I found an Italian article recently (its English version only) that shares my view, that Milan came first, and the tarot then spread from there to Bologna, which began the "popular tarot" decks, and Ferrara. It is is by Girolamo Zorli,
http://www.letarot.it/Bolognese-Industr ... 8_eng.aspx. Here are the most relevant parts:
The famous Ferrarese payment dated February 10 -1442 is the first known document about “trionfi”. The Este court paid four fine and very expensive hand-painted decks. These four packs were probably meant to celebrate the new Marquis, Lionello d’Este. We know that the Ferrarese court loved to play a card game called Imperatori. We are comfortably sure that the Este did not produce nor buy trionfi before that date. Possibly, they did not like the game. Bianca Maria Visconti, Milan duke Filippo Maria’s daughter, had just stayed in Ferrara for an eight-month visit. It is therefore natural to presume that the Ferrarese court received the triumphal deck idea from Milan.
Few months later, on July 28 – 1442, the Este paid Marchionne Burdochi, a Bolognese merchant. They bought from him a relatively inexpensive trionfi deck for the lord’s adolescent brothers to play the game.
An articulated high-class court item was therefore shortly ready for the game at a much lesser price. That deck could have been custom made by the Bolognese. It is curious that a brilliant and gambling court had only one cheap deck made for the game. It is more probable that the Bolognese already knew and currently produced triumph decks. The boys wanted it and got it in the market.
In XV century, Bolognese University knew her last momentum. Since the end of the XII century, Bologna hosted the children of the European upper class to teach them laws. The wealthy young crowd was a steady source of business. To reproduce texts and codes, the Bolognese were forced to pioneer duplicative techniques. The organization of sheets called book seems a mid-XIII century Bolognese invention. A paper-mill facility was available as early as 1289. Since the first half of the XIV century wood cut techniques were employed.
...
It is obscure how the triumph deck and idea arrived to gambling Bologna.
The Italian documents we have makes scholars to assume that trionfi are a Milanese invention, datable around 1420-25. The bulk of the new game was the ruff – and the trumps organized in a fifth suit. The natural communication vehicle to Bologna may have been the Milanese court students. Moreover Milan occasionally took Bologna and held it for a few years.
We know nothing about early Milanese packs. The 1447-1450 Milanese political unrest and civil war destroyed the Milanese archives. Only splendid remains of celebrative court decks are left, dated about 1445. Lombard popular trionfi packs are hinted to by a Francesco Sforza’s letter dated 1450.
Zorli cites his sources when it comes to sources we all know, the documents from Ferrara. But it would be nice to know what "Italian documents" he is referring to in the second to last paragraph above (and also what he means by "ruff." The Italian version of the article (at
http://www.letarot.it/L%27Industria-Bol ... 8_ita.aspx) contains neither of the last two paragraphs just quoted).
It is these last two paragraphs that interest me in this post. In general I am in sympathy with them, although with a few reservations. I am not at all sure that the trumps were a fifth suit, as opposed to being the highest members of the other four. I have expanded on this point in my last few posts on the "Bologna" thread. And I didn't know that Francesco's letter implied the existence of Lombard trionfi packs. I'm not sure where Burdochio was when Francesco asked him to get the decks. Somehow I thought it was Florence. And a date of 1445 for the CY seems to me unlikely, given the presence of the Sforza "fountain" device, not only on the Queen, Female Knight, and Male Page of Staves but also on the Lover's cape (Kaplan Vol. 1 pp. 62, 89). Filippo and Francesco were enemies at the time.
It also seems to me that if Milan invented the tarot in the 1420's, and woodcut technology was massively in use there then (as Hind documents in his
History of Woodcut Vol. 1), the game would have caught on and spread to other cities far sooner than 1441, if the vehicle of propagation was university students. So its spread is more likely related to the times "Milan took Bologna," as Zorli puts it. I only know one such time, 1438; but perhaps he is thinking also of the time Piccinino took Bologna on his own initiative, in 1440.
