Catholic wrote: Of course, from such a small sample it is very risk to make assumptions of any kind. But the same would be truth for most of the Science of History.
If a scientist were to carry out an experiment with a sample of 4 (or 40!) out of a pool of 1,000,000, I wonder how reliable the research would be?
1)"Jos Bleau" creator of Tarot de Marseille, whoever he was, was a creative, original, artist that lived in France and produced his work around or a little before 1650. Someone must be the first to put a naked nynph like girl pouring water on the Star card. Does not matter much if he is Noblet or other person. The Cary Sheet, the nearest surviving relative, shows, as Pen instructed me, a boy. And the Tarot de Marseille as a whole is unlike its predecessors.
We don't know what the Cary Sheet is, it might be a "proto-Tarot de Marseille" or it might be a variation. It certainly gives witness to some of the iconography of the Tarot de Marseille being known sometime around 1500, the fact that the Star is included and incredibly similar to the Tarot de Marseille is rather astonishing. I'm not convinced it is a man on the Cary Sheet Star. It might be, it might not be. We have the Two Coins from the Sforza Castle cards, which seems very like a Tarot de Marseille card but we can not be certain, dated to 1499. I doubt seriously that the creator of the Jean Noblet tarot, Noblet or whomever, is the creator of the Tarot de Marseille pattern. It seems likely to me that the Marseille pattern dates probably to around or before 1500.
2)The Jean Noblet tarot did not included the bird. And it is at least 50 year older than any one that included it. So it is reasonable to suppose that the original "Jos Bleau" tarot did not included the bird, being a later addition.
This is where I disagree with you. As an example, look at the Noblet Chariot:
Notice that on the Noblet, the faces are missing from the charioteer's shoulders. Should we assume that the faces were added by the next person that copied his tarot? Or is it more likely that the pattern already existed, and this is an omission made by Noblet when he created his version? I think the second option is far more likely, especially since we find that virtually every other sample, whether a Tarot de Marseille I, Tarot de Marseille II, a Besançon or the Vieville... have the faces on the shoulders. So did Noblet make a mistake or did every other carmaker see the shoulders and think, "gee, some faces would look good there!"? The bird
might be another example of this. All we can say is that it is missing on the Noblet, but present on most other versions of the Tarot de Marseille. Why? Maybe he hated birds? (and faces on shoulders!).
3)Artisans sometimes traveled and changed shops, bringing knowledge from their original Masters. Besides, the XVII century was very unlike modern times. Me, my father and my son all have very different cultural references. But at time, cultural references changed much slower. It seems reasonable that card makers of France understood each other much better than we do.
Yes, there seems to have been a lot of travelling around, moving shop, mix and matching. If you start looking closely at as many TdMs as possible, you really notice this mixing and matching. Sometimes entire cards are replaced and a slightly different looking picture is substituted, other times, little changes happen. If you compare the Jean Payen and the Jean-Pierre Payen, there's even differences between the two of them and this is a case where I would say that the cardmakers
did know each others work!
4) Dodal (or whoever created the bird) had a reason to add it. It seems unlikely that he simply wasted ink to add an unimportant detail that would not improve his selling, if not for some artistic reason. It seems that reason would come from how he understood the card. Of course it could come from an "ink speck" or any other number of reasons. But, again, Historians reconstruct entire civilizations from a little more than accounting records and pottery. There is no point of discuss Tarot History without some educated guess.
"Dodal created the bird 50 years later. He had Noblet's card as a model." is just a much shorter version of what I just said. And, despite my obvious failure, I REALLY try to not write too much. lol
Am I being so far fetched?
A great hug,
And hugs back, really!
But yes, I do think you are being a little too far fetched. We don't know at all that Dodal created the bird, I think it is highly unlikely that he did. We don't know who added the bird, it might have been there from the very first Tarot de Marseille deck. Why did they add it? Maybe they liked how it looked? Maybe it reminded them of something they saw as a child? Maybe there was a popular story or saying about a "bird in the tree is better than..", ... we don't know. I do think it is treading into slightly dangerous territory to think that everything on the cards "means" something, or that there is a reason for every detail. And why Dodal? If we are looking for the earliest *
existing* instance, it would perhaps be better to award it to the François Chosson from (possibly) 1672.
I've stated several times now that it is likely that we are looking at copies of copies of copies, the existing decks are relatives, but most are not directly related to each other. They all share the DNA of an earlier version, and by comparing and contrasting them, we can, I think, gather some generalities of what the earlier Tarot de Marseille might have looked like. Thankfully, because of the incredible general similarities rather than differences, I think we already have a pretty good idea just by looking at the remaining members of the family. I won't keep on about this anymore, and it is, after all, simply my opinion.
It's great to have you here, I love your enthusiasm, and it's lovely to have someone who shares such a passion for these decks.
cheers,
robert