Five - Nine - Seven
Posted: 20 Jun 2018, 05:48
Three groups. The 21 tarocchi trumps have traditionally been divided into three groups of related cards. Because 21 is one and a half times 14, the number of cards in a Tarocchi suit, it may be tempting to say the 21 trumps are three groups of seven. Many division points have been proposed. I want the divide between the first and second groups, to be after the Pope card, making the first group only five cards. As to the divide between the second and third groups, I have no very strong argument to say where it should be, but I think starting the last group at the Devil card works as well as anything. Here are two arguments supporting five cards in the first group; I'm sure neither is original with me: The first five trumps are called the five popes in Tarocchi Bolognese, and a special rule says any one of them can trump any other. After the throned potentates leading up to the pope as the highest, there can't be another throned potentate to follow after, since no one can rank higher than the pope. The only way is for this group of cards to be finished, so the pope is the highest within the group.
Considering the middle group, the Wheel of Fortune is in the center. The Wheel of Fortune shows a man tied on, with his head downward. It also shows a very old man, so old he can no longer stand. In some other pictures of the wheel, not on tarocchi cards, death in the form of a skeleton awaits to untie the dead at the bottom (4):
Whether shown or not, death is the meaning of the low point of the wheel. There is also the Emperor card showing a crowned man on a throne, which matches the picture at the top of the wheel. So four tarocchi cards, Emperor, Hanged Man, Old Man, and Death, match images either on tarocchi Wheels of Fortune cards, or from other images of the wheel. The Wheel lifts up, as well as casts down. The Wheel shows a man tied to the rising portion of the Wheel, but he is not doing anything; if this little image on the Wheel, corresponds to a card or cards, which are they? Which cards show a man enjoying sudden good fortune? The Lovers card seems to show a betrothal. Chariot, if it is not the supreme award for a soldier, the granting of a triumphal chariot (the card was sometimes called that), it is by any interpretation an upbeat card. So we can describe the second group of trumps, in the middle row, as follows: the Wheel is more or less in the center, bad fortunes and the end of life are after the wheel, and hopeful youth is before it (usually). The second row also holds three of the four cardinal virtues (usually). If the Wheel card originally had a happy lover and a victorious soldier, instead of the one happy figure, then we could say that all the cards (except virtues) on the Wheel row came from small images on the Wheel card, using them all, and in the same order. The one exception is the crowned and throned man at the top of the Wheel: he is on a card, but that card is above the Wheel, rather than on the Wheel row. We will get back to him shortly.
Those tarocchi decks which follow the Dummett type B order, place one of the cardinal virtues, Justice, near the end of the trumps, certainly in the third group. If we think in terms of an original or standard tarocchi from which the three orders are variants, it is easier to see this placement of Justice up next to Last Judgment, as a move to fix some problem, than it is to see both type A and type C orders as moving Justice away from that spot, to fix some problem. If we take that as meaning that the original tarocchi did not have Justice in this spot near the end, then the last group, starting at Devil, had originally seven cards. So the groups are five, nine, and seven.
Just for symmetry, let's center each group in its row. This is the Jacques Viéville Tarot de Paris order, which matches (except for one switch) the order of the Susio poem, so it is likely to be the order of Milan, or close to it.
A pattern is as good as a book, to provide a way to memorize the order of the trumps, and I see the start of a pattern here, a ring of yellow around the central Wheel of Fortune. Yellow is the color of virtue, in this layout.
Some bawdy songs. I am interested in this yellow ring of virtues, but first a digression through some unvirtuous songs. I have not quite verified that one of the songs in the collection called the Carmina Burana, was named Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, but in any case that was a traditional epithet. Here's a snippet:
On Fortune's throne
I used to sit raised up, / crowned with / the multi-colored flowers of prosperity;
though I may have flourished / happy and blessed,
now I fall from the peak / deprived of glory.
The wheel of Fortune turns;
I go down, demeaned; / another is raised up;
far too high up / sits the king at the summit - / let him fear ruin!
for under the axis we may read / “Queen Hecuba.”
and here's another
O Fortuna,
like the moon / you are changeable, / ever waxing / ever waning;
hateful life / first oppresses / and then soothes / as fancy takes it;
poverty / and power / it melts them like ice.
Triple axis. The central vertical axis of the deck, in the above Viéville order, is Imperatrix – Fortuna – Moon; That is, Fortuna herself repeated three times, as a triple goddess. Here is the front cover of the Codex Burana. Note Fortuna's crown. The four figures bound to the wheel are labeled: I will reign, I reign, I used to reign, I have no realm.
Card-playing louts. The Carmina Burana is a collection of drinking songs, and many of them are about drinking. The seven other illustrations in the manuscript show drinking beer, a pair of lovers, a forest, scenes from Dido and Aeneas, and three scenes of gambling, at backgammon, chess, and dice. (Card playing had not yet been learned from the Arabs.) Other songs are about gluttony, death, fate, luck, the return of spring, the rape/seduction of shepherdesses by knights, students, and clergymen (these are called pastourelles), and then there's a first-person narrative of a ten-hour love bout with the goddess Venus.
