Re: Cary Sheet

15
If by "bride" you mean "Where is the third figure?", she isn't there. I imagine that the Cary Sheet shows a Love card more similar to the Visconti than to the Tarot de Marseille with its 3 figures on the card.

Remember, we don't know "what" the Cary Sheet is. It might be a prototype of the Tarot de Marseille (as Dummett has suggested), it might be a relative of the Tarot de Marseille (meaning it is a deck that mixes Tarot de Marseille and other iconography.. a pattern that is now lost), it might be a special one-off luxury deck. We simply don't know.

As time goes on, I'm leaning more and more to thinking that Dummett is right, and that it is a very early version of the Tarot de Marseille before the Tarot de Marseille that we know was standardised. But... we simply don't know.

Is there any other card you think more likely than the Lovers?

Re: Cary Sheet

16
1-I am agree that may be was an earlier deck before Vieville and Noblet and after the C.S.
2-You suggested the lovers card.
I only asked which card anyone suppose is it.
3- Reagrding the third figure,imaging that we only have one...
And we can t deal with this !!!
Or carry on with this,my dear friend...
The Universe is like a Mamushka.

Re: Cary Sheet

17
I'm not sure if we're seeing the same thing, Eugim, as after all, we need to imaginatively 'complete' the portion of the image we do not have, in this case the top part of the two figures.

Given, as has been mentioned, that we have other images of early cards that show two figures (such as the Visconti-types), and given that on the right of the card is a pair of legs adjacent which is the bottom of a dress, it seems sensible to assume that on the left is a woman and on the right a man.

In addition to the Visconti-Sforza or the very similar Cary-Yale shown above, also consider the 'Charles VI'/'Gringonneur' version, that shows couples close to one the other:

Image
Image
&
Image
association.tarotstudies.org

Re: Cary Sheet

18
OnePotato wrote:Here is the remaining portion of the tower within the context of the entire frame of the card.
There is plenty of room for whatever is going on.
The potential space left for the foreground is particularly interesting.

Image
Recently I've been wondering about the Cary Sheet Tower card. We only have about 20% of it and it is quite mysterious. How could the complete card have been? Why the cow / goat? Andrea Vitali wrote that The explanation is obvious: this is the destruction of the house of Job at the hands of the devil, who had permission from God to tempt the faith of Job in his Lord, destroying his house and animals. In fact, the Bible says: “The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep and the servants, and consumed them” (Job 1: 16); “Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house; and, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead” (Job 1: 18).

Vitali also proposes an illustration of the episode as a visual parallel (Bartolo di Fredi, 1367):
Image


But to me it seems strange that a tower can represent the house of Job (and I don't think that Job fits well at this point of the sequence, after Death).

Re: Cary Sheet

20
But there's also the matter of the little circles. I had always assumed it was hail, as in Apocalypse 16:21:
And great hail, like a talent, came down from heaven upon men: and men blasphemed God for the plague of the hail: because it was exceeding great.
But the hail there is preceded by earthquakes, and this tower looks undamaged, as far as we can tell. One possibility: it refers to an earlier verse of that chapter, where angels pour their "vials" of fire, blood, etc. But there are no farm animals mentioned in this chapter, or towers.

The section of Job that has the destruction of the house (by wind, however, not lightning) also speaks of "fire of heaven" coming down on the sheep of one of Job's sons, as Andrea quotes (1:16):
And while he was yet speaking, another came, and said: The fire of God fell from heaven, and striking the sheep and the servants, hath consumed them, and I alone have escaped to tell thee.
Such fire might be lightning but perhaps also meteors. It's like in the Lucas van Leyden painting of Lot and his Daughters, Andrea's fig. 5: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... A12932.jpg

The Vieville seems close to the scene of Job 1:16: a distraught man looks up at the sky, sheep grazing, lots of multicolored globes falling. No tower, just a tree; but there might be a tree in the Cary Sheet, on the left edge.
Image

So there's the assumption that the Vieville image is descended from the Cary Sheet image. But how does it fit into the sequence, allegorically? I have no problem with it. Allegorically, the theme is a this-worldly Purgatory, or upper part of Hades (in Plutarch's On the Face that Appears in the Moon, as I've said elsewhere), where materiality gets burned away from the soul so that it can be immortal (that point specifically is in Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris sect.16, on Isis's magic, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/R ... is*/A.html). This fits in with what Andrea says about the card, too, in that it relates to the sphere of fire around the earth. That's the sphere I identify with Purgatory or Upper Hades; the sphere below it, that of air, would be the main part of Hades. In Plutarch one can still get dragged down to Hades proper from the higher part, if one is not steadfast.

There had to be an exoteric meaning as well. So the Cary Sheet artist, and Vieville, too, use the scene from Job 1:16, where the material sources of Job's happiness are being taken away from him, literally burned away. It is a this-worldly visitation from the sphere of fire. Admittedly, the tower on the card doesn't fit the passage in Job, as much as we can see of it, even as illustrated in the German Bible. Perhaps it's on the card simply for easy recognition in the game which in other versions always had a tower, and the artist justified it by the house that in Job 1:18 gets hit next. Or it's an intentional combination of images from disparate sources done so as to appear mysterious, while still conveying the general idea of God-sent disaster.

It doesn't seem to work very well, but we can't see much of the card. And Job is probably too pure to be a good example for the ordinary person. "Fire from heaven" is also in Revelation and a lot of other sources as well, even non-Biblical ones (e.g. Virgil's Aeneid, Euripides' Bacchai, the Aesclepius, and the recent history of Milan, with its destruction of the Visconti palace followed by Rev. 16-like starvation and plague). So the Milan-descended tarot, except for Vieville, keeps the globes--of fire, hail, or whatever--and the same allegorical meaning, but makes the scene more generic, not tied to Job, as indeed Andrea says, too, about the card generally.

Thanks for bringing up this interesting Cary Sheet card, with its various problems, Marco.