Re: Moakley's book: text and discussion

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Mikeh:
She even has a picture of the title page. I would have preferred a page of the discussion of tarot. Looking in WorldCat, I found one earlier edition, in 1572 Siena, which makes sense. The author given is Girolamo Bargagli.
Bargagli ...
https://archive.org/details/imageGXIII192NarrativaOpal

Andrea Vitali to Bargagli:
http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=199&lng=ENG
Bargagli’s work in relation to Tarot is the Dialogo de' giuochi che nelle vegghie Sane­si si usano di fare del materiale Intronato (Dialogue of games usually seen in Siena, utilizing [di fare del] Intronato material) (Siena, 1572), a real essay on the games of the time, whose improvement was attributed by the author to the Academy of the Intronati. The work is composed of a series of sentences or judgments born of a dialogue in which precisely the Intronati take part. About tarot (judgment 57) we read: “And I even (added Mansueto) have seen the game of Tarot done, so as to give to give to everybody the name of a tarot and then someone declaring and calling, for his own reason, that to the one or another was given this or that tarot name”. It is evident that the game of tarot, as described here, has to be seen in relation to pasquinades, sonnets and mottos based upon the association of a triumph to a certain person.
The passage is possibly at page 101 ???

Image


Image


If one doesn't assume, that the following Giuoco della Amazzoni belongs to it, it looks rather meaningless. In the content (at begin) Tarocchi is numbered as game 57 (and a curious 77, which I don't understand), della Amazzoni has No. 58 ... ergo it's another game.

******************

There is also a game called "Delle Corone"

Recently I asked Franco about this text (Corone) ...
"I don’t remember if I found this source, but I have certainly read of some plays or games in which some of the young ladies of Siena were adorned with flower crowns. Nothing to do with playing cards."
... this passage should be at page 76
Last edited by Huck on 02 Mar 2017, 12:02, edited 3 times in total.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Moakley's book: text and discussion

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Added after cross-posting: Thanks, Huck. I'd forgotten about Vitali's comments.

Before too many posts separate us from Moakley's analysis of the four Imperial and Papal cards (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1168&start=40#p19094), I want to give some comments.

Moakley apparently thought she needed no argument that the German lady and her husband are "captives of love", and perhaps she is right, in the "softened" sense not of an uncontrollable passion but of that between lawfully married man and wife in the business of begetting heirs. The Empress and the Emperor are united by marriage, with its obligatory communion cup (marriage is a sacrament and part of a mass), and a temperament amount of drink might help them express their love, his Fortitude (wink-wink) meeting her Temperance.

However she does feel the need for an argument when it comes to the Popess and Pope, and for good reason, since they are not, in any of the examples, legendary or not, a married pair. Her argument is that (1) Juno and Jupiter were "captives of love"--he by affairs, her (I assume) by jealousy; (2) Jupiter in the Middle Ages, right up to the time of the tarot, was seen as a priest and pictured in clerical garb. She refers to Seznec. Seznec has pictures; he explains that the Arabs depicted him that way, and the Europeans copied the Arabs. (3) The "game of the gods" of Filippo Visconti had Jupiter and Juno in low positions (numbers 1 and 5); (4) At some point Northern European tarot decks substituted Juno and Jupiter for the Popess and Pope. Therefore (5) Juno and Jupiter, captives of love, are interchangeable with the Popess and Pope.

The problem is that the substitution happened three centuries after the invention of the tarot, in a different part of the continent. And nobody even knew about the precedent of Filippo's game then, and few that Jupiter had been depicted like a priest. The change to Jupiter was done only in areas of mixed Protestant and Catholic populations but under Catholic control; I would imagine the reason was to prevent fights breaking out over the Pope card. I cannot imagine it was done to caricature the Pope. As for the original "substitution", the Pope was never thought of as assuming the role of Jupiter, he with the weakness for nymphs. It was simply that Europeans, seeing Arab manuscripts, imagined Jupiter as a high priest (as opposed to imagining the Pope as Jupiter).

Moakley also has an argument about "Captain Fracasse" substituting for the Popess, that he is the natural enemy of Bagatino and his ilk in the Commedia dell'Arte. That again was centuries after the fact. Yes, he is introduced in a ribald manner. That does not make the Popess ribald, or the natural enemy of the Bagatino.

All the same, I think it is possible to fix this problem. Here is one scenario. Moakley says that there were different variations of the deck before settling on 22 special cards, including at least one with 16 of them (plus or minus). So let us suppose that the Pope and Popess were not there originally, nor the Bagatella. None of the three, nor the Fool, are part of the surviving Cary-Yale. In a new game, illegal at first, card makers don't want trouble. With that supposition, there is just the Empress and the Emperor, united by Love, immediately following.

