I do not know whether the PMB originally had the same number of trump cards as suit cards. There are reasons for and against. I would not use Huck's argument in general, because triumphs we know are a special case.But again, the PMB did not bother to match the trump suit to the other four suit's number of cards, so why should the CY have done so?
However, the CY is the verifiably earliest (this excludes the Catania, which might be earlier) tarot deck we know any details about at all. It is 10 years at least before the PMB. It is more likely to be in the "developmental" stage, if there was one.
There are other reasons for 16, even specifically in the same 4x4 assignments of trumps to suits as in the case of the Marziano. At viewtopic.php?f=11&t=862&p=18058&hilit=Beinecke#p18058, I gave my reasons for tentatively accepting the Beinecke trump to suit assignments as genuine. You ignore them, so I will repeat that passage here. I am talking about how in their catalogue entry every trump is assigned to one of the four regular suits:
I asked the Beinecke curator for more details on what came with the cards that led the original cataloguer to make the catalogue entries as they were, i.e. what language the information was in, the exact wording, etc.. He says he went through all the files last summer when he had to move the office, and there was absolutely nothing more. Archivists even in the late 20th century did not keep their evidence, just as they did not do so in the 14th. Apparently there are no standards. All we know is that the cataloguing was done several years before Pratesi's 1989 article.There is no way any librarian, even a specialist in cards in Italy such as the Visconti di Madrone might have used, would have thought of assigning trumps to suits, even if they did have the temerity to make things up (for which see below). There was no other tarot deck in the world that had such assignments. The only other European card deck I know of that did so is the Marziano, and its suit assignments weren't public knowledge until Pratesi's article in 1989. The only way they could have known about it before then would have been to read the original document (discovered in 1890s Paris), make the connection to the Cary-Yale, and then make up the assignments. That is not likely. Moreover, the assignments are so irregular that even if anyone did think of assigning trumps to suits, they wouldn't have done it in the way it is done. Swords starts out reasonably enough, with Empress and Emperor, Love; then everything is strange-- well, the 3 theologicals being before Chariot, and Chastity in a different suit from the others--until the last, Coins, with World and Judgment, in that order. Even that order is a surprise, for Milan (although to me reasonable enough). Of course I do not expect that "Judgment" was the original name for that card. Somebody had the temerity to add this title, I hope merely as a translation of something else; it might also have been meant as an informed guess. But such an addition would be a commonplace assumption, unlike suit assignments and the order.
If there are 4 trumps assigned per regular suit, that makes 16. It could be 12, 20, or 24. Given the parallel with the Marziano, 16 fits what is there, namely 5 Petrarchans (titles only, not sentiment), 4 Virtues, and 2 Imperials. 12 would leave out 2 virtues and 1 Petrarchan. 20 would require an additional motif (or a different way of seeing the old ones).
A third reason for inferring 16 trumps is the chess analogy; it is not a basis for constructing the deck, but it is a bonus that recommends itself. Fame and Angel both have towers (like rooks); Emperor and Empress both have royal insignia (like King and Queen). Chariot and Death both have horses (like knights). There is room in the crow for one more pair, which at least would have had something in common with each other (the old men of Time and Fortune), if not precisely to the bishops on the chess board. If Love desirous of marriage is seen as a virtue, or at least ennobling, then there could easily be 8 virtues, matching the pawns.
It would be good, Phaeded, if you would list the reasons why the PMB likely does not have 14 trumps, apart from your Dante theory, which begs the question because it is simply one hypothesis against another.
My reasoning is mainly the lack of cardinal virtues. It is not what Dummett says, that because the CY had 4 cardinal virtues, the PMB must have had at least the 3 it eventually got. They are different regimes, and we know that at least 1 of the cardinals eventually got dropped, as well as the theologicals. By analogy, it is possible that the BB dropped 2 cardinals, to make it 5x14, and that the PMB dropped 1 more, but added 2 later, to conform to the tarot elsewhere.
Against that, my reasoning is as follows. It has to do not with the PMB itself, which I suspect was mostly not used for play, but with the common deck it corresponds to. I cannot see that the Sforza family, given that they have the CY and have seen decks from Florence, would countenance a deck for parents and children, in their own home and in the city they controlled, that did not emphasize the moral virtues, including especially Temperance, an extremely important virtue for an adolescent to know about and for the image of the city. It is not a deck dictated by adolescents. No other early tarot is without Temperance (assuming that is what the Stag card is in the Catania), and most also have Fortitude. So for these reasons there are at least 16 trumps.
In addition it seems to me that the World card has a stable enough iconography between the CY and the other early decks, luxury as well as common--castles in a bubble, or at least hemisphere--that what we see is likely a replacement.
That the 6 added cards of the PMB object are replacements rather than new subjects seems to me dictated by what is on the cards. They look like memorials of particular people. That is especially clear in the case of Forza, Temperance, Star and Moon (all with the same person, similar to portraits that others have taken for good reason to be Elisabeta Maria Sforza), but I suspect it is also true for Sun and World.
I cannot speculate on whether there were a Devil and a Tower.
It therefore seems to me that the deck had at least 17 triumphs originally (including a World card). As to when the Celestials, in some form (even as Theologicals), became part of the deck I cannot see any rationale for saying one way or another (well, I take that back: there is a detail on a 1462 Bembo painting that corresponds to the Ferrara Star card; that is a reason for saying at least by the 1460s). It does seem to me that the 6 cards we have were added many years after the original ones, not only to allow for the technology to develop for thinner cards, but because the art historians say 1480s unanimously and having seen the Bendetto Bembo painting Dummett likened to the 6 cards (it is on the web) and also the work of Cicognara (compare with e.g. my photo of http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H5t4JYAqn3s/V ... G_1685.JPG), I, too, go with Cicognara.
I would appreciate any additional rationales. It does not seem to me that we can infer that it was 22 based on what we see later, maybe as early as the 1460s for Boiardo, because 1450-1455, the probable date of the original cards, are too near the peace of Lodi, which I would see as one likely candidate for the great leveler, although over the course of some years. The argument that it must have been earlier because the subjects are all the same, and in roughly the same order, does not convince me, because the last few triumphs (among Devil to Sun, always in that precise order) could easily have been added to the others after the others, to make 22, all at once or in stages. After 1453 or so, communication among centers was good enough to keep the additions inserted in the same place in the sequence everywhere, even if all the triumphs were not exactly the same everywhere.
Finally, there is one reason, not a conclusive one, against the CVI having 16 triumphs including the Fool, namely the numbers on the cards, which go up to 20. There is also one reason, stronger, for thinking that the CVI, if it did have 16 triumphs, did not represent the typical common deck in Florence, namely, that the other luxury deck more or less contemporaneous with the CVI and much like it in appearance, the Catania, had an Empress. The PMB, in a town friendly to Florence then, also had an Empress, as did the CY before that. The Rosenwald later had an Empress. It seems to me unlikely that the typical common deck at the time of the CVI would not have had an Empress. And if the Star could make it between Ferrara and Milan (well, Cremona, but that's close enough), it can probably make it to Florence, too, by the 1460s.
For the rest in Florence all we have are the numbers on the CVI in support of their presence (and for one of the Bagat and the Popess, not even that), which is something but admittedly not enough.