Card playing was a crime. It was a sin. The rough types who played cards were involved in other sins and crimes, covering up their gambling by pretending to play for cookies. Trionfi cards were used for gambling by artisans so poor that the cheaply printed cards in their hands represented a third of a day's pay, three soldi. That is the world the cards come from, that is the world where they were used, and that is the world they are about.
(One final note, Carl Orff's setting of the Carmina Burana was part of a triptych with The Songs of Catullus and Trionfo di Afrodite. The name of the triptych? Trionfi.)
A memory scaffold. When the trumps are laid out, if they make a pattern, that is a way to check that you have laid them out in the correct order. It is the visual analog of making something easy to remember by casting it into verse, the rhyme pattern aids memory, and so does a visual pattern. If a spread layout of the cards, which can be seen and remembered, is used to fix the trump order, rather than reference to some outside source of order such as a book, then visual memory, rather than book learning, is being used. We may speak of a trump layout. Looking at the above Viéville (and likely Milan) layout, a pattern springs to the eye, a ring of yellow around the Wheel. which is in the exact center of the layout. I have shown the cardinal virtues in yellow. Star, Moon, and Sun may be hints at, or mistakes for, the Biblical virtues Hope, Faith, and Charity. Popess may be a mistake for Prudentia. I have highlighted these cards in yellow. Could the ring of virtues once have been complete?
Could the Popess card be a mistake for Prudentia? Prudentia is often shown strangling a snake, and with a male face on the back of her head. Another choice, more rare but not unknown, has her reading a book to an audience at a lectern. Either way she often holds a mirror, usually a round or oval mirror on a long stick, showing a face. If the first printed edition of the cards had a Prudentia, and this was wrongly taken as Popess, then the artist must have chosen the book rather than the snake, or the mistake could never have been made. Even so, the mirror should have settled it, but perhaps the artist omitted it, or drew it so it could be mistaken for something else. Here is the Popess from the Cary sheet:
The original artist, meaning her for Prudentia, could have drawn exactly this, in every detail (book, lectern, crown which is not a triple crown), except that instead of a crozier, she held a round mirror, showing a face, on a stick. All it would take would be a flaw in the woodblock carving to turn that mirror into a crozier.
The Queen of the Virtues presides: First, the ring of places around the Wheel is eight places, and there are only seven virtues. There needs to be an eighth, a presiding figure, as Apollo is added to the nine muses fill out a row of ten in the Tarocchi di Mantegna. This eighth figure added to the seven virtues should be a woman, as the virtues are, and she should preside. The Empress card seems as good a choice as any, and she is already in the right place. She may have been a goddess, rather than an empress, and she just might have been Diana.
King <–> Justice swap. In the Viéville order, spread as a layout, only two slots in the ring around the Wheel don't have virtues: the upper right and the middle right. (That is counting Empress as being Diana, for the “eighth virtue,” virginity). In the upper right, is the Emperor card. Assume that this place was originally Justice. Also assume the king pictured on the Wheel was repeated as a card, and was on the Wheel row, like the other cards taken from the small images on the Wheel. Especially once the card above the Wheel has been taken to be an Empress, this king could easily have been taken to be the Emperor. But he would have trumped the Pope! This was unacceptable, so the king card, taken as Emperor, had to be moved to the spot just before the Pope, and just after the Empress. The card that was in that spot was Justice, and it was moved to the spot where the king had been. This broke the ring of virtues, but several virtues (and Diana) had not been recognized, so the ring of virtues was no longer obvious.
Temperance to the end of the Wheel row. In the Viéville order layout the Temperance card, is at the far right of the Wheel row, but if the ring of virtues idea is correct, she was originally just after the Wheel, part of the ring. The last three slots on the Wheel row after her should then have been Hanged Man, Old Age, and Death, following the order around the Wheel. This made the Death card number 14; all the orders eventually made Death the unlucky number 13. So if Temperance was just to the right of the Wheel in the ring of virtues layout, she was moved to the end of the row, and the other three cards were slid left one space, making Death 13. This further breaks the ring of virtues. These two changes, one imperative because the Emperor must not trump the Pope, and the other imperative because Death must be 13, is all it takes to change the ring of virtues layout to the Viéville layout.