Then someone decides that there should be a card for the Pope, one that is higher than the Emperor to show the Pope's superiority to the Emperor, and that the Emperor rules by approval of the Pope. Then someone else has the idea to have a Popess, just like there is an Empress. Since there is no such person, this is a great way to add mystery to the game. To some, it will be a joke about Joan (as with Aretino in Le Carte Parlante) or popes' tendencies to have had mistresses. To others it will be the marriage between the Pope and the Church, bound by spiritual love. To the Visconti descendants, as their private joke, it will be Manfreda. Or not a joke, but a question: why shouldn't a woman be allowed to be Pope? If one thinks of cards being added by degrees for specific purposes, the later ones ignoring the designer's original conception, there is no problem.

Another scenario: the inventor of the game might have had a personal grudge against the Pope. So he puts the Pope and Popess cards there together, next to the Emperor and Empress, to express his contempt for the papacy, which in his view is riddled with hypocrisy and mistresses. The inventor dies, and his friends, whom he has taught the game, want to win acceptability for it. They say that the Popess is the Church (or the Faith), bound to the Pope in love, as signified by the Love card, which is "softened" from Petrarch and not a matter of captivity but simply of mutual respect and devotion. The word "Papessa", and the depiction as a lady in a papal tiara, allow for flexibility in interpretation. When Bianca Maria has a chance to design her own deck, she seizes on the chance to suggest someone else, but ambiguously, so as not to offend.

Another fixable problem I find is in Moakley's argument for Manfreda as the PMB Popess: why should anyone even remember those events 150 years later, especially seeing as the details were kept secret? Did the Inquisition even tell people that Manfreda considered herself chosen to be Pope (or Popess)? My answer is that it wasn't just Matteo, but a series of papal bulls charging a series of Visconti rulers with heresy as a follower of Manfreda and Guglielma. It was just harassment, part of an effort to bring various rulers outside the pope's jurisdiction to heel. Such bulls were public record and fresh ones could be issued at any time. Potential victims needed to know about the threat, as much as possible. Admittedly the bulls did not mention Manfreda as a would-be Pope. But there was an abridged record of the trial (our main source of information) found in the 17th century in a grocery store in Pavia. Pavia is where the Visconti Library was kept, so somebody probably removed it before the French carted the library to Paris. If this text was owned by the Visconti, each generation could inform the next, with the document as proof. So it is reasonably likely that Bianca Maria Visconti in particular, as the daughter of the Duke, would be informed. Also, her uncle was the general of the Umiliati order. The habit on the card corresponds to what Manfreda would have worn (although it also fits the Poor Clares). Even the three knots in the belt are not exclusively Franciscan; the trial record recounts a "miracle" involving the appearance of three knots in a cord.

There is no proof that Bianca Maria did know all this, but it is a reasonable possibility, given the card. For details and references, see M. M. Filesi at http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page. ... 72&lng=ENG, or me at http://popessofthetarot.blogspot.com/.

Re: Moakley's book: text and discussion

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Mikeh
http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page. ... 72&lng=ENG
http://popessofthetarot.blogspot.fr/

Conclusion : "The conclusion is that we cannot conclude anything. Until new documents are found, the question remains open. There are not satisfactory reasons for saying that the Pierpont and Fournier Popesses are the Popess Maifreda, nor are there reasons sufficient to refute Moakley’s hypothesis."

I've appreciated your review about the Popess as possibly heretic at first.
My attention is drawn on the monk of the Sermones appreciation's about the Papessa :
Sermones de Ludo Cum Aliis (c. 1500) about La Papessa, “O wretched, it is what the Christian Faith denies.”
Why? If not - heretic?

Translation from Latin to English by Mary Greer
https://marygreer.wordpress.com/2009/11 ... -evidence/
Last edited by BOUGEAREL Alain on 02 Mar 2017, 12:20, edited 4 times in total.
http://www.sgdl-auteurs.org/alain-bouge ... Biographie

Re: Moakley's book: text and discussion

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MikeH. I added a few details in my earlier post, don't overlook them.

When Moakley stated ...
The earliest printed account of the game of tarots is given in a small volume, "Dialogo de Givochi che nelle Vegghie Sanesi si usano di fare. Del materiale intronato. All' illustrima et eccelentissima Signora Donna Isabella de' Medici Orsina Duchessa di Bracciano. Appresso Bertano. In Venetia, 1575.
... then we get a vivid impression, what all wasn't known in the time of Moakley. Meanwhile we're in 1505 for the first Tarocchi and Taraux.

