Debra wrote
My thought is this: If the dancing figure in the World is feminine divine mercy, wouldn't that be the Virgin Mary--she's the closest to a "goddess" in Christianity.
Now isn't that a thought. No Jesus, just Mary..
That is what Vitali suggests, as I recall, due to the lunette. But even he is careful to say that similar lunettes surrounded other figures, for example Venus in a wedding chest image he supplies.
Divine Mercy could also be Isis, who stood behind Osiris's throne to welcome those favored by her husband's favorable judgment; or any of the various goddesses who foregave sins. What might help in narrowing the possibilities, besides the lunette, is identifying the objects in her hands. Is that a Queen of Heaven's scepter in her left hand, or a magician's wand, for example, or both? And what about her right hand? Is that a sistrum from the Isis cult, a phial of some sort, a small sized wand, or what?
mmfilesi wrote,
Well, in the case of Tarot de Marseille I asume this premises:
1. The iconographic codes should be understood by the people. In a luxury deck (as PMB or tarot of the Medici), the artist can develop codes cults, for an intellectual elite. But a deck Tarot de Marseille should be understood by the common people.
2. A good way to understand the visual culture of ordinary people in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is the theater, the television of this time . Inside the theater there are some pieces of particular interest, such as morality plays. For example, I see the same christian discourse of the tarot in the Cortes de la Muerte of Lope de Vega.
This is as good a pace as any to argue against your pont 1. Iconography was characteristically polysemous, with many meanings in different frames of reference. There could be one easy to understand meaning for the people, and others for the erudite (humanists, courts), or the politically suppressed (e.g. alchemists, Kabbalists, Hermetics). In that way a deck not only sells to the masses, but perhaps gets patronage as well, from those who sponsor the erudite references.
I agree with point 2. But here is where polysemous imagery proliferates. I am thinking of Shakespeare, perhaps Cervantes. There were meanings for the "groundlings"--those too poor to buy a seat--another for those in the private boxes. Some plays even had two versions, a short one for the masses and a longer one for the court. There were also novellas, which assume literacy but not in more than one language. They are in the middle.
Commedia del Arte should be a late reference point if theatre is a model. It developed from plays for the courts, which in turn came from classical sources. The "Braggart Captain" is an example: he is already in Plautus, a play by that name, also called the Miles Gloriosus, the source for one of Aretino's plays in Italian.