7
by Ross G. R. Caldwell
It's easy to accept why the Second Coming of Christ would be the highest trump, but it's not so easy to understand why the card would be called the "World" when, in the Tarot de Marseille (and Vieville) form, there is no world in it.
I think the ambiguity of the figure may be deliberate, to stay shy of outright blasphemy. So I would not expect that any such "World" card ever showed him holding the Cross-flag, or with a crown of thorns, or the stigmata, etc.
I think there must have been a "missing link" between the Italian Mondo styles, such as on the Beaux-Arts and Rosenwald sheets, and the Tarot de Marseille. In the Italian cards, there is a wreath, presumably a laurel wreath, around the World. In the TdMs, the mandorla is a laurel wreath as well. The laurel obviously means "victory" and "triumph". My "missing link" would be that somebody took the figure from off the top of the world and put it IN the world. The "world" disappears and the figure takes its place, and the laurel is stretched to accomodate it - ending up as a mandorla or oval shape. It's possible there's no "missing link" and somebody just did it all at once. The result has an obvious resemblance to the glorified Christ, which is heightened even further by the addition of the Evangelists.
Note in the Anonymous Parisian that there are four winds blowing on the world - maybe the "four winds" were a stage of development into the four evangelists - or maybe just another variation. We know from Piscina that packs in Piedmont already in 1565 already had the Evangelists, which I think is the earliest attestation of the design. The next is from Spain, 1588, where "cards imported from France" had the Evangelists too. Piedmont probably used cards imported from France too, or a design influenced by them.
There is also the S-Series (of the pseudo-Mantegna) which shows the four Evangelists around a world - or rather, the whole Cosmos. This is probably late 15th century.
With the woman on the card instead of a man, we might think it is the "Bride", the New Jerusalem, and by extension the "New heaven and new earth" of the Apocalypse.
Personally I think that the absence of a depiction of the World in the Tarot de Marseille types argues for it being the result of some kind of evolution as I just outlined.