Btw: The online edition of Bargagli is from 1581, Vitali had the version of 1572. Moakley writes 1575.
Last edited by Huck on 02 Mar 2017, 12:35, edited 1 time in total.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Moakley's book: text and discussion

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BOUGEAREL Alain wrote: My attention is drawn on the monk of the Sermones appreciation's about the Papessa :
Sermones de Ludo Cum Aliis (c. 1500) about La Papessa, “O wretched, it is what the Christian Faith denies.”
Why? If not - heretic?

Translation from Latin to English by Mary Greer
https://marygreer.wordpress.com/2009/11 ... -evidence/

See also note to Tarotpedia entry (translated by myself, excepting the list of card titles that were already present and translated by Ross Caldwell.P Marco and others)

In "De Claris Mulieribus" (About Famous Women) Boccaccio writes:
Que tamen non verita ascendere Piscatoris cathedram et sacra ministeria omnia, nulli mulierum a christiana religione concessum, tractare agere at aliss exhibere...

"This woman was not afraid to mount the Fisheman's throne, to perform all the sacred offices, and to administer them to others (something that the Christian religion does not permit any woman to do)."

The Steele sermon preacher's comment on the Popesse O miseri quod negat Christiana fides / O wretches! That which the Christian Faith denies bears some resemblance to this passage.

http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Sermones ... _Cum_Aliis

Re: Moakley's book: text and discussion

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On the other hand, as Vitali underlined, it's is right to assert that :
- Christian Faith was represented by the Popess
- and that there is no contradiction with the appreciation of the preacher ; the hypothesis would then be that the monk just wanted to apostrophe whom (O miseri) would negate Her (quod negat Chtistiana fides"):
"It is an undeniable fact that the High Priestess of the tarots represents Faith, since the same friar, the author of the Sermones, describes it with the words “O miseri quod negat Christiana fides”, a sentence which looks like the incipit of a longer expression, since the monk adds the graphic symbol for etc. to the word fides, in the same manner as in other parts of the Sermones. In the way it appears, the sentence is impossible to translate, but what is interesting is that the friar made a reference to Faith. "
http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=114

Nota
Your translation of MISERI as "wretches" appears to me correct.
The translation of Mary was : "wretched".
Miseri I see here a plural vocatif .
In this grammatical sens, then, Vitali's interpretation is re-enforced.
An apostrophe to the Miseri who would deny precisely Christian Faith.

MISERI : la première classe des adjectifs masculins, génitif singulier
MISERI : la première classe des adjectifs masculins, nominatif pluriel
MISERI : la première classe des adjectifs masculins, vocatif pluriel
MISERI : la première classe des adjectifs neutres, génitif singulier
http://www.sgdl-auteurs.org/alain-bouge ... Biographie

Re: Moakley's book: text and discussion

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BOUGEAREL Alain wrote:On the other hand, as Vitali underlined, it's is right to assert that :
- Christian Faith was represented by the Popess
- and that there is no contradiction with the appreciation of the preacher ; the hypothesis would then be that the monk just wanted to apostrophe whom (O miseri) would negate Her (quod negat Chtistiana fides"):
"It is an undeniable fact that the High Priestess of the tarots represents Faith, since the same friar, the author of the Sermones, describes it with the words “O miseri quod negat Christiana fides”, a sentence which looks like the incipit of a longer expression, since the monk adds the graphic symbol for etc. to the word fides, in the same manner as in other parts of the Sermones. In the way it appears, the sentence is impossible to translate, but what is interesting is that the friar made a reference to Faith. "
http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=114
I disagree with your (and if you are representing him correctly) Vitali's assertion -- Such a reading goes against the anti-gaming, cards as invention of the devil objections of the preacher in general, it offers an interpretation more favorable to the card inventors than the preachers objections and argument allows -- it may have been seen by some, or even meant as a representation of Faith - but that is not how our preacher sees it -- if the sentence is ambiguous (I don't believe it is) the overall context is not, the preacher means it as 'that which the Christian faith denies', that is:

NOT
whom would deny faith ?(represented by the Popesse),

BUT rather she represents

THAT which the Christian faith denies!

They are two very different readings, and I do not think there is the linguistic or contextual ambiguity to claim such --

Re: Moakley's book: text and discussion

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There is also Aretino, Carte Parlante, cited by Vitali at
CAR: La papessa è per l’astuzia di quegli che defraudano il nostro essere con le falsità che ci falsificano.