The visual key to the trump order, in the card player's hand. I have not found a wheel of fortune with six or five figures tied to it, but you could put six figures on a wheel, and put that on a playing card, and have the figures still be large enough to be recognized. In that way, the Wheel card in the player's hand, is the key to the order of the trumps. Rather than use a poem which many buyers won't know, or some monument that only one city would know, the game designer has chosen a visual key to the trump order, and put that visual key in every player's hand, as the Wheel card. This Wheel card would have shown five figures: 1) a fortunate lover getting engaged, 2) a victorious soldier awarded a triumph, 3) a king reigning in brief glory, 4) an traitor upside down, and 5) a very old man. Death as a skeleton waits at the bottom. With this card, the six cards on the Wheel row are placed: Lovers, Chariot, King, then the Wheel inside the ring of virtues, then Upside down Traitor, very Old Man, and Death. With the figures on the Wheel, plus the ring of virtues around the Wheel, re-enforced by the triple goddess vertical axis, all but six of the 21 trump cards are placed. (Those six cards may have a place in the scheme as well.) It was an excellent plan, to have an easily remembered image be used to place the cards. So what went wrong?
Virgil's Trivia: I digress, to talk about the vertical axis for a bit. In 1440, the Seven Virtues were over a thousand years old. Chastity is not one of the Seven Virtues, but in the Italy of the 1400s, she was an overwhelmingly important virtue, and virginity also. My idea of a ring of virtues suggests the empty spot directly above the Wheel would have needed a sort of “eighth virtue,” a female figure who fits in among the other seven. Virginity works, and the way to show virginity would have been Diana. The card buyers didn't know much mythology as a rule, but Diana and Actaeon was the one myth you could find on a cassone or a desco da parto. Of course Diana was the goddess of the moon, so the central axis is now connected with the moon, all three cards of it.
The card below the Wheel is Moon. mikeh thinks it is the virtue Faith, based on iconology. I take his opinions seriously, but I had thought it was Charity, based on the idea that the reliable sun, rather than the inconstant moon, was Faith (I also want Faith where it is). Charity is usually shown in art as a bare-breasted woman nursing. In the CYV Charity, she has one breast bare and one baby, but in other images of Charity it is both breasts bare, and more babies to suckle than could possibly be her own, hence charity. Here is Charity by Jan Matsys, a Flemish painter born in 1509, and famous for his erotic female nudes. (3)
This bare breasted woman would have suggested to the singers of the tavern songs found at Beuern, and to the card playing louts of Italy as well, a different sort of giving of favors. The card at that point in the trump order, may or may not have been a virtue, but it ended up as the Moon card, so it had a moon on it; a moon on the card suggests a night scene. So we have a bare-breasted, fecund, and generous woman, encountered at night.
If you wander the woods under the moon, and encounter Diana naked, she turns you into a stag and sets your own dogs on you. Bare breasted Charity does not look like she'd be so strict. Boccaccio's Comedia della ninfe fiorentine was a play rather than a book. Boccaccio, more than Petrarch, was likely to be drawn on for a cassone or a desco da parto (as this play was), so if any written source is a clue to what the common people would have known and understood, it is this play. It stars Ameto, a shepherd who wanders the woods and stumbles upon some nymphs, but unlike Actaeon he did not end up being eaten: these nymphs are followers of Venus, rather than of Diana. This play, by the way, has nymphs representing six of the seven virtues (leaving out Faith, which was just as well, as they are worshipers of Cybele, the Phrygian mother goddess!)
So the central axis has three women, or goddesses, all connected with the moon: At the top, perhaps Diana, virginal and dangerous to encounter naked. At the bottom, a much more charitable naked goddess, perhaps Venus: Ameto suffers no more than being thrown into an ice cold spring to cool his blood. Between these good and bad outcomes is Fortuna, like the moon she is changeable. Both Diana and Actaeon, and this play, can be found on deschi da parto. A triple goddess, with Diana as the virginal one of the three, was a well-known concept, although here I must cite Virgil (who does not make the desco da parto cut). Virgil's usual name for Diana was Trivia (Three-road), in his times the goddess was worshiped at every three-way crossroads, and a three night bash was celebrated every new moon. But even without having read Virgil in particular, the central axis, as a triple moon goddess, should have been recognizable as a pattern to the Italians. Anyone who had seen the play would not have forgotten where in the trump order that bare-breasted woman under the moon was supposed to go: she goes on the other side of Fortuna from the virginal Diana.
The ring of virtues. I propose that the first trionfi printing with 21 trumps had this layout, which I will call the ring of virtues layout.
The Wheel card had six spokes, and had five figures tied to it, showing in miniature, on the rising side, a fortunate lover and a successful soldier, at the top a throned king, and then on the descending side a man upside down with his crown falling off, and at the bottom an old man so weak he cannot stand. Next to him Death as a skeleton waits to untie him. Thus the six figures of the middle row can be placed in order, by simply looking at the Wheel card. The ring of virtues should have been easy to remember, and the order of the ring is the Thomas Aquinas order: Wisdom (Prudentia), Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, followed by the Biblical virtues (1). (These are not in the Bible's order, but other clues give the order of these three trumps.)
