Thank you Robert, I am glad you enjoy the thread
I really hope that the Brera Museum will come up with a serious study of the deck. It was announced that it was going to be exhibited soon after being acquired, but this has not been the case. In the meantime, I cannot avoid speculating on these cards from time to time!

Nine of Cups
This card is obviously related to Greek mythology, since it represents a Triton. A passage by Pausanias (on theoi.com) could provide a possible explanation for the presence of a Triton in the suit of cups:

[At Tanagra in Boiotia] ... the Triton would waylay and lift all the cattle that were driven to the sea. He used even to attack small vessels, until the people of Tanagra set out for him a bowl of wine. They say that, attracted by the smell, he came at once, drank the wine, flung himself on the shore and slept, and that a man of Tanagra struck him on the neck with and axe and chopped off his head. For this reason the image has no head. And because they caught him drunk, it is supposed that it was Dionysos who killed him.

Four of Discs

On www.theoi.com, I found this passage about Selene:

SELENE was the Titan goddess of the moon. … [She] is described as a very beautiful goddess, with long wings and a golden diadem (Hom. Hymn. 32. 1, 7), and Aeschylus (Sept. 390) calls her the eye of night. ... In later times Selene was identified with Artemis, and the worship of the two became amalgamated (Callim. Hymn. in Dian. 114, 141 ; Soph. Oed. Tyr. 207 ; Plut. Sympos. l.c.; Catull. 34. 16; Serv. ad Aen. iv. 511, vi. 118). In works of art, however, the two divinities are usually distinguished; the face of Selene being more full and round, her figure less tall, and always clothed in a long robe; her veil forms an arch above her head, and above it there is the crescent.

The card looks more like a caricature than the portrait of “a very beautiful goddess”, but there are a few elements that have suggest to me the possibility of this interpretation:

* the golden diadem;
* the fact that the subject of the card definitely is “full and round”
* the disc she is holding, that could be taken as an allusion to the full moon (and possibly the other three discs symbolize the other three lunar phases).

I have not found many images of Selene. The attached one is interesting because it presents a disc instead of the far more common crescent.
Six of Discs

As for the Seven of Coins, there is a superficially obvious counterpart in classical mythology: On Hephaistos,/ Vulcanus. The attached image of Vulcano is a detail of a painting by Piero di Cosimo (1500 ca). Also here there is something that does not fit: Hephaistos is usually represented as middle-aged (and limp, and bearded).

Trump XVII Ipeo

During my research about Greek myths, I stumbled on the Titan Typhon / Typhoeus. The image on the right is an Etrurian fresco.
Also in this case, the identification is far from certain to say the least. The positive evidence is:

* The name of the Titan is sometimes rendered in Italian as “Tifeo” (in ancient Italian "Tipheo") which is not so distant from “Ipeo”.
* At least one author, though not a scholar (Luciano De Crescenzo), affirms that Typhoeus was represented with bat wings.
* Typhoeus was a Titan and Selene a Titaness: the figures in these two cards are the only ones who wear a triangular diadem.

On the negative side (omitting many other iconographic details):
* the meaning of the winged head at the top of the tree remains unexplained, as the reverent attitude of the supposed titan;
* the sequence of the trumps is composed by characters of Roman history (with exceptions at the beginning and the end of the sequence). A Greek mythical creature in this position would break this nice state of things.

marco wrote: Seven of Coins

The boy could represent Ganymedes. I cannot make sense of the “perch” connected to the base of the large cup that contains the seven discs, but a naked boy with an eagle and a cup reminds me of the myth of the shepherd who was kidnapped by Zeus in the form of an eagle and made to be the “cupbearer of the gods”.

I have a new proposal for the seven of discs.

Fulgentii Mythologicon ; II, IX Prometheus - “They say that Prometheus made man with mud, but his creature was without life and feelings. Minerva admired his work, and told him to ask her if among the riches of the gods he could find anything to help him in his work. He said he knew nothing of what was in heaven, and asked her to raise him to the gods, if that was possible. … She brought the craftsman to the sky, through the boundaries of the sevenfold disc(inter ora[s] septemplicis clypei). Then he saw that all heavenly things were alive thanks to a flaming soul. Secretly, he applied a rod to the wheel of the Sun, and stole fire, which, when applied to the breast of man, made the body alive. So they say he was tied and a vulture was eternally eating his liver. However, Nicagoras, in his book of Disthemithea, says that he was the first to build an idol and the vulture eating at his breast seems to symbolise hatred. And Petronius Arbiter writes:

The vulture penetrating to the liver,
pecking at the breast and inner bowels,
is not what frivolous poets say,
but grieve and the sad hatred of the heart.”