Aside from these reservations, I think that Zorli's ideas in the last two paragraphs quoted above aren't bad. The idea of Milan's inventing the tarot much earlier than the 1440's is especially worth pursuing further, and also how specifically it would have gotten to Bologna.
First, what evidence is there for a pre-1438 invention of the game in Milan? I don't know what Zorli's is, other than unspecified "Italian documents," but I can see several bits myself--all inconclusive, of course, but nonetheless at least evidence.
(1) The close connection between the Michelino and what we see in the Cary-Yale: there are correspondences between cards, a Christianization of what was originally Greco-Roman, as well as the idea of two "good" suits and two "bad" suits, an idea found in tarot as well. I also see a similar conception of the role of trumps in the two games. That is, the trumps belonged to suits. For the Michelino, we know that particular trumps attached to particular suits, in groups of four, from Marziano's description of the game. A similar set of groupings attaches to the Cary-Yale, in a system that the Beinecke Library did not invent. The principle is that in the trick-taking part of the game, one must play in the suit led, even if the only card one has in that suit is a trump or a king, both perhaps thereby wasted. Since the Michelino was 1420-1425, the tarot could be any time after that.
(2) Part of the name "Martiano" in fact can be seen on the Star card, above the little king on the bottom, the idolator Nino. To be sure, Huck sees "Murad," a Muslim king, 1421-1444, something I still can't see there. Many people see "M u r." II at least see the letters "m a r t," as did Cicognara in 1831. See the thread "Who are the kings..." in the Unicorn Terrace.
(3) There is the correspondence noticed by mmfilesi between the red castle on the so-called "World" card and the red castle used by Filippo in the 1420's as his love nest with Bianca Maria's mother. This suggests an earlier version of the card that perhaps does not have the little man in the bottom of the boat, a detail that could have been added to decks done after the Piccinino incident that Trionfi writes about. That detail could have been added either by Filippo or by Sforza later, depending on when the CY was done. (A parenthetical remark: the "rearing horse" ducats on the Coins and other cards do not show that the CY must have been done for Filippo. For one thing, they are not precisely his ducats, as I pointed out earlier in this thread; for another, similar ducats were issued by Sforza in 1450, according to Andy Pollet's website; and in the third place, Sforza would have wanted to have something like Filippo's ducats on the cards for the same reason as he issued the real ducats, to emphasize the continuity between his regime and the former one. The presence of the "rearing horse" motif on the CY indicates only that that motif was not part of the Milan cards until after 1436, when those ducats were first issued.)
Now that I have mentioned a personal reference to Filippo, I should perhaps also comment on Ross's remark that Filippo didn't like clowns, the mention of death, or shame-posters. The issue of clowns has already been dealt with: the PMB Fool is no clown. As for death, we don't know what Filippo was like in the 1420's and early 1430's, whether he had that phobia when he was healthy. We also don't know that Filippo was so averse to the mention of death that he wouldn't have approved of a card about death in a deck for the women and children in his milieu. We don't know that Filippo was even involved when the Death card was made part of the deck; that might have been someone else's innovation, such as the Boromeos or some other branch of the Viscontis. As for the Hanged Man, we don't know if that was part of the deck early on. It is not one of the surviving CY cards.
(4) The 1428 marriage between Visconti and Savoy, reflected in the Love card, as well as the Chariot card, which suggests a triumphal entry into the male lover's city. I mention this primarily to emphasize that this 1428 event does not imply that the CY itself was done in 1428, but rather some other deck alluding to it, perhaps with a Love card without the Sforza fountain on the man's cape. The earlier card could have been done in 1428 as part of the wedding celebration, or it could have commemorated the wedding at a later anniversary, such as 1429, 1433, or 1438. If between 1430 and 1433, the fountain could have in fact been there, to acknowledge the betrothal of Francesco and Bianca as well as Filippo's own marriage.
(5) I have recently noticed that compared to clothing styles as shown in frescoes and sketches, the style of the CY and PMB is anachronistic, pointing back to an earlier era. One explanation might be that the decks copy decks made at that earlier time. This point to my knowledge has not been discussed before, so I will go into some detail.