Waxing abstract, we may say the vertical axis is cosmic, the horizontal axis is a man's life. The vertical is female, the horizontal male. Both vertical and horizontal lines are about what the world does to you, the circle of virtues is about how you should live in the world. Wheels are within wheels, and the Sun, Moon, and Star are the cycling days, months, and years, located within eternity. The Wheel row is the course of man's life from youth to death, and eternity follows after. The happy lover may find his happiness smashed by death; the defeated soldier may be raised to the highest throne; in the end, Fortuna trumps all. These concepts might not have been familiar in the form of written words to the average card buyer, but they can be felt in the placement of the spread out cards, and they add to the layout's coherence.
So what went wrong? Justice with her scales, and Temperance pouring water into wine, were easily recognized as the virtues they were, and the woman weight-lifter can be recognized as Fortitude once you know she's one of the seven virtues. But the Prudentia (Wisdom) card likely showed a woman, in a chair, at a lectern, reading a book to students (as in other images of Prudentia). She may or may not have carried a mirror. She was not bare headed but in some sort of headdress, or perhaps she wore a crown (perhaps all seven virtues did). To the card buyers, this was a woman giving a sermon, seated on a throne, in some sort of fancy hat. Therefore to those who saw the card, she was a high church official, perhaps a bishop. But there weren't any woman bishops – except, just once, a woman had been elected bishop of Rome. No one doubted that Pope Joan was historical fact, in the XV century. So they thought this was a picture of Pope Joan.
Likewise the Charity card had a bit too much Moon in it, a bit too much of Ameto's nymph Lia, to be recognized as the virtue Charity. Star and Sun had been made prominent on those cards for a reason (Moon trumps Star, Sun trumps Moon), but the result was that Hope and Faith failed to be recognized as the virtues they had been intended for. (They knew the cross on the Sun/Faith card was a cross, but not that the card was the virtue Faith.) Without the virtues, there is no ring of virtues. One casualty is Diana, not seen as the virtue Virginity, but just a crowned woman on a throne.
So there's a muddle. The top row has Bagatto, Pope Joan, Empress, Justice, Pope. All but the page boy are crowned and on thrones. But there's a mistake, the Emperor is three steps higher than the Pope! Better not show such a thing around here! So the King, who is really just the traditional king from the top of the Wheel, and no emperor, gets put in the place of Justice. Justice moves to somewhere more or less where the king used to be.
And then, someone notices that Death is trump number 14. Can't have that. Move Temperance to the end of the row, so Death will be 13.
Just those two changes, two necessary changes, moving the Emperor to be before the Pope so you won't be in trouble with the Parte Guelfa, and making sure that Death is at XIII, change the ring of virtues layout, to this:
And this, is the order the Viéville Tarot de Paris (except switching Hanged Man and Old Man), and of the earlier Susio poem from Pavia (except for a further switching of Popess and Empress). These are type C or Western orders. Pavia is near Milan, and the French adopted tarot when they conquered Milan. Thus on two grounds this was the likely early order of Milan.
Order types A and B.
This A order results from a reasonable desire to bring together the three virtues that the deck seems to have. World and Last Judgment are switched, and the couples are brought together on the top row. It makes Death 14, but this was dealt with by other means, such as not giving the Bagatto a number.
The Met has three of these sheets, only one is online (5). Others are in Budapest (6). B order moves Justice to be next to Last Judgment. This makes Death be 13. Both A and B orders move Temperance to be the lowest ranking virtue (of the ones they recognized). Aquinas, by placing them in order, was giving the first-listed virtue the greatest weight, so that Wisdom ranked higher with him than Temperance. While C order puts the virtues in the Aquinas order, which makes sense if the only point is to use the Aquinas order to remember the order of the trumps, A and B orders more properly reverse the order, so the more important virtue outranks the less important. But the A and B reworking of the trump order, must have been after the failure to recognize Prudentia.
Conclusion: When one of the trump orders, which was likely that of Milan, is grouped by concepts into five, nine, and seven cards, and those groups are placed in rows and centered, a part of a pattern emerges: a ring of virtues around the central card, the Wheel of Fortune. If a deck existed with this ring complete, then only two moves, both explainable, are required to get to the Milan order from that starting point. Three cards, Emperor, Hanged Man, and Old Man, match images on the Wheel of Fortune card, and a fourth, Death, matches an image found on other wheels of fortune. The other Wheel image is a young man of rising fortune, who is not shown doing anything in particular, but he corresponds, at least in happiness, to two cards, the Lover getting engaged, and the victorious soldier awarded a triumphal Chariot. A Wheel card might have shown these two examples of happiness rather than just the one man rising. With that change every card on the Wheel row, was shown on the Wheel card, using them all, in the same order. A third pattern, a triple moon goddess, is found in the central axis of the layout. Every concept used in these patterns was known to the ordinary people of Italy, and not just to advanced humanist circles, as is shown by scenes on birth trays and hope chests, and by the presence of these concepts, such as the Seven Virtues, deep into the medieval past.
