Re: Panegyric of Bruzio Visconti by Bartolomeo da Bologn

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mikeh wrote:Pudicitia is a concept that applies to both men and women. Whether later decks, such as the CVI, continue to represent Pudicitia with their chariot cards is not of concern. Concepts change. For example, there was a shift, in Florence, from feminine-oriented marriage chests to male-oriented ones. Instead of clones in the next generation, we get family resemblances. But the general structure of the deck does not change.
Even you can't possibly believe in this sex change explanation, with the supporting evidence of marriage chests somehow being male. There is no way the CVI Chariot - nor any subsequent chariot - has anything to do with Chastity. If Petrarch were the basis for that trump this does not happen.

Someone receiving the CVI - without knowledge of the CY, as was undoubtedly the case - would read the card below as Chastity...how?

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Lemme guess, our hero is using the halberd to fend off the advances of lewd women?

Re: Panegyric of Bruzio Visconti by Bartolomeo da Bologn

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Phaeded wrote: Someone receiving the CVI - without knowledge of the CY, as was undoubtedly the case - would read the card below as Chastity...how?

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I agree, that a change occurred, when the rider of the triumphal became male. It seems, that the Petrarca model influence on the card deck ceased with that. The 14 cards of PMB-1 are in agreement with the Petrarca model, the Charles VI changes the direction.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Panegyric of Bruzio Visconti by Bartolomeo da Bologn

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mikeh wrote:I agree that Chastity is less an issue in the PMB Chariot, as opposed to virtue generally (and likewise in the Florentine cards), but still see the winged white horses as those of Plato's Phaedrus, which propel the virtues in their courses, as opposed to some doubled Pegasus.
Except contemporary portrayals of Plato's charioteer were as winged himself, not by making the horses Pegasuses:
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Fulgentius and Dante explain why Pegasus was used:
The world of fame, myth, poetry and wisdom thus consecrated by Fulgentius with the image of Pegasus will be immensely successful in later ages…The great winged horse which is born out of the Gorgon’s blood, flies through the ether, and creates the clear spring of the Muses (the ‘Hippocene’) fuses elements too deep in Western culture and too dear to our imaginatinnto be easily forgotten….Pegasus’ wings will fly through the centuries….Giovanni del Virgilio, Bersuire, Boccacio, Holcot, Christine de Pisan, and the Ovide Moralise’ will follow Fulgentius in the fourteenth century. Dante will invoke the Muse as ‘Pegasean goddess’ and his commentators will quote Fulgentius: ‘O Pegasean goddess, giver of glory / To the inventive mind, and long life, / Which, with your help, it gives to cities and kingdoms’ (Paradiso XVIII.82-4, tr. C.H. Sisson)
Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, 1984: 43
That's precisely what the PMB chariot is doing - Bianca restoring the muses to beleaguered Milan - Pegasean goddess, giver of glory ...which, with your help, it gives to cities and kingdoms.

Phaeded
Last edited by Phaeded on 29 Nov 2016, 02:42, edited 1 time in total.

Re: Panegyric of Bruzio Visconti by Bartolomeo da Bologn

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Huck wrote: I agree, that a change occurred, when the rider of the triumphal became male. It seems, that the Petrarca model influence on the card deck ceased with that. The 14 cards of PMB-1 are in agreement with the Petrarca model, the Charles VI changes the direction.
The PMB has even less to do with Petrarch. Exactly how is a woman holding a scepter and orb, wearing a ducal crown, pulled by two Pegasuses, have anything to do with Chastity? There isn't a single attribute of Chastity below:

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Re: Panegyric of Bruzio Visconti by Bartolomeo da Bologn

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Phaeded wrote: The PMB has even less to do with Petrarch. Exactly how is a woman holding a scepter and orb, wearing a ducal crown, pulled by two Pegasuses, have anything to do with Chastity? There isn't a single attribute of Chastity below:

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The bride journey was a common reason for triumphal celebrations. Naturally the bride travelled on a chariot as the celebrated person. And naturally the bride was connected to chastity. A ducal crown doesn't change that.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Panegyric of Bruzio Visconti by Bartolomeo da Bologn

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Huck wrote: Naturally the bride traveled on a chariot as the celebrated person. And naturally the bride was connected to chastity. A ducal crown doesn't change that.
Actually Bianca traveled down the Po in a boat to her wedding in 1441, but all events, Bianca is not a bride in the PMB, which no one dates before 1450, not even you. To point out the OBVIOUS again, the matrimonial bed where a wedding needs to be consecrated, as we find in the CY, is completely absent in the same Love card in the PMB, because historical conditions have changed: Bianca has already given birth to two kids by 1450 and had been married for 9 freaking years. She is no bride.

