Re: Pratesi on birthtrays, cassoni, Petr. mss. & parades (now 2)
Posted: 07 Jun 2018, 00:27
By "CY" I meant decks of the CY type, of which the actual CY is one luxury example. For everyday play there might well have been cheaper products. There is no reason to suppose it was one of a kind. The CY looks to me to have been used very little, if at all. It is in better shape than the PMB original cards., in fact. The CY-type would not have had Sforza heraldics, of course.
Not much can be proved from the suit of coins, except that the CY was done before around 1452, or whenever Francesco Sforza started producing coins of a different design than Filippo before him. What is on the card is not made from actual coins, or a or even a larger version of an actual Visconti coin, although it is quite similar to the standard design that the Visconti had been using for a long time, long before Filippo. What is different, between the coins and the images of coisn on the cards, is the writing around the circumference, as Marco showed at viewtopic.php?f=11&t=917&p=13798&hilit=rearing#p13807. If there are coins that conform to the cards, nobody has produced them that I can find.
Since Francesco wanted there to be continuity between his regime and the previous one, he might even have produced the CY himself, based on a standard design adopted by Filippo but with the addition of Sforza heraldics in two of the suits and a few of the triumphs, so as to commemorate the union of the two families, Sforza and Visconti. Sforza's first coins, I read somewhere, still had the same "rearing horse" design as the Visconti used.
By a religious emphasis, all I meant was that it emphasized the seven virtues of the Church, the four cardinals and the three theologicals. These were popular subjects in private, public, and religious art before, after, and during Filippo Visconti's reign, and also outside of Milan. There are also the Last Judgment and Death but those come from the titles of Petrarch's poems. I don't know how prevalent the skeleton and the souls rising up from the tombs were before the tarot. Death, as far as I can tell, was seldom represented before the 15th century; when it was, it was as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and it just looked like a horseman, not a skeleton. I think the souls rising from the tombs motif was common enough, in books of hours at least.
Regarding Marziano's deck of the gods, I expect they would have been something like the 7 planets in the Mantegna sequence, but without the writing on the bottom and with the departures suggested by Marziano, e.g. in the case of Jupiter, the four stars above and the two stars below. I see no reason to suppose that everything in Marziano's descriptions would have been put on the cards. For Jupiter, for example, only the second half of his account would be on the cards, the part beginning "he is seated" and not all of that (http://trionfi.com/martiano-da-tortona- ... -16-heroum): just the visuals he specifies.
There may be one thing that is "Renaissance" about Marziano's specifications, namely, they do not seem to stick to the standard conventional medieval attributes; they are creative. That might be a distinguishing mark of its being Renaissance, as medieval representations tended to use the same basic attributes over and over again, for the benefit of illiterates. Even though the Renaissance used those, too, there was more freedom (and more literacy), That also would restrict the appeal, to those who liked to know the symbolism, to a literate audience, who could read his explanations. But there are enough conventional symbols -- and if not, the artist could add them --, to make the card recognizably Jupiter to those who knew anything about planetary symbolism.
In that sense the CY-type is more medieval, by being more conventional, and so more readily understood by illiterate players, or players in the process of becoming literate, like children.
We cannot assume that the CY-type had cards such as the Devil, the Pope, the Tower, etc., From the 11 known card I can extrapolate to 5 others using the pattern 7 Petrarchan ( including 1 Boccaccian, the Wheel) triumphs + 7 virtues + Emperor and Empress. Anything beyond those, seems to me to require an argument. That 21 plus the Fool became standard everywhere does not seem to me enough of an argument, because one or two centers dominating the market after 1440 but having added cards to what was before then a smaller deck, would explain that.
The lack of numbers on the CY-type cards would still limit the players to those who knew the intended order, more or less, and could keep to the same order through numerous games--and of course the rules, including the scoring system. In that sense it is a game which, if originating in the court, could more readily spread to a larger group, such as ordinary soldiers. It seems to me more unlikely than likely that Filippo would have invented a game expressly for the masses. It would have been beneath his dignity. And the rules might have been too complicated.
Not much can be proved from the suit of coins, except that the CY was done before around 1452, or whenever Francesco Sforza started producing coins of a different design than Filippo before him. What is on the card is not made from actual coins, or a or even a larger version of an actual Visconti coin, although it is quite similar to the standard design that the Visconti had been using for a long time, long before Filippo. What is different, between the coins and the images of coisn on the cards, is the writing around the circumference, as Marco showed at viewtopic.php?f=11&t=917&p=13798&hilit=rearing#p13807. If there are coins that conform to the cards, nobody has produced them that I can find.
Since Francesco wanted there to be continuity between his regime and the previous one, he might even have produced the CY himself, based on a standard design adopted by Filippo but with the addition of Sforza heraldics in two of the suits and a few of the triumphs, so as to commemorate the union of the two families, Sforza and Visconti. Sforza's first coins, I read somewhere, still had the same "rearing horse" design as the Visconti used.
By a religious emphasis, all I meant was that it emphasized the seven virtues of the Church, the four cardinals and the three theologicals. These were popular subjects in private, public, and religious art before, after, and during Filippo Visconti's reign, and also outside of Milan. There are also the Last Judgment and Death but those come from the titles of Petrarch's poems. I don't know how prevalent the skeleton and the souls rising up from the tombs were before the tarot. Death, as far as I can tell, was seldom represented before the 15th century; when it was, it was as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and it just looked like a horseman, not a skeleton. I think the souls rising from the tombs motif was common enough, in books of hours at least.
Regarding Marziano's deck of the gods, I expect they would have been something like the 7 planets in the Mantegna sequence, but without the writing on the bottom and with the departures suggested by Marziano, e.g. in the case of Jupiter, the four stars above and the two stars below. I see no reason to suppose that everything in Marziano's descriptions would have been put on the cards. For Jupiter, for example, only the second half of his account would be on the cards, the part beginning "he is seated" and not all of that (http://trionfi.com/martiano-da-tortona- ... -16-heroum): just the visuals he specifies.
There may be one thing that is "Renaissance" about Marziano's specifications, namely, they do not seem to stick to the standard conventional medieval attributes; they are creative. That might be a distinguishing mark of its being Renaissance, as medieval representations tended to use the same basic attributes over and over again, for the benefit of illiterates. Even though the Renaissance used those, too, there was more freedom (and more literacy), That also would restrict the appeal, to those who liked to know the symbolism, to a literate audience, who could read his explanations. But there are enough conventional symbols -- and if not, the artist could add them --, to make the card recognizably Jupiter to those who knew anything about planetary symbolism.
In that sense the CY-type is more medieval, by being more conventional, and so more readily understood by illiterate players, or players in the process of becoming literate, like children.
We cannot assume that the CY-type had cards such as the Devil, the Pope, the Tower, etc., From the 11 known card I can extrapolate to 5 others using the pattern 7 Petrarchan ( including 1 Boccaccian, the Wheel) triumphs + 7 virtues + Emperor and Empress. Anything beyond those, seems to me to require an argument. That 21 plus the Fool became standard everywhere does not seem to me enough of an argument, because one or two centers dominating the market after 1440 but having added cards to what was before then a smaller deck, would explain that.
The lack of numbers on the CY-type cards would still limit the players to those who knew the intended order, more or less, and could keep to the same order through numerous games--and of course the rules, including the scoring system. In that sense it is a game which, if originating in the court, could more readily spread to a larger group, such as ordinary soldiers. It seems to me more unlikely than likely that Filippo would have invented a game expressly for the masses. It would have been beneath his dignity. And the rules might have been too complicated.