(CAR: The Popess means the shrewdness of those who defraud our being with falsehoods that falsify us.}
of which Vitali observes (http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page. ... 63&lng=ENG and =ITA:
Interessante la valutazione della Papessa da cui risulta un rapporto inequivocabile con la Papessa Giovanna. Scrive infatti l’Aretino che essa “è (posta, n.d.r) per l’astuzia di quegli che defraudano il nostro essere con le falsità che ci falsificano”. Anche se oggi attribuiamo alla carta della Papessa il significato di fede cristiana, in riferimento alla Scala Mistica che connota l’insieme dei 22 Trionfi, risulta evidente come il mito della Papessa Giovanna fosse ben presente nell’immaginario collettivo degli uomini del Rinascimento.

(Of interest also is the evaluation of the Popess, from which results an unequivocal relation with Popess Joan. Aretino actually writes that she "is there for the shrewdness of those who defraud our being with falsehoods that falsify us". Even if nowadays we give to the Popess card the meaning of Christian faith, referring to the Mystical Staircase that the whole 22 Trumps signify, it is evident how much the myth of Popess Joan was present in the collective imagination of the Renaissance.
For the "captive of love" interpretation, there is, besides the legend, the Venetian engraving of Petrarch's Trionfi from the late 15th century.

I notice that all these "ribald" associations are from Ferrara or Venice. Moreover, while an association to Carnival or Lent in particular cannot be sustained, the d'Este Fool and Bagat are more amenable to a "ribald" interpretation. The Fool has his genitals exposed, with young boys looking at it, and the Bagat is trying to keep his objects away from some children.
The same could be said for Rotta and the Hanged Man, portrayed there and in Florence with money bags, suggesting Judas. I remember being in Mexico during Holy Week, and the children on Thursday night all having Judas dolls that made loud noises when done something to them, I can't remember what--lit, wound up, or something. They were thoroughly entertained.

If deformity is an object of mirth, then the Metropolitan/Budapest sheets add further confirmation. The Hunchback would be ribald. There is also the Rotta with three donkeys. In Staves, the Page of Cups is downing a drink, and in Staves, he has his 2nd finger bent down, as though in a lewd gesture. It fits Aretino in Carte Parlante, who says (cited in http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=180):
CAD: Swords?
CAR: Death of those who despair of gaming.
PAD: Staves?
CAR: The punishment that deceivers deserve.
PAD: Coins?
CAR: The substance of gaming.
PAD: And Cups?
CAR: The drinks that reconcile quarrels between gamers.
And the manuscript Sermo perutilis de ludo of the beginning of the XVI century. Vitali quotes it in the same essay (and also in the previous one; it doesn't mention tarocchi):
De secundo ludorum genere scilicet cartularum dico quod si lusor cogitaret quod in cartulis significatum est, forte ab eis cavaret. Nam in cartulis quadruplex differentia est.
Of the second kind of games, I say that if the player thought about the meaning of the cards, he would realize that it would be better not to play. In fact in the cards there is a fourfold differentiation.

Ibi nam sunt denarii per manus lusorum discurrentes. Et hoc significat instabilitatem pecunie in lusore, quia debes cogitare, quando intras in ludum, quod denarii tui ibunt in malam horam eo quod perdes.
Here in fact are coins flowing from players’ hands. And this means the instability of the money in the game, because you must consider, when you enter in the game, to whom in adversity the money of those who lose will go.

Sunt et Cuppe ad ostendendam paupertatem ad quam ita deveniet lusor, quod carens cypho ad bibendum utetur cuppa.
The Cups are also there, to show what poverty will come, because the poor player lacking food will use a cup for drinking.

Sunt et bastoni. Lignum est arridum ad insinuandam siccitatem divine gratie in lusore. Sunt postremo et enses ad declarandum brevitatem vite lusoris quia plerumque occidunt.
The Staves are also there. The wood is dry to suggest the drought of divine grace in the player. There are also the Swords that mean the brevity of the life of the player, since he will be killed by it etc...

These are all later than the PMB, of course. So either what was serious then became ribald later, for those who wanted it to be, in other places (Ferrara, Venice, perhaps Florence), or else a serious sequence of 14 or 16 cards had ribald characters added to it. If we include the Devil (beloved by children today at Holloween) and Arrow, there would be 8 possibles (Fool, Bagat, Popess, Pope, Rotta, Impichato, Diavolo, Sagitta), assuming the CY reflects the earlier sequence and the PMB/Charles VI/d'Este/Metropolitan/Budapest the later one (but with an attempt in Milan to make the additions more serious-looking).

