What consists of a ‘concrete link’?...it is important to be precise about what people read and saw and knew. Arguments that the key to the interpretation of a particular work of art lies in its link to other objects, and especially texts, have been known to rest essentially on the mere fact that the text or the object, however arcane, was known or knowable to someone in roughly the time and place at which the artist and patron lived. Particularly elaborate iconographical interpretations based on this premise, without the support of any compelling evidence of concrete links, have been in part responsible for a retreat to simplification in identifying the likely sources of works of art. (Dale Kent, Cosimo De' Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron's Oeuvre. 2000: 22)
As Kent’s caveat warns, it is particularly iconographical interpretations that are often most suspect of being less than concrete. My specific complaint of what we indulge in here – which I am most thoroughly guilty of – is that we forage for iconographical information (whether pictorial or textual) and map that over trionfi, while ignoring the specific circumstances – time, place, patron, humanist (if relevant), artist, social and political pressures – in a word, the history of the given exemplar, often in favor of the history of the genre as a whole. And here, I would argue, Dummet bears some responsibility for that impetus for his emphasis on sequence that reinforced a search for generalities at the expense of specificity (his monograph on the PMB is woeful in comparison to his work on regional sequence variations).
Iconographic analysis must necessarily be the root of what we do, but I am suggesting that we too often than not divorce it from historical analysis. Even when history is considered it tends to be loosened from concrete decks, with artistic productions from even decades later thrown into the mix as somehow equally valid.
Here’s a basic primer with a decent bibliography, Writing About Art (Marjorie Munsterberg http://writingaboutart.org/index.html ), in which stylistic, iconographic and historical analysis are all broken down (and yes, we all tend to ignore stylistic concerns, but the miniature nature of tarot makes comparison to known artists’ larger format works difficult, unless they did additional miniature work, in say illuminations of psalters, etc. But who argues the likes of a Bembo conceived of trionfi? We are a long way from a Titian with trionfi).
As for iconographic analysis, it is perhaps exemplified by the work of Panofsky:
Certainly historical circumstances are a consideration even here (e.g., local traditions and texts), but the emphasis is on master artist, but the artist was hardly always (perhaps even seldom) the source for the subject of the artistic production in mid-Quattrocento Northern Italy (again, my comment on Bembo).We have to ask ourselves whether or not the symbolical significance of a given motif is a matter of established representational tradition . . .; whether or not a symbolical interpretation can be justified by definite texts or agrees with ideas demonstrably alive in the period [the work was made] and presumably familiar to its artists . . .; and to what extent such a symbolical interpretation is in keeping with the historical position and personal tendencies of the individual master. (Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting. Its Origin and Character, 1953: 1:142-3).
What supplemental angle then would historical analysis contribute? Munsterberg offer’s this as an example:
While nothing could compare to the plague, the dramatic events of wars, famines, treaties, regime changes, dynastic succession, bankruptcies, etc., all had enormous impacts on the societies involved. Those historical moments were not just captured in plastic or pictorial arts but in performative activities as well (see especially Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy, 1979: 72f). And it is arguable that how various factions or rival cities celebrated or defamed their respective leaders, in lyric poetry that made the rounds in the streets, for example, had a greater impact in their time than any pictorial art, in say a manuscript illumination or the decoration on a rich couple’s wedding trousseau. By linking a trionfi deck to a pictorial work or textual source, alone, ignores the larger currents sweeping through the society that consumed trionfi. All of the preoccupations of a given city at the time of production of a particular deck, as well as it critical relations with other cities – not just ‘art’ – matters immensely.In Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death. The Arts, Religion, and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century, Millard Meiss (1904-1975) argued that this happened at a moment central to the history of Italian Renaissance art. The book begins with a statement of his purpose:The present book deals with Florentine and Sienese painting from around 1350 to 1375. . . . [T]hose aspects of reality and those problems of form that had occupied the leading masters of the first half of the century, and that were soon again to occupy the artists of the early Renaissance, were suddenly opposed by other values. The painters became engrossed with qualities which do not easily find a place in the evolution leading from Giotto to Masaccio, or from Simone [Martini] and the Lorenzetti [brothers] to Sassetta. The first part of the book endeavors to show that these qualities, however foreign to this evolution and to classical taste, are coherent and purposeful, and that the more important paintings of the time present a unique range of meaning and form. The subsequent chapters confront the problem of the emergence of this art, and they attempt to interpret it in the light of contemporary religious sentiment, contemporary literary thought, and a state of mind that was affected by a series of unusual events (1951: 65f).
[Munsterberg explains with the stark facts here]:[D]uring the summer months of 1348 more than half of the inhabitants of Florence and Siena died of the bubonic plague. http://writingaboutart.org/pages/histor ... lysis.html
Munsterberg speaks better than I can on the limitations of iconographic analysis:
And that leads us back to the crux of the matter: do individual decks and their immediate users matter more, or is the abstracting of all decks into generalized trump themes (perhaps simplified to nothing more than a single titular word, e.g. ‘carro’) and the identification of a few competing sequence orders more important? I would argue the latter has obscured the historical development of the genre by a tendency to gloss over specific conditions in which each deck was produced (as well as 'anomalies' within each deck).Iconographic analysis is used to establish the meaning of a particular work at a particular time. To identify the subject of an altarpiece as a Madonna and Child, however, explains nothing about the use of the altarpiece, how it fit into the surrounding culture, its economic import, or what it may reveal about social and political issues of the period. These questions apply most naturally to the study of objects from the past, but the same methods can be applied to contemporary art. What matters is the way the context is described and what kinds of relationships are established between it and the work or works being studied. This type of analysis is richest when it creates a web of very specific connections. To juxtapose a few generalizations about a historical context with a work from the period without suggesting any particular relationships between the two does not reveal very much. (ibid)
In terms of arguments, then, it would seem to behoove whomever is making a point to tie a given artifact (broadly defined), firstly, to the concerns of the commune/court/duchy/republic/‘domain’ in question at that specific time, and secondly, if at all possible, to the evidential concerns of individuals or groups within that same ‘domain’; thirdly, the most elusive task (on which we are going to have to fall back on points 1 and 2, more often than not), to reiterate Kent, “compelling evidence of concrete links” between said individuals/groups and the given deck itself (something we can do in a familial sense in surviving hand-painted decks, thanks to the prominence of imprese).
Phaeded