A designer of the trionfi game, seeking to make the trump order easy to grasp and remember by ordinary card buyers, might better have chosen a set of patterns and symmetries seen visually in a layout of the trumps, rather than copy some 21 things found in a book. The ring of virtues trump layout described here is such a layout. That such a highly symmetric and crosschecked pattern exists, and is only two explainable moves away from the known Milan order, is unlikely to be due to chance. This is evidence that this order did in fact exist, as the first large printing of trionfi decks, and the known orders emerged as explainable variations from it. That changes from this well-designed starting layout happened at all, was likely due to the failure of four of the virtue cards to be recognized as the virtues they were intended to be.
Considering the middle group, the Wheel of Fortune is in the center. The Wheel of Fortune shows a man tied on, with his head downward. It also shows a very old man, so old he can no longer stand. In some other pictures of the wheel, not on tarocchi cards, death in the form of a skeleton awaits to untie the dead at the bottom (4):
Whether shown or not, death is the meaning of the low point of the wheel. There is also the Emperor card showing a crowned man on a throne, which matches the picture at the top of the wheel. So four tarocchi cards, Emperor, Hanged Man, Old Man, and Death, match images either on tarocchi Wheels of Fortune cards, or from other images of the wheel. The Wheel lifts up, as well as casts down. The Wheel shows a man tied to the rising portion of the Wheel, but he is not doing anything; if this little image on the Wheel, corresponds to a card or cards, which are they? Which cards show a man enjoying sudden good fortune? The Lovers card seems to show a betrothal. Chariot, if it is not the supreme award for a soldier, the granting of a triumphal chariot (the card was sometimes called that), it is by any interpretation an upbeat card. So we can describe the second group of trumps, in the middle row, as follows: the Wheel is more or less in the center, bad fortunes and the end of life are after the wheel, and hopeful youth is before it (usually). The second row also holds three of the four cardinal virtues (usually). If the Wheel card originally had a happy lover and a victorious soldier, instead of the one happy figure, then we could say that all the cards (except virtues) on the Wheel row came from small images on the Wheel card, using them all, and in the same order. The one exception is the crowned and throned man at the top of the Wheel: he is on a card, but that card is above the Wheel, rather than on the Wheel row. We will get back to him shortly.
Those tarocchi decks which follow the Dummett type B order, place one of the cardinal virtues, Justice, near the end of the trumps, certainly in the third group. If we think in terms of an original or standard tarocchi from which the three orders are variants, it is easier to see this placement of Justice up next to Last Judgment, as a move to fix some problem, than it is to see both type A and type C orders as moving Justice away from that spot, to fix some problem. If we take that as meaning that the original tarocchi did not have Justice in this spot near the end, then the last group, starting at Devil, had originally seven cards. So the groups are five, nine, and seven.
Just for symmetry, let's center each group in its row. This is the Jacques Viéville Tarot de Paris order, which matches (except for one switch) the order of the Susio poem, so it is likely to be the order of Milan, or close to it.
A pattern is as good as a book, to provide a way to memorize the order of the trumps, and I see the start of a pattern here, a ring of yellow around the central Wheel of Fortune. Yellow is the color of virtue, in this layout.
Some bawdy songs. I am interested in this yellow ring of virtues, but first a digression through some unvirtuous songs. I have not quite verified that one of the songs in the collection called the Carmina Burana, was named Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, but in any case that was a traditional epithet. Here's a snippet:
On Fortune's throne
I used to sit raised up, / crowned with / the multi-colored flowers of prosperity;
though I may have flourished / happy and blessed,
now I fall from the peak / deprived of glory.
The wheel of Fortune turns;
I go down, demeaned; / another is raised up;
far too high up / sits the king at the summit - / let him fear ruin!
for under the axis we may read / “Queen Hecuba.”
and here's another
O Fortuna,
like the moon / you are changeable, / ever waxing / ever waning;
hateful life / first oppresses / and then soothes / as fancy takes it;
poverty / and power / it melts them like ice.
Triple axis. The central vertical axis of the deck, in the above Viéville order, is Imperatrix – Fortuna – Moon; That is, Fortuna herself repeated three times, as a triple goddess. Here is the front cover of the Codex Burana. Note Fortuna's crown. The four figures bound to the wheel are labeled: I will reign, I reign, I used to reign, I have no realm.
Card-playing louts. The Carmina Burana is a collection of drinking songs, and many of them are about drinking. The seven other illustrations in the manuscript show drinking beer, a pair of lovers, a forest, scenes from Dido and Aeneas, and three scenes of gambling, at backgammon, chess, and dice. (Card playing had not yet been learned from the Arabs.) Other songs are about gluttony, death, fate, luck, the return of spring, the rape/seduction of shepherdesses by knights, students, and clergymen (these are called pastourelles), and then there's a first-person narrative of a ten-hour love bout with the goddess Venus.
Card playing was a crime. It was a sin. The rough types who played cards were involved in other sins and crimes, covering up their gambling by pretending to play for cookies. Trionfi cards were used for gambling by artisans so poor that the cheaply printed cards in their hands represented a third of a day's pay, three soldi. That is the world the cards come from, that is the world where they were used, and that is the world they are about.
