What follows is my reply to Mike and Ross from the discussion here:
viewtopic.php?p=25887#p25887
I am still very doubtful of the wisdom of sharing what is still a work in progress, and even more so of attempting to present my findings in abbreviated form, without laying out all the evidence in full detail and in a properly argued manner. I fully expect everything I say here to be cursorily dismissed by many readers. But I also feel that Ross has a point—who knows when or even if I will ever find the time to present this material properly? So here it is, for what it's worth...
mikeh wrote: 19 Jun 2023, 13:11I need more persuading that the fad of Petrarch illustrations (in manuscripts and cassone) in Florence starting around 1440 shows anything about the game, except that the game's popularity, with cards associated by those familiar with them to Petrarch's poems, probably stimulated the demand for the illustrations.
This remark by Mike goes to the crux of what I've found, namely: evidence of mid-15th century illustrations of the six subjects of Petrarch's Trionfi poems which significantly resemble 15th century Trionfi cards, to a degree that makes it extremely likely that the latter were originally likewise intended as illustrations of those same subjects.
Among other things, the evidence from the illustrations strongly indicates that the female figure on the World card was originally intended as an anthropomorphic allegory of Eternity. She is female because the Latin and Italian words for Eternity are feminine, in the same way as the allegorical figures on the Love and Time cards are male because the corresponding Latin/Italian words are masculine. In other words, the World woman literally
was Eternity—in exactly the same way that the Old Man was Time.
As will be seen, however, this conclusion relies in part on a reconstruction of the evolution of the World card, arguing that the design from which all World cards are descended must have depicted a figure much like that on the Visconti di Modrone card (although probably showing the full figure, either standing, or sitting in such a pose that it could be mistaken for standing, and perhaps with the world below as a full circle rather than a half-circle). That alone will have to be an essay in itself, I fear...
The illustrations have also convinced me that the Visconti di Modrone "Chariot" card is the only surviving card that was ever intended to depict Chastity, and that all the other surviving "Chariot" cards were directly descended from earlier Fame cards, and had nothing to do with Chastity at all. In particular, both the Issy Chariot and the Visconti-Sforza Chariot—the only two to depict a female charioteer other than Visconti di Modrone's Chastity—must either have been consciously intended by their designers as depictions of Fame, or were closely based on earlier designs that were so intended (unlike later Chariot cards, where there is no longer any indication that their designers understood the subject as Fame, or anything other than simply a "Triumphal Chariot," as they no doubt called it). The Issy Chariot and the Visconti-Sforza Chariot are simply two different approaches to depicting the same subject (Fame), and both those approaches are attested in surviving manuscript illustrations of Petrarch's Triumph of Fame. Of the two, the Fame card from which the other Chariot cards are descended must have been much closer to the Issy than to the Visconti-Sforza, although with some significant differences.
(This means (among other things) that the Visconti di Modrone deck must have originally had two "Chariot" cards, one being the Chastity card that has survived, and the other a Fame card, now lost, which would have looked more like a conventional Chariot card. Most likely it resembled the one on the Cary Sheet but with a female charioteer.)
Thus we find, not surprisingly, that all six of Petrarch's Trionfi were originally depicted in the tarot deck by an entirely consistent series of anthropomorphic allegorical representations, all gendered according to the grammatical gender of their Latin and Italian names. This is just the kind of nice, neat set of trumps that one would expect from people influenced by the Marziano game, and rather more satisfyingly consistent than what later became the most common illustrative schema for Petrarch's Trionfi, in which five of the six were anthropomorphic allegories but Eternity was not.
(Note that I am not suggesting that the first proto-tarot deck had only six trumps. It almost certainly did not have 22 trumps, because it would have been designed to be a "Trionfi" deck, focused on those six Petrarchan subjects, and 16 other trumps would overwhelm them. But six trumps would have been too few for the game to work well, so it must have had more, probably something like the number in the Marziano deck, and that would have made the set somewhat less neat. As I have said elsewhere, I think that all seven virtues would have also been present, plus Judgment as a supplementary card for Eternity, for a trump suit of 14, the same length as the four regular suits, giving a sum total of 70 cards in the deck, as attested at the court of Ferrara later. That would certainly have been messier than just the six Trionfi personifications, but nevertheless still very neat compared with the hodgepodge of the 22-trump sequence that developed later.)
In that snippet from Mike that I quoted at the start of this post, there are two words that are almost like a red rag to a bull to me now: "the fad of Petrarch illustrations (in manuscripts and cassone)
in Florence starting around 1440".