But this whole subject is beyond stupid and I'm done with it, especially in light of all the subsequent male charioteers, who are not demonstrating their chasteness.

NO CHASTITY
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Re: Panegyric of Bruzio Visconti by Bartolomeo da Bologn

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Phaeded wrote:
Huck wrote: Naturally the bride traveled on a chariot as the celebrated person. And naturally the bride was connected to chastity. A ducal crown doesn't change that.
Actually Bianca traveled down the Po in a boat to her wedding in 1441, but all events, Bianca is not a bride in the PMB, which no one dates before 1450, not even you. To point out the OBVIOUS again, the matrimonial bed where a wedding needs to be consecrated, as we find in the CY, is completely absent in the same Love card in the PMB, because historical conditions have changed: Bianca has already given birth to two kids by 1450 and had been married for 9 freaking years. She is no bride.

But this whole subject is beyond stupid and I'm done with it, especially in light of all the subsequent male charioteers, who are not demonstrating their chasteness.
If other Trionfi decks (before the PMB) had included the trump series of the 6 Petrarca figures, the artist of PMB-1 would have simply followed suit. The 3 female charioteers, that we know, are all early. I thought, we study the origin of the Trionfi series, not its later developments.

Surely Bianca wasn't a bride in 1452. Nonetheless weddings belonged to the common triumphal moments and the Petrarca series had a chastity figure. In 1441, but also in 1452. The Sforza triumphs were Trionfi cards between other Trionfi cards. 1452 is early, but it is not the time for "earliest Trionfi cards".
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Panegyric of Bruzio Visconti by Bartolomeo da Bologn

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Phaeded: Two Pegasuses? You have not cited a single source for two such beasts. Of course artists are free to make up their own imagery, but Pegasus was a unique creation, tied to one birth-event with only one such horse. We've been over all this before, but I think the present discussion I can generalize to the CVI as well as the PMB.

The only place I know with chariots driven by two winged white horses is in the Plato's Phaedrus, the chariots of the gods and archetypes. I will give a few quotes from the Jowett translation on the Internet, so I don't have to type it out, even though it has some unfortunate wording (such as "through a glass dimly", which is not quite Plato's image). Since I am quoting without the context, I add some explanations in brackets. My emphasis.
...let the figure [of the soul] be composite-a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent,... In the revolution [of the heavens] she [the divine intelligence] beholds justice, and temperance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of generation or of relation, which men call existence, but knowledge absolute in existence absolute;
...
Few only [of the human charioteers[ retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly perceive. For there is no light of justice or temperance or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies of them: they are seen through a glass dimly...

The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory... Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved... And now they are at the spot and behold the flashing beauty of the beloved; which when the charioteer sees, his memory is carried to the true beauty, whom he beholds in company with Modesty like an image placed upon a holy pedestal.
And thereafter, for those who love in the Platonic sense:
After this their happiness depends upon their self-control; if the better elements of the mind which lead to order and philosophy prevail, then they pass their life here in happiness and harmony - masters of themselves and orderly - enslaving the vicious and emancipating the virtuous elements of the soul; and when the end comes, they are light and winged for flight...

It is easy to read the "they" here as meaning the virtuous charioteers themselves, rather than their horses. In fact that is how Ficino used the image (quoted by Frances Ames-Lewis in "Neoplatonism and the Visual Arts", Marcilio Ficino: his Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy, ed. Allen et al, p. 336):
Plato calls wings those [powers] by which the soul flies back to the heights whence it had descended...The soul can fly back with two powers, the contemplative and the moral...Plato means these two powers to be the soul's wings. [Footnote: Arthur Field, Origins of the Platonic Academy, pp. 181-82...).

So artists sculpting memorial images gave wings to the charioteer as images the soul of the virtuous deceased on his way to Elysium. Received opinion is that the image you showed is on the sculpture of a bust done to memorialize the death of one of Cosimo's sons, or maybe grandsons. Here is Wittkower's analysis ("A Symbol of Platonic Love in a Portrait Bust by Donatello", Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol. 1, No. 3, Jan., 1938):
Donatello's bust, conceived in the years of this first enthusiasm for Plato, can only be interpreted in a Platonic sense. It is inspired by the passage in Plato's Phaedrus [footnote: translated by Leonardo Bruni in 1423] in which winged genii on cars driving two horses with whips are described as symbols of the soul.
But there are no whips. Whips are for the soul in life, to tame the unruly horse. The cameo is of a funerary nature, showing the ascent of the soul after death.