(One final note, Carl Orff's setting of the Carmina Burana was part of a triptych with The Songs of Catullus and Trionfo di Afrodite. The name of the triptych? Trionfi.)
A memory scaffold. When the trumps are laid out, if they make a pattern, that is a way to check that you have laid them out in the correct order. It is the visual analog of making something easy to remember by casting it into verse, the rhyme pattern aids memory, and so does a visual pattern. If a spread layout of the cards, which can be seen and remembered, is used to fix the trump order, rather than reference to some outside source of order such as a book, then visual memory, rather than book learning, is being used. We may speak of a trump layout. Looking at the above Viéville (and likely Milan) layout, a pattern springs to the eye, a ring of yellow around the Wheel. which is in the exact center of the layout. I have shown the cardinal virtues in yellow. Star, Moon, and Sun may be hints at, or mistakes for, the Biblical virtues Hope, Faith, and Charity. Popess may be a mistake for Prudentia. I have highlighted these cards in yellow. Could the ring of virtues once have been complete?
Could the Popess card be a mistake for Prudentia? Prudentia is often shown strangling a snake, and with a male face on the back of her head. Another choice, more rare but not unknown, has her reading a book to an audience at a lectern. Either way she often holds a mirror, usually a round or oval mirror on a long stick, showing a face. If the first printed edition of the cards had a Prudentia, and this was wrongly taken as Popess, then the artist must have chosen the book rather than the snake, or the mistake could never have been made. Even so, the mirror should have settled it, but perhaps the artist omitted it, or drew it so it could be mistaken for something else. Here is the Popess from the Cary sheet:
The original artist, meaning her for Prudentia, could have drawn exactly this, in every detail (book, lectern, crown which is not a triple crown), except that instead of a crozier, she held a round mirror, showing a face, on a stick. All it would take would be a flaw in the woodblock carving to turn that mirror into a crozier.
The Queen of the Virtues presides: First, the ring of places around the Wheel is eight places, and there are only seven virtues. There needs to be an eighth, a presiding figure, as Apollo is added to the nine muses fill out a row of ten in the Tarocchi di Mantegna. This eighth figure added to the seven virtues should be a woman, as the virtues are, and she should preside. The Empress card seems as good a choice as any, and she is already in the right place. She may have been a goddess, rather than an empress, and she just might have been Diana.
King <–> Justice swap. In the Viéville order, spread as a layout, only two slots in the ring around the Wheel don't have virtues: the upper right and the middle right. (That is counting Empress as being Diana, for the “eighth virtue,” virginity). In the upper right, is the Emperor card. Assume that this place was originally Justice. Also assume the king pictured on the Wheel was repeated as a card, and was on the Wheel row, like the other cards taken from the small images on the Wheel. Especially once the card above the Wheel has been taken to be an Empress, this king could easily have been taken to be the Emperor. But he would have trumped the Pope! This was unacceptable, so the king card, taken as Emperor, had to be moved to the spot just before the Pope, and just after the Empress. The card that was in that spot was Justice, and it was moved to the spot where the king had been. This broke the ring of virtues, but several virtues (and Diana) had not been recognized, so the ring of virtues was no longer obvious.
Temperance to the end of the Wheel row. In the Viéville order layout the Temperance card, is at the far right of the Wheel row, but if the ring of virtues idea is correct, she was originally just after the Wheel, part of the ring. The last three slots on the Wheel row after her should then have been Hanged Man, Old Age, and Death, following the order around the Wheel. This made the Death card number 14; all the orders eventually made Death the unlucky number 13. So if Temperance was just to the right of the Wheel in the ring of virtues layout, she was moved to the end of the row, and the other three cards were slid left one space, making Death 13. This further breaks the ring of virtues. These two changes, one imperative because the Emperor must not trump the Pope, and the other imperative because Death must be 13, is all it takes to change the ring of virtues layout to the Viéville layout.
The visual key to the trump order, in the card player's hand. I have not found a wheel of fortune with six or five figures tied to it, but you could put six figures on a wheel, and put that on a playing card, and have the figures still be large enough to be recognized. In that way, the Wheel card in the player's hand, is the key to the order of the trumps. Rather than use a poem which many buyers won't know, or some monument that only one city would know, the game designer has chosen a visual key to the trump order, and put that visual key in every player's hand, as the Wheel card. This Wheel card would have shown five figures: 1) a fortunate lover getting engaged, 2) a victorious soldier awarded a triumph, 3) a king reigning in brief glory, 4) an traitor upside down, and 5) a very old man. Death as a skeleton waits at the bottom. With this card, the six cards on the Wheel row are placed: Lovers, Chariot, King, then the Wheel inside the ring of virtues, then Upside down Traitor, very Old Man, and Death. With the figures on the Wheel, plus the ring of virtues around the Wheel, re-enforced by the triple goddess vertical axis, all but six of the 21 trump cards are placed. (Those six cards may have a place in the scheme as well.) It was an excellent plan, to have an easily remembered image be used to place the cards. So what went wrong?