In Florence! Tarot history has, I believe, been terribly hampered by an excessive focus on Florence in the art-historical studies of illustrations of Petrarch's Trionfi. The worst aspect of this is perhaps the widespread misconception—originating with the highly influential but nevertheless flawed
1902 survey of Petrarchan artwork by the prince d'Essling and Eugène Müntz—that a standard schema for illustrating the six Trionfi was established very early on and hardly changed thereafter, with virtually all illustrators adhering to it. The features of this schema include each Triumph being mounted on a chariot (with the temporary exception of Eternity), those chariots being pulled by specific creatures for each Triumph (horses for Love, unicorns for Chastity, etc.), and various other details. Essling/Müntz wrote of a "quasi unanimité", an "entente internationale entre les illustrateurs [...] presque dès le début" (p. 121).
Closer inspection, however, reveals that this "quasi unanimity" in fact only truly existed in Florence and in certain other sectors that were very heavily influenced by the Florentine tradition, such as the Trionfi editions printed in Venice. In those places, the artists did indeed conform with surprising strictness to the schema described by Essling and Müntz. Elsewhere, though, there was considerable variation. Illustrators in other places (in Italy and beyond) were admittedly often influenced to varying degrees by the Florentine schema—not surprisingly, given the huge amount of Petrarchan Trionfi artwork produced in 15th century Florence, and the cultural influence of the city at that time in general—but they rarely adhered to it strictly, and frequently diverged from it greatly. Moreover, in most cases, they do not seem to have developed their own separate, similarly strict schemas for Trionfi illustration, but instead continued to experiment with varying depictions. Milan is one of the best examples: I know of four illustrated manuscripts of the Trionfi produced in 15th century Milan, and only one of them adheres to the Florentine schema to any great extent. All four are quite different; one could almost believe that the Milanese illuminators never depicted the Trionfi the same way twice. Two of them were created apparently within a few years of each other by the same artist, the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum (the most important illuminator in Milan in the reign of Filippo Maria Visconti), yet they have relatively little in common. And both of them differ greatly from the Florentine schema.
This Essling/Müntz misconception is particularly pernicious for tarot history because, as Mike and others have noticed, the Florentine schema is quite unlike the images we see on the cards. Indeed, there is no real evidence to suggest that anyone in Florence was ever aware of any link between the Trionfi game and the poems by Petrarch. It's theoretically possible that some Florentines were aware of such a link, at some very early stage, but there is really no surviving evidence of it: The surviving Trionfi cards made in Florence and the surviving Petrarchan Trionfi illustrations made in Florence bear virtually no discernible relation to each other. It is thus entirely possible that the game of Trionfi and the trend for Trionfi illustration both arrived in Florence at around the same time but nevertheless independently, with most or even all Florentines unaware of any association between them.
So we need to get away from this blinkered focus on the standard Florentine illustrations of Petrarch's poem cycle, and look more at the illustrations made in other places (and also at those few illustrations from Florence that diverged from the standard schema). Here again, we are impeded by the usual approach of art historians, who love to focus on artworks that form consistent patterns and schemas, and give relatively little attention to those that don't exemplify those patterns and schemas. For us, it is precisely among the less orthodox Trionfi illustrations that we find what is most useful to us, yet they are much less likely to be reproduced or discussed in the books and essays written by art historians on the subject.
My current study goes a very long way away from Florence indeed: My findings are based mainly on illuminated manuscripts of the Trionfi poems from 16th century France. This may seem absurd at first, but bear in mind that all the French illustrations of the Trionfi at that time were based to a greater or lesser degree on Italian models (with the sole exception of one of the very earliest: an extremely French Triumph of Love in
Cod.gall. 14 at the Bavarian State Library).
One of those Italian-influenced French manuscripts (BnF ms.
Français 22541) contains a Fame that looks remarkably similar to the Visconti-Sforza Chariot card, providing us with the evidence that it was conceivable to depict Fame in that way. This Fame could well have been based heavily on some lost Italian image, since strong Italian influences are visible in the other Trionfi illustrations in that French manuscript.
The principal source for my research, however, is BnF ms.
Français 24461, a collection of images with short textual accompaniments, mostly of moralistic intent, produced by court official Jean Robertet and his son François in a series of stages between the 1490s and the early 16th century. Three of its six Trionfi illustrations, namely Love, Time, and Eternity, share a number of significantly unusual characteristics with early tarot cards, especially (but not only) the cards from the early Milanese tradition (which I take to include the Cary Sheet and also the
Queen of Cups and Old Man/Hermit cards in the BnF, which are stylistically close the Cary Sheet, as evidenced especially by the headgear of the Queen of Cups). The Trionfi illustrations, which are at the very beginning of the Robertet book, are directly followed by a Wheel of Fortune which likewise shares an exceptional number of features with the Wheels in the early tarot decks (although the Robertets have augmented the image by adding other very different features, primarily the figures of Fortune and Reason). I know of no other non-tarot image of the Wheel of Fortune that shares so many features with early tarot cards as this one, despite my best attempts to find one: I have now seen a very great many, but nothing quite like this.
