Jim Schulman wrote:Huck wrote:But the quality of the surviving deck let's one assume, that it very likely wasn't the one and only and "very fine" triumph deck for this wedding. .. so there's just the reason to assume a "later copy" ... perhaps. Or that it had been a celebration deck of a "lower level".
So, whatever the dates, the printed decks are probably copies of an earlier hand painted deck.
Is this common? Do more card makers have access to hand painted or other high quality decks for use as models. Much of the printing history seems to be of card makers copying/restoring/reimagining decks from damaged woodblocks or poorly preserved cards. The use of valuable, high quality past decks as models would act as a better preservative of early iconographies.
Maybe I don't understand your question.
Productions of either hand painted or printed decks have natural destinies. Either they were imitated or repeated by later productions and so influenced later developments or not.
Hand painted cards cards have the realistic chance to be "single decks", printed cards very likely have a much smaller chance to be "single decks".
Early findings of playing cards often enough don't allow much conclusions about the numbers of the really produced decks.
When I say, that the Tarot de Paris was likely from 1559, then I actually can only speak from the design of the coin suit. Actually somebody else much later might have composed the deck from different influences, and took only the coin suit from the deck of 1559, which naturally would make my conclusion foolish. In the case of Trionfi cards with style of 15th century we definitely know about later "forgery cases".
from "Tarot, Tarock, Tarocchi", Hoffmann, Dietrich, 1988
Likely a remake of 19th century according a technical research of 1955. The first is the falconer (Fool 1), the second was identified as "Queen of Cups". It's rather obvious, that the falconer is very similar to Kaplan I, Rosenthat Tarocchi, p. 99. The so-called queen-of-cups is very similar to the Star in the same deck.
So, if the analysis "c. 19th century" is true, what shall we take of this? If an artist copied just an older deck, then I could get information about a possibly 15th or 16th century deck from the forgery. However, If an artist in 19th century just got the fancy to make "historical cards of his own imagination", I might be rather fooled.
Now the Rosenthal Tarocchi is also "under suspicion" to be forgery, but if this is forgery, then also the Victoria-Albert (Kaplan 1, p. 100) and the von-Bartsch (Kaplan 1, p. 100) look also like forgery. That would a "little too much" and so I assume, that there was a "real old deck", which distributed these variations.
As the variations twice contain a motto of Isabella d'Este (ace of cups, "nec spes nec metu"), but also the Visconti viper of Milan (also twice), I would assume, that they belong to the moment, in which Isabella d'Este could take influence on Milan, and this was in 1512, hen Massimiliano Sforza was installed as new duke of Milan.
Well, that's a "working hypothesis", the whole deck family might be much later "forgery" or just "enthusiastic imitation" and "glorification of earlier times".
Similar to this the Tarot de Paris might be also insecure. And other datings and decks might have similar insecurities.