Shephard suggests for Moakley's missing Fame the Star card, without explaining why. The Metropolitan/Budapest cards suggest one way, if the figure on the Star card is David (very reminiscent of the Florentine statues, especially Michelangelo's), the minchiate and Bolognese another (birth of Jesus). These cards are all later, but we don't know when they started with those designs.
Last edited by mikeh on 03 Mar 2017, 02:40, edited 2 times in total.

Re: Moakley's book: text and discussion

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Re. "Papess" as Manfreda as Umiliati nun

Can anyone produce a 15th century depiction of an Umiliati nun that resembles the PMB trump? There are scores of tertiary Franciscan Clares that fill that bill (e.g., https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... _coll..jpg, to which was added the papal tiara. Something I posted a while back...with the usual underscoring of historical context:
Almost immediately upon becoming Pope Nicholas V, he issued the Franciscan targeted Bulla Pastoralis officii (July 20, 1447) which had the aim of responding to the requests of the “friars of the Third Order living in Italy”, by giving them the right to possess “houses, oratories, and other places” (domus, oratoria atque loca), together with the right to found other houses “with the permission of the diocesan bishop” .… Since the first Regular Tertiaries seem to have been hermits, Nicholas V invited them to adopt a habit which would distinguish them from simple hermits, and at the same time from other religious Orders (from this link: http://www.franciscan-sfo.org/hland/histfranmov2.pdf )

To put to bed any lingering doubts about this identification of the “Papess”, the conditions in Milan at the time the PMB produced explain the need for a Franciscan Tertiary in light of the one popular communal project that extended from the Visconti to the Sforza era: hospital reform. The movement to reform Milan’s corrupt charities took on momentum in earnest in under the leadership of Martino della Gazzada, a wealthy banker and merchant and member of Misercordia; after St. Francis’s visit to Milan in 1441, della Gazzada became a Franciscan Tertiary under the newly formed Observant monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Following della Gazzada’s example, by December 1442, 19 new male members from the city’s merchant class had joined the Tertiaries and in 1447 the community had more than doubled in size (Evelyn S. Welch, Art and authority in Renaissance Milan, 1995: 133). Upon the death of Visconti in 1447 the new Ambrosian Republic moved quickly to form a committee to continue the hospital reform, the Deputati sopra le Provvisioni dei Poveri, with della Gazzada taking a lead role in what proved to be one of the most popular initiatives of the Republic (ibid). When Sforza took over in 1450 his plan was not to just sanction a process already in place but closely associate his regime with it so as to take the credit for its final realization in the form of the enormous Ca’ Grande hospital, built on Bernarbo Visconti’s old palace in Porta Romana that Sforza donated for the project (ibid, 136). Although prominent Republicans such as della Gazzada were excluded and Sforza’s own secretary inserted as a lead deputy, Cicco Simonetta, the connection to the Franciscan Tertiaries was maintained, via Simonetta’s own representative who tended to day to day activities, Giovanni Caimi, a ducal courier whose “family had been closely connected to her Franciscan Tertiaries in the 1440s, and in 1446 Giovanni was charged with the administration of the Ospedale deo Poveri in Bianca Maria’s dower town of Cremona”(ibid, 141). Two Ciami women donations ensured the commencement of the Ca Grande’s construction in 1456. Thus a popular communal movement that became closely aligned with Franciscan Tertiaries that had preceded the arrival of Sforza was nevertheless coopted into an expression of his own piety. Although the hospital (1456) post-dated the PMB (c.1451), the religious sentiments of the Milanese patriciate, as well as the lower classes that formed the backbone of the Tertiary Order, would have been the apt symbol of popular piety at the time of Sforza’s investiture and thus an apt symbol of the Church in Milan. Sforza primarily courted the Milanese patriciate and Welch notes that while most wealthy Milanese men and women did not join the Franciscan Tertiaries many were buried in the Tertiaries’ habits (ibid, 133).
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1062&p=16260&hilit ... can#p16260
The new pope expressed an interest in Franciscan tertiary habits and Milanese citizens were being buried in the same. The crowned woman in the trump is simply "the Church" (Ross has adequately explained that elsewhere) and the Franciscan Tertiary admirably symbolized that in a most inclusive manner possible in Milan, c. 1450.

Moakley is a wrong turn into a dead end.

Phaeded