Yes, Steve, excellent.(And also the images you posted.) My apologies for not citing your ATF comments earlier; I couldn't remember where they were.
However I am not convinced that the analysis applies to the foreground of the CY "World" card as well as to the background.
I have been reading more about how popular the Arthurian romances were in mid-century Italy, in Cecil Clough's "Chivalry and Magnificence in the Golden Age of the Italian Renaissance," (
Chivalry in the Renaissance, ed. Sydney Anglo, 1990). (The "Golden Age" for him goes from the Peace of Lodi to the French invasion.) Here are a couple of quote:
At least until the French invasions the courtiers of the condottieri princes tended to be their military captains, some of whom were from the powerful families of their state. Romances of chivalry were the literary diet for such rulers and their entourage at the dawn of the golden age... (p. 35)
Between 1447 and 1455 at the latest [in Mantua] Pisanello had worked on an enormous fresco cycle to cover the walls of one of the rooms of the Gonzaga Palace, a part of which was known as the Castello di San Giorgio, be it noted. The themes are Arthurian, the recovered portion concerning Tristram in particular. It is supposed that the room was to be furnished with a Round Table and that it reflected Marquis Ludovico's passion for chilvary, fed on the literature available in the Gonzaga Library. (p. 41)
It is known that Duke Filippo Visconti enjoyed "French romances" (Rabil, "Humanism in Milan," in
Renaissance Humanism Vol 1, p. 243). And there is the set of illustrations of a Grail romance done around the same time and place, in the same artistic style as the Cary-Yale.
Here is some more from Clough:
In princely courts there were genuine jousts witnessed by the public. At one such in the winter of 1450 held to commemorate Francesco Sforza becoming ruler of Milan, Federico da Montefeltro insisted on challenging a champion to joust in real armour and with a steel lance. With chivalric flamboyance Federico wore his visor up and sported the favour of his lady (who he probably had seduced under a blasted oak). The consequence, which Federico saw as Divine punishment, was the splintered bridge of his nose and the loss of his right eye, with which we are so familiar. Thereafter Federico himself did not participate, but such displays continued to be held in his state. (p. 44f)
...Borso d'Este had been genuinely dedicated to chivalric romances, but the interest of his brother, Ercole, who succeeded him in 1471, was in the cult of Antiquity.(p. 45)
The point is that the
condottiere princes of the beginning of the Golden Age found the Arthurian material to their taste and admired chivalric ideals. Their sons and younger brothers preferred antiquity and regarded chivalry as part of the dark ages, but still gave it lip service and used it to bolster their regimes.
In the Grail stories, the part about Sir Perceval's meeting with the Fisher King is so prominent that I can't imagine that anyone familiar with them wouldn't take the fisherman as the Fisher King and the knight on the other side as Perceval (or some other knight, in other versions). In Chretien's version, the Fisher King is in a boat with another man, and he invites Perceval to spend the night at the castle. On the card he's on the bank, and he sends someone to do the inviting, along with a rower, or it's himself at a later time. The particular arrangement on the CY might reflect some personal meaning attached to a particular occasion for which that deck was made. But the general theme of the grail knight and the Fisher King would have been the one most readily identified with this card in a CY-type deck generally, it seems to me.
One other thing: the lady in the CY card is holding a crown. That the crown was given to the monk who reached the top of the "ladder of virtue", as the object of Hope's desire, counts in favor of the view that this card would have been the last in the sequence, even though Fame was not the last in the Petrarchan sequence.