In the tarot, the Chariot card is not among those after the Death card; it is in the company of the virtues. It is either the divine archetype of Pudicitia, seen by the soul before birth, or (if male) the Pudicitia-inspired charioteer in life (and with no whip because his unruly horse has been thoroughly tamed). There are two kinds of chariots: those with two white horses, representing the virtues, and those representing humans, with one white and one dark horse. It is fitting that the charioteer of the virtues, those with two white horses, be female. It is equally fitting that those of humans on earth be male, as Plato's unambiguously are. (No less than Leonardo Bruni had translated these passages, to the disapproval of some, and even he changed Plato by making Beauty female.)

Petrarch's second triumph is not that of Chastity, but Pudicitia, a virtue that applies to both sexes. The term can be translated as "sense of shame, aimed toward its avoidance", in other words, "honor". As a male in whom honor lives, the male charioteer is perfectly well suited to both Plato and Petrarch.

For female charioteers, the PMB and CY are not alone. There is also the Issy and the minchiate. That the Issy's charioteer is surrounded by four female attendants, seems to me to say that she is the Quintessence. And when art presented nude females, as we see in the minchiate version, they were acceptable and honorable to view primarily if they represented the ideal, and even then preferably if they showed a modicum of modesty (as Venus often did not).

The Sermones calls the chariot card "the little world". That is as opposed to "World, that is, the father", i.e. the cosmic world of the B order's card 21. It is the little world of honor, reputation, and even glory during one's lifetime, as opposed to the glory (earthly as well as heavenly) that transcends death. It seems to me that there are also two Petrarchan representatives of Time: the short time of a life that can be cut short at any time, and the cosmic time of the heavens. And two Eternities: the eternal round of the Wheel and the cessation of all change when Time itself has been overcome at the Last Judgment.

Re: Panegyric of Bruzio Visconti by Bartolomeo da Bologn

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mikeh wrote: For female charioteers, the PMB and CY are not alone. There is also the Issy and the minchiate. That the Issy's charioteer is surrounded by four female attendants, seems to me to say that she is the Quintessence. And when art presented nude females, as we see in the minchiate version, they were acceptable and honorable to view primarily if they represented the ideal, and even then preferably if they showed a modicum of modesty (as Venus often did not).
Yes, indeed, also the Minchiate, I forgot about it.

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http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/decks07/d05115/d05115.htm

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http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/decks07/d05113/d05113.htm

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http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/c ... id=3058908

... though the Rosenwald Tarocchi charioteer looks male

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The Ferrarese (?) chariot (Issy-de-moulineux)

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according ... http://www.3x7.org/en/2-the-chariots-journey/

The same webpage knows a similar Chariot of Faith by Finiguerra ...

Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: Panegyric of Bruzio Visconti by Bartolomeo da Bologn

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Huck and Mike,
You continue to cast your net far and wide, when the compelling evidence is the relationship of the CY to the PMB as products of the same medium and type - naibe a trionfi - from the same city, Milan. Everything else is of secondary consideration.

Nothing is winged in the CY chariot as it has nothing to do with Plato or the soul. The very earthly matter of a ruler's orb is held out by the page riding on the controlled horse. The very earthly matter of a marriage (with its implications of dynastic succession) has already been indicated in the CY Love card. The bride to be also shows such restraint with her chastity attribute, the jousting shield, which also has zero to do with the soul and everything to do with the value of the woman on the chariot (especially considering she was a bastard child). Again, the implications of power/rule/domain/succession are as important as the chaste nature of the bride; the CY card can in no way adequately be summed up as simply 'chastity'.

The PMB Chariot features a crowned woman holding a scepter and orb - the cumulative effect of the crown/scepter/orb does not connote the ascent of the soul or chastity - it is RULERSHIP.

The introduction of a pair of Pegasuses drawing a female ruler is an invention. It is not borrowed from Petrarch nor Plato (it is some humanist's invention, and in 1450-2 Milan that had to be Filelfo). That invention first needs to be grounded in terms of the CY and PMB trump cycles.

