Nathaniel wrote: 13 Apr 2022, 10:30
I hate to rain on everyone's parade here, but it really doesn't look like they are playing tarot at all, does it?
It does, though, which is why it has acquired the traditional name. Rosini 1841 is the earliest attestation I've seen now, and he calls it "Giuoco dei Tarocchi."
But yes, it might not be Tarocchi. Tarot historians since Dummett have pointed out that no trumps are visible, although he thinks the splotches on the cards of the right-hand side players in the old photographs of Lissoni (and the same on Cust's) might show "the Matto or a Queen" (Game of Tarot, p. 68). From Terni di Gregori's photograph we can see that the card was turned face downwards, and only the back-pattern can be seen.
If the painter wanted to paint a picture of a tarot game, surely a trump would be clearly visible somewhere.
We can't assume that. The setting might be enough to indicate what game it was. What seems so necessary to us may not have occurred to them at all. About the trumps, Gertrude Moakley pointed out in 1956 the annoying fact of "the original absence of curiosity about their meaning, showing that it must have been taken for granted."
In any case, whether it was Tarot or not, the fresco is not critical proof of anything. We know that Tarot existed already, and that rich people played it. Whether we believe it is a game of Tarot or not doesn't matter.
One lost fresco explicitly depicting noble ladies playing Triumphs is consistent with the Borromeo one being this game, though. In 1469 Galeazzo Maria Sforza commissioned Bonifacio Bembo to complete an ambitious fresco cycle in the castle at Pavia. See Evelyn Welch, "Galeazzo Maria Sforza and the Castello di Pavia, 1469,"
The Art Bulletin, 71:3 (1989), pp. 352-375
https://ur.booksc.eu/book/34581012/c1f89a
"The next fresco in the duchess's suite was for a
saletta ove manzano le donne [G] in the loggia, the first overt indication of a room's function. But the fresco there makes little reference to dining, warning against assumptions that the paintings necessarily reflected the purpose of each room. Here, the new bride, her sister-in-law Elisabetta and other members of her court were shown playing a feminine version of
balla, the game of
poma, palma, or tarot cards,
al triumpho. These subjects were popular decorative themes in Lombard palaces. All three games are depicted in the
Giochi Borromei in the Palazzo Borromeo in Milan.
Palma also appears in the Palazzo Zoppi in Alessandria. They may also have been considered particularly suitable for women's quarters. For example, a
sala de la palla, recorded in the Sforza palace in Pesaro from 1442 to 1476, was generally assigned to Sforza brides and formed part of Costanza d'Aragona's suite. But the only aspect of the Pavian fresco that related to the room's function as a dining room was an odd final vignette of a dwarf bringing mushrooms to the duchess." (page 365)
Image of the placement of the rooms in the destroyed NE wall of the castle:
http://www.rosscaldwell.com/marzianotex ... 89zogo.jpg
For myself, I'm content that the Borromeo fresco is consistent with a game of Trionfi, visible trumps or not.
Moreover, five is not the number of players you would expect in a game of tarot at this time. All the evidence we have indicates that the game of tarot was originally for designed for three or four players. Five is extremely unlikely at this stage.
Whatever ideal number of players the game was created for, they surely had the creative imagination to adapt the game to the number of people present and willing to play.
It is possible that Trionfi games for two players already existed by the early 1440s. On 3 January 1444 Giovanni di Ser Piero and Vieri di Nanni were arrested for playing
charte a trionfi in the San Simone neighbourhood of Florence (
http://naibi.net/A/78-CARDS.pdf, pp. 3-4). Pratesi notes, however, that usually in these records only one person was apprehended and fined, so it is uncertain how many total players of a game there were on a given occasion, if one or more managed to escape.
The earliest explicit evidence for the number of players is from Ugo Trotti's
De multiplici ludo, 1456, when he mentions Triumphs as game of four in two partnerships -
"Ex hiis infertur quid de ludo cartarum qui hodie multum frequentatur, qui tamen multiplex est et quandoque plus habet industrie quam fortune. Veluti si quattuor bipertiti ludant ad triumphos."
The game of cards, which today is very popular, stands out from these other games (previously mentioned), because it is varied and depends more on skill than on luck, as if four in two pairs should play triumphs.
The “veluti si” always struck me as implying that he knew of other kinds of Trionfi games, not depending quite so much on skill.
It is also possible to imagine that a completely different kind of Trionfi is being portrayed in the fresco. For instance, the central figure might be a kind of dealer-bank who is not playing, but who deals the top card which the others must play to, following suit if possible, etc. So there are actually only four players in a given round, and the deal, presumably, goes around. We cannot guess how many cards of the “bank” she is holding back.
Both of these points have already been made by others. To these two points, we can add a further observation: The number of cards visible in the surviving images is too low for tarot. I'm not sure why Ross thinks there could be three tricks in front of the man on the right of the picture; I see only two, for a total of five tricks on the table—possibly four if the cards in front of the woman on the far left are a discard, not a trick, but they look too numerous for that. The players appear to have six cards remaining in their hands (certainly not ten, as one would expect from a 78-card tarot deck). If five tricks have been played (5 x 5 cards = 25) and six cards remain in their hands (5 x 6 = 30), then there are a total of 55 cards in play. This would correspond very well to a standard 56-card deck (with four courts in each suit, including queens) with an initial discard of just one card (not shown in the painting). If the cards on the table in front of the woman on the far left were not a trick but rather a discard of two cards, it could have been a standard 52-card deck (with three courts in each suit) but the 1841 drawing makes it look like there are more cards there than two, so it is more likely to be a trick that she has won.
You'll note that I corrected myself from three to two, based on Rosini's drawing, in the "Addendum" to my post above.
I agree that there appear to be too few cards visible for 78, so it could be a normal pack. There can only be 25 cards already won, the sixth round is being played, and there are at least six cards remaining in the hands. 6 + 5 = 11 per hand, so 55 cards in play with a single discard, as you suggest. This assumes that all the cards are dealt out, but since the game with five players is already an innovation, I'm not comfortable with a hard assertion that "classic" rules apply. All that seems certain to me from the picture is that they are following suit in a trick-taking game. Every other rule would be merely a guess.
To my mind, the reason this painting came to be called The Tarocchi Players is probably because Milan switched over to French-suited cards for its regular decks centuries ago, so from that point on, the Italian suits were used in Milan only in tarot decks. So when people saw Italian-suited cards in the picture, they assumed they must be tarot cards. In much the same way, French people have sometimes inaccurately called Italian-suited standard decks "tarot decks" because of their similar appearance to the suit cards of the Tarot de Marseille, and until relatively recently it was quite common in Germany for even playing-card specialists to refer to all Italian-suited decks as "Trappola decks" because those were the only kind of Italian-suited decks generally known in Germany.
That might be part of the explanation. But also because of the nobility of the players and the size of the cards. What other game matches the situation so well? At least, it seems natural to associate this game with these people.
It's a beautiful and fascinating painting, but it's almost certainly not a picture of a game of tarot.
Can't agree with "almost certainly not," but it's definitely not "certainly so."