Phaeded: haeded: I do not remember seeing that fresco. If you showed it before, I apologize. Interesting. Earlier I had checked out the book you mentioned,
Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy, from the library and then forgot why I got it; we were discussing mostly something else then, Manfreda I think. Thanks for reminding me. Now I've read the relevant part, the essay by Harding on the fresco series. For anyone else who might be reading this, the people on either side of Venus are meant to be lovers. Venus was associated with adolescence. It is a "seven ages of man" correlation between planets and ages, as in Shakespeare's "seven ages of man" speech in
As you like it. On this theme, Harding says,
By the late Middle Ages the idea of the influence of the planets on the stages of life was common knowledge, and the seven-age scheme was the preferred pattern. Sears argues that a relatively small stock of pictorial forms and verses on the theme of the seven ages was combined and recombined in a highly creative manner.
So here we have Venus holding a mirror up to her face with her right hand, and the zodiac signs are superimposed on the stars, as in the manuscript. They appear on both sides of all the planets except the Sun and the Moon, which have none. Harding gives black and white pictures of all seven.
Harding observes
Certain elements in the representations of the planets, such as the eight-pointed stars behind some of the planets, appear only at the Palazzo della Ragione and this location.
Looking online at pictures of the series at the Palazzo, however, all I saw was one eight-pointed star, behind one of the figures, maybe Sol, since he had a crown (at
http://heavenastrolabe.net/about-the-st ... um-planum/). The one that seemed to be Venus (holding flowers) didn't have any (at
http://padovacultura.padovanet.it/homep ... kno_1.html). Perhaps you have pictures. I don't see much of a tradition here. The tradition seems to have been the connection between planets and stages of life. Perhaps you know of other examples. I will try to pursue Harding's footnotes, although it would not seem from what she says to suggest anything else.
As you show us, the Eremitani images were copied into manuscripts. According to Harding there were two, both during the 1430s and 1440s, the one in Modena that you showed and another at the Bodlian Library, Can. Misc. 554. The latter is "a general astronomical text by the Paduan doctor Prosdocimi de'Beldomandi". I have no information on their provenance.
So yes, you have a visual similarity in the requisite historical context, 1430s-40s manuscripts that might have been seen by the PMB artist, or sketched by someone else. If he had worked on the Schifanoia project (as his style indicates), he might have seen and copied sketches brought from Padua to show how the planets had been treated there. Perhaps indeed the PMB Star lady borrows visually from the Padua Venus, subtracting the other star, removing the mirror, putting the remaining star in her hand, removing the zodiac sign superimposed on the star. Perhaps her slight cleavage borrows from Venus, too (although not from there). Or perhaps it is meant to suggest breasts ready to nurse (on my hypothesis that it memorializes Elisabetta Maria Sforza).
Unless you have more information, these things seem to me to mean as little or as much as any other visual similarities in the specific historical situation of the time and place of the card.
I am not saying that the PMB Star card means Hope and nothing else, just that Hope is in its background as a card in a similar deck, probably substituting for it, and that the star there could be seen as a star of hope, that of the Star signifying Christ, just as it does more clearly in the BAR and the d'Este. But I suppose if the Moon lady can be associated with Diana (holding the bridle of temperance), so can the Star lady with Venus, to those who can identify the reference to a fresco series done in the territory of their current enemy. But the card can have more than one association, surely. It can be in more than one iconographic tradition, too, perhaps an icongraphic tradition of cards as opposed to frescoes.
Perhaps you have more to say on this subject, such as the significance of Venus in the sequence, followed by the Moon and the Sun, perhaps preceded by a Tower.
Hope, Faith, and Charity are consistent with an eschatological and/or soteriological meaning to the sequence of the three celestials. And the visual similarities I've pointed to run through all three of the cards. The Padua Sun and Moon aren't a bit like the PMB's. And as you say, the stars on the Venus fresco aren't even unique to her. All five star-like planets had them, and they seem to have represented not only the zodiacal constellations, but the planets themselves, in another guise; if not, the Sun and the Moon would have had at least one. But Venus is the only female among them. So does the card show Venus reaching for herself? (That's not an issue when she's holding a mirror.) In a sense, there is no problem: a goddess can reach for her planet. Or is it just a star, any star? I guess what I am missing is an answer to the question: what's point of her being Venus? Why does it matter whether it's Venus reaching for her namesake, as opposed to someone else reaching for a random star, or Venus reaching for some other star? Of course, if it's just meant as decoration, I suppose it doesn't have to matter. But I like to think that the designer had more of a plan than that, or at least that people would have thought he did; and I think there are grounds for thinking that he did and that at least some people, in a reflective moment, would have seen one there.
The antitypes under the Theologicals have nothing to do with the Magi that I know of. They are part of an independent and well-established tradition of the virtues. Something as important as the Theologicals can have more than one context of representation and more than one iconographic tradition.