In the CY we have established the 'World' is the fame of someone (the knight below); Fama disappears in the PMB 'World' but not from the deck entirely. As I have already demonstrated above, Pegasus was a stand-in for fame (from Fulgentius to Dante to subsequent humanists), so it now appears in the Chariot. So the reference is not to Pegasus per se, but as a symbol of fame - Bianca's fame:
...Noble Bianca, who will soon give birth [i.e., written in 1450] and who is great in the glory of her virtue, does not turn deaf ears to our plight...O Bianca, daughter of prince Filippo - who alone surpassed in the magnificence of his legacy all other heroes both of our time and antiquity [i.e., the typical image of Fama surrounded by ancient heroes] - O Bianca, illustrious wife who most gently entreats her husband Sforza - Filippo's son-in-law and a man renowned for his glorious probity - O warrior maiden, celebrated with the honors of an unblemished life, will you not provide assistance to the deserving poet who has exalted you to the stars? [Filelfo is trying to get out of plague-ravaged Milan in 1450, eventually being allowed to travel to Cremona] (Filelfo, Odes, Book IV.1.50-65; tr. Robins, 2009: 223-225).
Fama has been transferred to Bianca in the Chariot (and of course Sforza is given his own due in the PMB Justice and Fortitude trumps), although she is present in the CY 'World' so its not like Fame had to preclude her there.
I've already pointed out Filelfo's interest in the symbol of Pegasus in having creating the Muses, whose names form the organization of the books of his Odes. Can you likewise point to a a Milanese humanist in Milan c. 1450 extolling Plato's Phaedrus? Historical context matters.

One other reason there may have been a pair of Pegasuses is that Sforza is consistently referred to as Apollo by Filelfo, which could liken Bianca to Aurora - and indeed in the Chariot trump she is clothed in gold with the radiant sun imprese on her dress, arriving to clear away the gloom of Milan along with her 'Apollo'-consort. The classical material that would have been mined by humanists:
Ovid (Met. ix. 420, Fast. iv. 373) calls her a daughter of Pallas. At the close of night she rose front the couch of her beloved Tithonus, and on a chariot drawn by the swift horses Lampus and Phaëton she ascended up to heaven from the river Oceanus, to announce the coming light of the sun to the gods as well as to mortals. (Hom. Od. v. 1, &c., xxiii. 244; Virg. Aen. iv. 129, Georg. i. 446; Hom. Hymn in Merc. 185; Theocrit. ii. 148, xiii. 11.)

Lycophron, Alexandra 16 ff (trans. Mair) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
"Eos was just soaring over the steep crag of Phegion (Phegium) on the swift wings of Pegasos (Pegasus), leaving in his bed by Kerne (Cerne) [a fabled island in the remote East] Tithonos (Tithonus)."
http://www.theoi.com/Titan/Eos.html
This convention of Pegasus-drawn Aurora survived into the 16th century, in Cartari's Imagini degli dei (Images of the Gods):
Cartari on Aurora: "Some of them...place a lighted torch in her hand, and give her a cart drawn by the winged horse, Pegasus....Homer, however, gives her not Pegasus, but two other horses...to sum up, everyone does as he pleases." (J. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, 1953: 291)

A lack of precision here, but certainly one can see how an invention of a chariot pulled by two Pegasuses - especially for an image that is not strictly Aurora but of a famed female ruler - could emerge out of the humanist reception of this mythic material. Ultimately the simple fact that the CY was drawn by two horses was a convention that was kept with the two Pegasuses. Pegasus itself had the additional meaning of fama throughout the Renaissance. Its hardly going out on a limb here to see the fame-aspect of Pegasus utilized in the PMB, which obviates the need to keep the horse singular.

Regardless of other female charioteers (and if anything the Issy one supports my point - a female ruler, with orb and sword, surrounded by ladies in waiting - nary an attribute of Chastity), the PMB charioteer undeniably proclaims rulership (that is the context - the contested taking of the Duchy of Milan) through her displayed attributes - crown/scepter/orb.

Sure, Bianca is chaste - and Filelfo constantly refers to Bianca as precisely that in his Odes (even in IV.1 that I quoted above), after the childbirths - but the PMB chariot nowhere demonstrates that it's concern is with Chastity. You have mapped Petrarch as the fundamental meaning of the CY card - ignoring the significance of the orb and the female's gesture (which no other known Chastity makes) - and then mapped again that identification onto the PMB in spite of the lack of a single attribute of chastity. Pet theory has trumped reading the card for what it is.

Phaeded

Added later: Does the similarity of the Issy 'chariot' make the CY Empress also Chastity? Actually the CY Empress holds the same jousting shield (having secondary chaste connotations) as the CY Chariot because Milan was an imperial fief, and what is principally being conveyed in the CY Chariot is dynastic marriage. Thanks for the confirming evidence of the Issy that the theme of the Chariot is RULERSHIP (at least consort, of a ruler), regardless of gender.
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