Such are the similarities between these images and their tarot counterparts that it surprises me that this manuscript has not received more attention. The Eternity figure is particularly striking in its resemblance to the figure on the Visconti di Modrone World card—that caught my attention immediately when I saw it for the first time three years ago (a few months after I discovered this forum and developed a serious interest in this business) in Michael Hurst's
collection of Trionfi illustrations on wikipedia. Yet even Hurst doesn't seem to have remarked on it, although it provides support for
his (in my view correct) interpretation of the iconography of that World figure.
Perhaps this is simply because the manuscript was regarded as too foreign and too late to have any bearing on the creation of tarot in mid-15th century Italy. But a bit of research reveals that those Trionfi images in the Robertet manuscript must have been copied largely unchanged from a now-lost Italian manuscript that was brought to France (and which was evidently seen by others in France too, in addition to the Robertets and their artist). And there is evidence that this Italian manuscript, or one copy of it at least, was made no later than the mid-1440s. I need to do a little more research to find out exactly how solid that dating is, but what I have seen so far supports it.
The evidence does not give any indication of whether the Wheel of Fortune image was also in that Italian manuscript, but given the Wheel's position in the Robertet book and its resemblance to early tarot imagery (like the Trionfi that precede it), it seems highly likely that it would have been.
(It is also possible that the same Italian manuscript contained the Tarocchi di Mantegna images that the Robertets used for the next series of images in their book, but that is more conjectural, and of no real significance for the purposes of this discussion.)
Does the presence of a very tarot-like Wheel of Fortune next to the Trionfi in the Robertet manuscript mean that the Wheel must also have been present in the original proto-tarot? No, not necessarily. What the Robertet images tell us is that in the place in Italy where those images were first made, Love, Time, Eternity, and the Wheel of Fortune were sometimes depicted in much the same way as images we see on certain tarot cards from that era. The Wheel might have been present in a Petrarchan proto-tarot, but Français 24461 cannot be taken as evidence of that, and I am still very much inclined to doubt it, because the Wheel does not seem like a natural fit for a trump sequence based on Petrarch's Trionfi (unlike the Last Judgment, or the cardinal and theological virtues).
The Trionfi images copied by the Robertets from that lost Italian manuscript had their greatest impact on other Trionfi illustrators in France, rather than in their native Italy. But even in Italy, strong echoes of those images can be found in several Trionfi manuscripts, made in various places. It is also possible to trace the earlier Italian origins of some of the Trionfi images in the Robertet manuscript, which is to say, we can see how earlier Italian images of the Trionfi subjects contributed to the creation of the Robertet images. These Italian connections (both before and after the Robertet images) apply not only to the images of Eternity, Time, and Love which have apparent links to tarot cards, but also to the images of Fame, Death, and Chastity, which do not have any such links to tarot.
The fact that the latter three images do not resemble any tarot cards might prompt you to doubt the tarot connections of the other three. But as I noted above, the depiction of Petrarch's Trionfi in places outside Florence varied a great deal, notably in Milan in particular. So it ought not surprise us to find a set of Trionfi illustrations where three of the six images resemble the tarot depictions of their subjects while the other three do not. Moreover, in those other Italian manuscripts with Trionfi images that bear some resemblance to the Robertet images, none display the Robertet features in all six Trionfi; usually, they have one or two images that share some notable characteristics with the Robertet ones, and everything else is different. Generally speaking, we should not expect the same consistency in Trionfi illustrations outside Florence that we find in Florence, and we should certainly not expect the consistency that we find in tarot cards, which, by their nature as playing cards, were naturally highly conservative in their designs. There may, in fact, never have been any manuscript anywhere in which all six Trionfi illustrations looked like their tarot counterparts, even at the very place and time when the first proto-tarot deck was designed.
Are the similarities between early tarot cards and Français 24461 (and Français 22541) enough to put the Petrarchan provenance of the earliest tarot game beyond reasonable doubt? When taken together with the other evidence that I mentioned in my last post, especially the name of the game, I think the answer is yes. We were already halfway there; this takes us the rest of the way. I think we do finally have enough now to put this debate to rest. Nevertheless, I can understand if people still have doubts at this stage, given that I have not gone through and pointed out all the important details in the Robertet images that are also found on tarot cards (and it is not always obvious which ones are important, if you have not seen hundreds of other Trionfi illustrations for comparison). I have also not presented the evidence that those images were copied from an Italian manuscript from the 1440s. But that would unfortunately take more time than I have to spare at present.
Obviously several major modifications must have taken place to get tarot from that early Petrarchan game to the standard sequence which then spread far and wide. These include the radical reordering of Death and Time, the complete elimination of the Chastity card from the deck, and most important of all, the total loss of awareness in tarot players' minds of the connection between the game and the poems of Petrarch. Without that disconnection, we cannot easily explain things like the addition of the Sun, Moon, and Star to accompany the "World" (no longer known or identified as Eternity), the re-identification of Fame and Time as the "Triumphal Chariot" and the "Old Man"/"Hunchback" respectively, and the Florentine reversal of the top two trumps.