Re: Pratesi on birthtrays, cassoni, Petr. mss. & parades (no
Posted: 10 Dec 2016, 10:06
That's nice, Steve. I don't know what it shows, except that the Apollo and Daphne story was recurrent in 15th century art and literature, including imaginative constructions of playing card decks.
Another thing about the Dal Ponte (possibly) Triumph of Fame and the Stefano Apollo and Daphne is why I posted them" not as what the tarot came from, but as counter-examples to an argument that Franco got from some of his art historian sources. In relation to the tarot, the question is, why did the illuminated manuscripts and cassoni showing Petrarch's Trionfi only become popular after around 1440 and not earlier? One answer that I favor might be that it was precisely the proliferation of tarot cards after 1440 that led to the popularity of the manuscripts and cassone. Against that might be advanced the argument of the majority of the tarot historians that there was a shift in what was popularized in Florence, from voluptas to virtus, particularly heroic virtue, with a concomitant shift of major interest from Boccaccio, the proponent of love, to Petrarch, the proponent of heroic virtue, happening around mid century or a little earlier.
Franco starts by quoting Cecilia De Carli:
In fact the tarot deck, at least some of it, seems transitional in this shift. The Love card invariably reflects the chivalric ideals of Boccaccio as opposed to the power of love to to enslave from Petrarch that we see reflected in the illuminations and cassone of the Triumphi later. The virtue cards of the tarot are those of the Dal Ponte cassone of the 1430s rather than of the illuminations of Petrarch, which do not feature them at all. (Neither does Boccaccio, but he starts and ends his poem with a lady who holds a scepter in one hand and a "golden apple" in the other, and who offers him a steep, narrow, and lonely path rather than the noisy one of wisdom, fame, love, and the rest). Even while the cards have the Petrarchan structure reflected in the illuminations, their depictions, at least the majority of those in the so-called "middle" section, more reflect Boccaccio and the cassoni of the 1430s.
So, if it is all right with those who read this Forum, I will continue to post examples of cassoni on triumphal themes before 1440, just to show how they can be seen earlier. By "triumphal" I don't mean "predecessor of the tarot triumphs", but just images that imply victories of one kind or another, over other things, as in the case of Daphne, the triumph of fame, or the seven virtues, which were often shown trampling over exemplars of the vices.
In that spirit, here is another, artist unknown, in the Metropolitan's collection ("Secular Painting in 15th-Century Tuscany: Birth Trays, Cassone Panels, and Portraits": The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 38, no. 1 (Summer, 1980), by Keith Christiansen, Keith and John Pope-Hennessy; for a larger image, see https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XzjDy8coLMk/ ... 002det.jpg)
The dating of this cassone may be inferred from the authors' remarks (pp. 12-13):
One more thing about the Chariot of Love in Siena 1438. It would help if we knew more about what is depicted. If it is a young winged man with bow and arrows and with him a young maiden, then that comes from Boccaccio's Amorosa Visione, which describes the poet's beloved as "shining at Love's side" (dall'altro lato a Amor vidi lucia, XV.60). The same if it is a garden with loving couples and no Cupid. If it shows just Cupid at the top and below him people bound with ropes or slain, that is Petrarch ("some of them were but captives, some were slain"). If it shows Cupid on top and one or more couples below, unbound and loving, that is most likely inspired by the tarot card.
Another thing about the Dal Ponte (possibly) Triumph of Fame and the Stefano Apollo and Daphne is why I posted them" not as what the tarot came from, but as counter-examples to an argument that Franco got from some of his art historian sources. In relation to the tarot, the question is, why did the illuminated manuscripts and cassoni showing Petrarch's Trionfi only become popular after around 1440 and not earlier? One answer that I favor might be that it was precisely the proliferation of tarot cards after 1440 that led to the popularity of the manuscripts and cassone. Against that might be advanced the argument of the majority of the tarot historians that there was a shift in what was popularized in Florence, from voluptas to virtus, particularly heroic virtue, with a concomitant shift of major interest from Boccaccio, the proponent of love, to Petrarch, the proponent of heroic virtue, happening around mid century or a little earlier.
Franco starts by quoting Cecilia De Carli:
Franco also quotes from the 2015 catalog of a cassoni exhibition in Florence:Towards the middle of the fifteenth century birth trays showed a change in the cultural situation that radically abandons the romantic idyll of virtus et voluptas present in the Gardens of Love, in Amorous hunts, in stories of the Ninfale Fiesolano or Teseida, whose main reference was Boccaccio. In its place we find Virgil, Homer, Petrarch, whose triumphs unfold the soul's progress from love to chastity, fame, plotting, in a sense, the new iconography of birth trays and chests, whose authors are the professionals lo Scheggia, brother of Masaccio, and Apollonio di Giovanni, with their respective workshops. (p. 29.)