Virgil's Trivia: I digress, to talk about the vertical axis for a bit. In 1440, the Seven Virtues were over a thousand years old. Chastity is not one of the Seven Virtues, but in the Italy of the 1400s, she was an overwhelmingly important virtue, and virginity also. My idea of a ring of virtues suggests the empty spot directly above the Wheel would have needed a sort of “eighth virtue,” a female figure who fits in among the other seven. Virginity works, and the way to show virginity would have been Diana. The card buyers didn't know much mythology as a rule, but Diana and Actaeon was the one myth you could find on a cassone or a desco da parto. Of course Diana was the goddess of the moon, so the central axis is now connected with the moon, all three cards of it.
The card below the Wheel is Moon. mikeh thinks it is the virtue Faith, based on iconology. I take his opinions seriously, but I had thought it was Charity, based on the idea that the reliable sun, rather than the inconstant moon, was Faith (I also want Faith where it is). Charity is usually shown in art as a bare-breasted woman nursing. In the CYV Charity, she has one breast bare and one baby, but in other images of Charity it is both breasts bare, and more babies to suckle than could possibly be her own, hence charity. Here is Charity by Jan Matsys, a Flemish painter born in 1509, and famous for his erotic female nudes. (3)
This bare breasted woman would have suggested to the singers of the tavern songs found at Beuern, and to the card playing louts of Italy as well, a different sort of giving of favors. The card at that point in the trump order, may or may not have been a virtue, but it ended up as the Moon card, so it had a moon on it; a moon on the card suggests a night scene. So we have a bare-breasted, fecund, and generous woman, encountered at night.
If you wander the woods under the moon, and encounter Diana naked, she turns you into a stag and sets your own dogs on you. Bare breasted Charity does not look like she'd be so strict. Boccaccio's Comedia della ninfe fiorentine was a play rather than a book. Boccaccio, more than Petrarch, was likely to be drawn on for a cassone or a desco da parto (as this play was), so if any written source is a clue to what the common people would have known and understood, it is this play. It stars Ameto, a shepherd who wanders the woods and stumbles upon some nymphs, but unlike Actaeon he did not end up being eaten: these nymphs are followers of Venus, rather than of Diana. This play, by the way, has nymphs representing six of the seven virtues (leaving out Faith, which was just as well, as they are worshipers of Cybele, the Phrygian mother goddess!)
So the central axis has three women, or goddesses, all connected with the moon: At the top, perhaps Diana, virginal and dangerous to encounter naked. At the bottom, a much more charitable naked goddess, perhaps Venus: Ameto suffers no more than being thrown into an ice cold spring to cool his blood. Between these good and bad outcomes is Fortuna, like the moon she is changeable. Both Diana and Actaeon, and this play, can be found on deschi da parto. A triple goddess, with Diana as the virginal one of the three, was a well-known concept, although here I must cite Virgil (who does not make the desco da parto cut). Virgil's usual name for Diana was Trivia (Three-road), in his times the goddess was worshiped at every three-way crossroads, and a three night bash was celebrated every new moon. But even without having read Virgil in particular, the central axis, as a triple moon goddess, should have been recognizable as a pattern to the Italians. Anyone who had seen the play would not have forgotten where in the trump order that bare-breasted woman under the moon was supposed to go: she goes on the other side of Fortuna from the virginal Diana.
The ring of virtues. I propose that the first trionfi printing with 21 trumps had this layout, which I will call the ring of virtues layout.
The Wheel card had six spokes, and had five figures tied to it, showing in miniature, on the rising side, a fortunate lover and a successful soldier, at the top a throned king, and then on the descending side a man upside down with his crown falling off, and at the bottom an old man so weak he cannot stand. Next to him Death as a skeleton waits to untie him. Thus the six figures of the middle row can be placed in order, by simply looking at the Wheel card. The ring of virtues should have been easy to remember, and the order of the ring is the Thomas Aquinas order: Wisdom (Prudentia), Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, followed by the Biblical virtues (1). (These are not in the Bible's order, but other clues give the order of these three trumps.)
Waxing abstract, we may say the vertical axis is cosmic, the horizontal axis is a man's life. The vertical is female, the horizontal male. Both vertical and horizontal lines are about what the world does to you, the circle of virtues is about how you should live in the world. Wheels are within wheels, and the Sun, Moon, and Star are the cycling days, months, and years, located within eternity. The Wheel row is the course of man's life from youth to death, and eternity follows after. The happy lover may find his happiness smashed by death; the defeated soldier may be raised to the highest throne; in the end, Fortuna trumps all. These concepts might not have been familiar in the form of written words to the average card buyer, but they can be felt in the placement of the spread out cards, and they add to the layout's coherence.