First, notice the way the man's dress sticks out in front and in back, on the Lover card and two of the others; I give the Male Page of Cups and Male Page of Coins as other examples.
The Male Page of Batons is similar. The same practice is continued to a lesser degree in the PMB. I give the Page of Staves there, and for contrast the d'Este Page of Staves, whose clothing is not in this style at all.
If you look at frescoes from the two periods, the style exists in the 1430's but not by the mid-1440's. The sequence on the walls at Monza is a good example, because it was done by the same artists over a long period of time, from the early 1430's to the mid 1440's. (I am not talking about the vault, which was done much earlier.) Roettgen (
Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance, p. 167) says the Zavatarri may havestarted as early as 1430. The first scenes, at the top of the wall, show its central figures (in red, below) with the same sticking-out dress as in the CY.
It continues in the next scene, the figure in blue:
Later, in the dance and banquet scenes, the protusions are less pronounced.
From a certain point on, there are none at all.
We know when this part was done, because there is an inscription on the wall below this point with the year 1444 on it and a quatrain saying that "the Zavattari ornamented this chapel, except for the paintings on the upper part of the vaulted cupola" (Roettgen p. 167). There is one more row of frescoes below this inscription, probably done after the signing of a known contract dated 1445, according to Roettgen. The protrusions are lacking there, too.
Looking elsewhere in Roettgen's book, I found one other fresco series with male dress of this style, done 1435-1437, the Collegiate of the Castiglioni Olona. Here too in one scene we see the characteristic protrusion.
Finally, there are drawings by
Pisanello in the same style. Here is one, c. 1432 according to Syson and Thornton, from Ferrara or Mantua (
Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy, p. 170). In fact, because of this style, it was thought by some at one time that
Pisanello did the CY (see
http://rozcawley.typepad.com/autumn_cot ... _book.html).
Pisanello was in Pavia, 1424, doing Frescoes, and in Milan, c. 1440, doing medals; so it is not out of the question that he designed a proto-CY for Filippo. But the clothing in the Pavia frescoes could have been copied by anyone.
All this is evidence that predecessors to the CY existed by the early 1430's.
Now the question is, why didn't Milan's invention spread to other cities before 1438? Well, at that time it was mainly a game for women and children. University students played chess, at least when they were home. And why take the risk of introducing a new game that might fail? There needed to be some special impetus for a new market, such as extended stays by fwomen and children of the Milan nobility, through visits or marriages. Thus we have the betrothal of Donnina Visconti to Annibale Bentivoglio in 1438, followed by their marriage in Bologna, May 1441. We have Bianca Maria's 8 months in Ferrara, Sept 1440-April 1441. That's all I know about, but it's enough. Other occasions would be Piccinino's entries into Bologna in 1438 and 1440. he might have had decks to charm the ladies with and make presents of, especially if it was indeed him who was portrayed in the boat of some late CY-style "World" card.
That no such CY-style decks survived is not surprising, and not only because of the conflagration in Milan 1447. Maria of Savoy, one likely custodian, was antagonistic to the Sforza, considering herself to be the legal ruler of Milan. Decks that Bianca Maria took with her with Francesco could easily have been lost in these years of much travel. In Bologna, the destruction of Giovanni II Bentivoglio's palace would have also meant the destruction of any Visconti heirlooms from his mother.
The miracle would be if the CY itself survived from those pre-1450 years; I doubt such a miracle. My reasons have already been given. First, there is the style of the ducats, whose style conforms to Sforza's "rearing horse" ducats of 1450. That choice of design fits Sforza's general purpose of establishing continuity with the Visconti, as does, more ambiguously, the fountain device and the scenes on the Lover and Chariot cards. In addition, many of the females in the CY look to me like they could have been seen as a mature Bianca Maria, including perhaps an attendant to the Empress. Thus we again have the Sforza tie through her to the Visconti. making the Sforza line legitimate vassals of the Emperor. Thus there was every reason for Sforza to create a deck in the style of the Visconti; and the Bembo, loyal early on to Sforza, famous for their ability to work in anachronistic styles, and probably with sketches of older decks in their shop, were a perfect choice to carry out the assignment.