And Paul Watson in his 1970 Ph.D. dissertation:The heart of the exhibition, however, is made up of the golden age of the painting of cassoni, that vast world which exploded the mid fifteenth century in Florence and also echoed in the words that Vasari dedicated to this production, recognizing its specificity and excellence, in the Life of Dello Delli. Petrarch took the place of Boccaccio, I Trionfi succeeded the Amorosa Visione, heroic themes of classical history and mythology widened the spectrum from Ovid moralized, effortlessly updating what had been the fashion all over Europe towards 1400. Through the domestic painting of the cassoni, myth and the classical heritage became shared history more and more familiar. (P. 20.)
However another scholar, Witthöft in 1982, puts the shift earlier, at around 1430, who brought up Bruni's call for virtu of the classical Roman sort in the context of the defeat of Florence by Milan in 1424 and :Most of the subjects popular during the first decades of the fifteenth century disappeared abruptly around 1450. There were no Gardens of Love, nor any of its variants, no Allegorical Chases, and no amatory romances of the type of Theseida and the Ninfale Fiesolano. No tales from the Decameron survived, with one significant exception. Boccaccio was replaced by Vergil and Homer, and by Petrarch, whose Triumphs limning the progress of the soul from love to chastity to fame, were almost a summary of the iconographic history of cassone painting.
That seemed to me closer to the truth, and for that reason I posted the "Dal Ponte?" cassone of the triumph of fame. In this framework, the Apollo and Daphne is the same, the triumph of virtue over love.The sudden appearance of classical subjects around 1430 can, in fact, be partly explained by these circumstances. For it is about that time that the first generation of men who were educated according to humanist precepts reached marriageable age.
In fact the tarot deck, at least some of it, seems transitional in this shift. The Love card invariably reflects the chivalric ideals of Boccaccio as opposed to the power of love to to enslave from Petrarch that we see reflected in the illuminations and cassone of the Triumphi later. The virtue cards of the tarot are those of the Dal Ponte cassone of the 1430s rather than of the illuminations of Petrarch, which do not feature them at all. (Neither does Boccaccio, but he starts and ends his poem with a lady who holds a scepter in one hand and a "golden apple" in the other, and who offers him a steep, narrow, and lonely path rather than the noisy one of wisdom, fame, love, and the rest). Even while the cards have the Petrarchan structure reflected in the illuminations, their depictions, at least the majority of those in the so-called "middle" section, more reflect Boccaccio and the cassoni of the 1430s.
So, if it is all right with those who read this Forum, I will continue to post examples of cassoni on triumphal themes before 1440, just to show how they can be seen earlier. By "triumphal" I don't mean "predecessor of the tarot triumphs", but just images that imply victories of one kind or another, over other things, as in the case of Daphne, the triumph of fame, or the seven virtues, which were often shown trampling over exemplars of the vices.
In that spirit, here is another, artist unknown, in the Metropolitan's collection ("Secular Painting in 15th-Century Tuscany: Birth Trays, Cassone Panels, and Portraits": The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 38, no. 1 (Summer, 1980), by Keith Christiansen, Keith and John Pope-Hennessy; for a larger image, see https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XzjDy8coLMk/ ... 002det.jpg)
The dating of this cassone may be inferred from the authors' remarks (pp. 12-13):
They observe (p. 12) that Hercules' image was on the seal of Florence as early as 1281, and that from 1391 to 1405 two of his exploits, with the Nemean lion and Antaeus, were sculpted on one of the portals to the cathedral, the Porta della Mandorla. (So heroic virtue is nothing new in Florence; it just needed new emphasis.). It is significant, they say, that the images on the cassone seem to derive from classical models, on ancient Roman coins and sarcophagi. The two side panels they identify as depictions of Fortitude and Temperance, necessary virtues for the hero.The lighting and modeling of the figures remind one of the grisaille Genesis frescoes by Paolo Uccello in the Chiostro Verde of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, which must date from soon after 1430, and the barren landscape and carefully spaced trees recall Uccello's early work as well.
Like so many paintings of the 1430s, Uccello's frescoes are indebted to Lorenzo Ghiberti's relief style for many of their compositional ideas. It is therefore not surprising that perhaps the closest parallel for the relation of figure to setting and the depiction of violent action n the cassone roundels is to be found in the side-reliefs of Ghiberti's Shrine of Saint Zenobius, which were modeled between 1432 and 1434.
One more thing about the Chariot of Love in Siena 1438. It would help if we knew more about what is depicted. If it is a young winged man with bow and arrows and with him a young maiden, then that comes from Boccaccio's Amorosa Visione, which describes the poet's beloved as "shining at Love's side" (dall'altro lato a Amor vidi lucia, XV.60). The same if it is a garden with loving couples and no Cupid. If it shows just Cupid at the top and below him people bound with ropes or slain, that is Petrarch ("some of them were but captives, some were slain"). If it shows Cupid on top and one or more couples below, unbound and loving, that is most likely inspired by the tarot card.