So what went wrong? Justice with her scales, and Temperance pouring water into wine, were easily recognized as the virtues they were, and the woman weight-lifter can be recognized as Fortitude once you know she's one of the seven virtues. But the Prudentia (Wisdom) card likely showed a woman, in a chair, at a lectern, reading a book to students (as in other images of Prudentia). She may or may not have carried a mirror. She was not bare headed but in some sort of headdress, or perhaps she wore a crown (perhaps all seven virtues did). To the card buyers, this was a woman giving a sermon, seated on a throne, in some sort of fancy hat. Therefore to those who saw the card, she was a high church official, perhaps a bishop. But there weren't any woman bishops – except, just once, a woman had been elected bishop of Rome. No one doubted that Pope Joan was historical fact, in the XV century. So they thought this was a picture of Pope Joan.
Likewise the Charity card had a bit too much Moon in it, a bit too much of Ameto's nymph Lia, to be recognized as the virtue Charity. Star and Sun had been made prominent on those cards for a reason (Moon trumps Star, Sun trumps Moon), but the result was that Hope and Faith failed to be recognized as the virtues they had been intended for. (They knew the cross on the Sun/Faith card was a cross, but not that the card was the virtue Faith.) Without the virtues, there is no ring of virtues. One casualty is Diana, not seen as the virtue Virginity, but just a crowned woman on a throne.
So there's a muddle. The top row has Bagatto, Pope Joan, Empress, Justice, Pope. All but the page boy are crowned and on thrones. But there's a mistake, the Emperor is three steps higher than the Pope! Better not show such a thing around here! So the King, who is really just the traditional king from the top of the Wheel, and no emperor, gets put in the place of Justice. Justice moves to somewhere more or less where the king used to be.
And then, someone notices that Death is trump number 14. Can't have that. Move Temperance to the end of the row, so Death will be 13.
Just those two changes, two necessary changes, moving the Emperor to be before the Pope so you won't be in trouble with the Parte Guelfa, and making sure that Death is at XIII, change the ring of virtues layout, to this:
And this, is the order the Viéville Tarot de Paris (except switching Hanged Man and Old Man), and of the earlier Susio poem from Pavia (except for a further switching of Popess and Empress). These are type C or Western orders. Pavia is near Milan, and the French adopted tarot when they conquered Milan. Thus on two grounds this was the likely early order of Milan.
Order types A and B.
This A order results from a reasonable desire to bring together the three virtues that the deck seems to have. World and Last Judgment are switched, and the couples are brought together on the top row. It makes Death 14, but this was dealt with by other means, such as not giving the Bagatto a number.
The Met has three of these sheets, only one is online (5). Others are in Budapest (6). B order moves Justice to be next to Last Judgment. This makes Death be 13. Both A and B orders move Temperance to be the lowest ranking virtue (of the ones they recognized). Aquinas, by placing them in order, was giving the first-listed virtue the greatest weight, so that Wisdom ranked higher with him than Temperance. While C order puts the virtues in the Aquinas order, which makes sense if the only point is to use the Aquinas order to remember the order of the trumps, A and B orders more properly reverse the order, so the more important virtue outranks the less important. But the A and B reworking of the trump order, must have been after the failure to recognize Prudentia.
Conclusion: When one of the trump orders, which was likely that of Milan, is grouped by concepts into five, nine, and seven cards, and those groups are placed in rows and centered, a part of a pattern emerges: a ring of virtues around the central card, the Wheel of Fortune. If a deck existed with this ring complete, then only two moves, both explainable, are required to get to the Milan order from that starting point. Three cards, Emperor, Hanged Man, and Old Man, match images on the Wheel of Fortune card, and a fourth, Death, matches an image found on other wheels of fortune. The other Wheel image is a young man of rising fortune, who is not shown doing anything in particular, but he corresponds, at least in happiness, to two cards, the Lover getting engaged, and the victorious soldier awarded a triumphal Chariot. A Wheel card might have shown these two examples of happiness rather than just the one man rising. With that change every card on the Wheel row, was shown on the Wheel card, using them all, in the same order. A third pattern, a triple moon goddess, is found in the central axis of the layout. Every concept used in these patterns was known to the ordinary people of Italy, and not just to advanced humanist circles, as is shown by scenes on birth trays and hope chests, and by the presence of these concepts, such as the Seven Virtues, deep into the medieval past.
A designer of the trionfi game, seeking to make the trump order easy to grasp and remember by ordinary card buyers, might better have chosen a set of patterns and symmetries seen visually in a layout of the trumps, rather than copy some 21 things found in a book. The ring of virtues trump layout described here is such a layout. That such a highly symmetric and crosschecked pattern exists, and is only two explainable moves away from the known Milan order, is unlikely to be due to chance. This is evidence that this order did in fact exist, as the first large printing of trionfi decks, and the known orders emerged as explainable variations from it. That changes from this well-designed starting layout happened at all, was likely due to the failure of four of the virtue cards to be recognized as the virtues they were intended to be.