This interpretation would explain the sad attitude of the naked youth. The vulture is to be interpreted as the metaphor proposed by Petronius. The seven discs could correspond to the seven heavens (“clypeus” means both “sky” and “round brazen shield”).

For once, I am tempted to agree with Sofia Di Vincenzo, who writes that the youth is “adjusting the flame” “of a small circular stove”. “The stove … is none other than the container of the inner fires”. It would be interesting to know if this can really be a stove.

I'm really enjoying your speculations regarding the Sola Busca, Marco.

I have nothing to add at the moment, except to remind you about the Botticelli image of one of the temptations of Christ in the Sistine Chapel, which we talked about a few years ago at AT -
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.ph ... botticelli
(posts 10-14)

You made this comparative image -


There are some caveats though:
- the relevance of the name "Ipeo" remains unexplained
- the context: in Botticelli's fresco, he is clearly the Devil posing as a monk
- no evil-bird feet in the Sola Busca image
- there is no talking stick in Botticelli's image; instead, compositionally, Christ takes his place!

Nevertheless, that talking stick and especially those evil looking bat wings make the Sola Busca Ipeo seem somewhat diabolical.

../the winged cherub's head on the tree makes me think of Lucifer for some reason: I have in mind that lucifer (as the serpent of the fall) was portrayed sometimes as a serpent with a woman's head, sometimes as a cherub - but while I can find plenty of images of lucifer/satan as human headed serpent, I cannot find any as a cherub... so maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.

Ross wrote, about the comparison of the SB XVII "Ipeo" and the Botticelli image,

I have nothing to add at the moment, except to remind you about the Botticelli image of one of the temptations of Christ in the Sistine Chapel, which we talked about a few years ago at AT -
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.ph ... botticelli
(posts 10-14)

You made this comparative image -

There are some caveats though:
- the relevance of the name "Ipeo" remains unexplained
- the context: in Botticelli's fresco, he is clearly the Devil posing as a monk
- no evil-bird feet in the Sola Busca image
- there is no talking stick in Botticelli's image; instead, compositionally, Christ takes his place!

Nevertheless, that talking stick and especially those evil looking bat wings make the Sola Busca Ipeo seem somewhat diabolical.

I think Ross's suggestion is worth saying more about--and Steve's, too.

The connection between "Ipeo" and Botticelli's image is that "Ipeo" is "Typheo" minus the T, and Typheo was considered a Greek version of the Devil. The son of Tartarus and Gaia, he tries to put himself above Zeus, like Lucifer above God, and loses the subsequent battle. Usually Typhon was described as having snakes emanating from his body. For example, http://www.theoi.com/Gigante/Typhoeus.html has

Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses 28 (trans. Celoria) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"Typhon was the son of Ge (Earth), a deity monstrous because of his strength, and of outlandish appearance. There grew out of him numerous heads and hands and wings, while from his thighs came huge coils of snakes. He emitted all kinds of roars and nothing could resist his might."

The Minchiate Devil card has that feature, the snakes coming from his thighs, as well as wings (see e.g. http://a-tarot.eu/p/jan-11/viev/ronc-devil.jpg, posted by Bertrand recently). In the SB's Ipeo, the wings are his only devilish attribute, but perhaps that's all we need. In most respects, likewise, the SB figure does not resemble Typhon either.

It strikes me that the figure on the stick might be meant to be a Luciferian Selene. Her wings form a kind of crescent above her head. The Moon, as Hecate, was considered the goddess of witches, with their sabbaths at the full moon. Around his waist, Ipeo wears a medallion of eight discs. These could be the phases of the moon. So we have Typhon in service to Selene, like a devil in service to Lucifer.

But these SB figures are anybody's guess!

About the 2 of Batons, it seems to me that an obese older naked male would more likely have been associated with Dionysus's teacher and companion Silenus, than with either Dionysus or Priapus. In the context of c. 1500 Venice, the most well known one would have been Mantegna's engraving of "drunken Silenus," unbearded (http://mini-site.louvre.fr/mantegna/acc ... n_6_2.html), made into an engraving by Durer in 1494 (see http://www.oneonta.edu/faculty/farberas ... n_fig.html, one of the last two images).

(This last link has a good image--relating to the "Ipeo" card--of the female serpent next to the Tree, one by Hugo van der Gross, c. 1470.)

For me the difficulty is that the card has none of the suggestions of a Bacchanalian context that usually accompanied representations of Silenus: no satyrs, no grapes, no cups, no ivy wreaths. (If you do a Google Images search for Silenus, you will see what I mean.) But at some point "Silenus" must have become a standard designation for any older obese naked male, because in the Barcelona Picasso Museum there is his school-drawing of an obese unbearded older naked male with the title "Silenus." (I can't find it on the web--there is just Picasso's version of the Mantegna.) Whether that was so in the time of the SB I don't know.