I'm sorry for misunderstanding; it's good to get that point cleared up. I had thought, on the other thread, that you were just presenting the 1510 idea as another possibility. I didn't realize you'd abandoned the 1461 idea, since you had argued so strongly for it before.Yes I'd changed mind ...
Huck wrote
I think you make too much of this. If the Goldschmidt pattern was still around, the Conte de Desana could just as well have gotten his emblem from the card as the other way around. Anyway, it is easy to put a crown on a dolphin. The similarity to the card is just one point among many, the others pointing to an earlier date.The research about the dolphin gave the result, that the Dauphine dolphin looked similar to the Goldschmidt dolphin, but the dolphin of the Conte de Desana looked more similar (a clear "crowned dolphin").
Huck wrote,
How secure is that? On the one hand, Wikipedia says of Rene II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9 ... f_Lorraine):Rene II had been in Italy himself at the begin of the 1480s, as leader in a military Venetian campaign (against Ferrara). It's more plausible, that he learned then about the game.
.He moved to Italy and defeated the Duke of Ferrara in the Battle of Adria as an ally of the Republic of Venice.
In 1480 René succeeded his grandfather as Duke of Bar while his mother was still living. In 1482 he conquered the prévôté of Virton, a part of the Duchy of Luxembourg, and annexed it to Bar.
On the other hand, Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Ferrara says, speaking of the Battle of Adria, which it says was in 1482:
No mention of Rene.Venetian troops led by the condottiero Roberto Sanseverino[3] attacked Ferrarese territory from the north, brutally sacking Adria, quickly overrunning Comacchio, attacking Argenta at the edge of the saltmarshes and besieging Ficarolo in May (capitulated 29 June) and Rovigo (capitulated 17 August).
But somebody posting on another site (no references) says, writing about Alfonso II of Naples (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/in ... rs.113428/):
The Battle of Campo Morte ended August 21, 1482. If Rene was also conquering part of Luxembourg that same year, he was pretty busy. And generally, wars need some preparation, usually by the person leading it.After Campo Morte he marched on Ferrara where the Venetian army under Sanseverino is under the walls. Alfonso is joined by Pitigliano leading the Florentine army and V Orsini leading the Papal army (the Pope has by now switched sides). Sanseverino abandons Ferrara and invaded Lombardy in order to support Bona of Savoy’s claims to the regency of Milan against Ludovico il Moro. Alfonso evades the Venetian army under Rene of Lorraine and ultimately invades Brescia, Bergamo and Verona forcing Sanseverino to pull back from Milan and Venice to make peace.
However another site, whose sketchiness does not inspire confidence, says Rene became Duke of Bar in 1483, not 1480 (http://www.hawaiilibrary.net/article/wh ... 20lorraine). The source given is "World Heritage Encyclopedia", no date. That seems to be an on-line encyclopedia of some sort, but I haven't figured out how to access it.
It might be that Rene I died in 1480, passing on Lorraine to his grandson then, but perhaps Rene didn't get Bar until his mother died in 1483. I can't figure it out, or find anything reliable about whether Rene was actually in Italy. We also do not know whether Venetians played tarot then.
Anyway, if Rene brought Triumphs to Bar by 1480-83, it seems plausible to me that they would have crossed the border into France, which wasn't far and spoke the same language. Bar was half French and half Imperial. Its Duke, e.g. Rene I or Rene II, was a "peer of France", according to Wikipedia.
I notice that Bar also has a dolphin on its coat of arms, less similar to the one on the Goldschmidt than either of the two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_ ... r_Arms.svg. It would be of interest to know how far back that dates.
Huck wrote,
"trionfi alla franciosa" suggests, at least as a strong possibility, that the triumphs were in the French style. It could mean the court cards and number cards, I suppose, but "trionfi" suggests mor naturally triumphs.The source says "Trionfi decks", not "Tarot decks", btw. And "alla franciosa" could mean a lot of things, for instance court cards with banderoles a la "Lancelot" or "Jeanne d'Arc", either something, which we already know from other old cards or something, what we never have seen and never would think of.
Huck wrote,
This is not a strong argument. Alfonso wasn't trying to make money from tarot-production, so there is no reason for competition in that sense. As far as ideological warfare, much of the Church was against cards in general. To have produced the new deck, increasingly popular, would not have strengthened Julius's position, in fact the contrary. Part of Julius's defamation of his predecessor was against his immorality. Cards for many in the Church, at least the Franciscans and Dominicans, were a form of immorality.Julius still was a foe of Alfonso and likely prepared already to attack Bologna (which he actually did in 1506). The production of Taraux in Avignon might have been a counter attack on Alfonso's production (Julius should have been still mighty enough in Avignon to cause that; just a sort of counter propaganda).
Huck wrote,
I have no idea how many. It just seems likely that there were some, at least among the nobility, and maybe a mass production after around 1500 or earlier. It depends on what "trionfi alla franciosa" were, among other things.Somehow you're fixed on the idea, that already a high number of French Trionfi existed before 1506.
Huck wrote,
We have no idea why some French scholars thought that in c. 1650. It might well have been that the tarot had, owing to the vagaries of royal taste, been more popular in the non-French border areas of France, such as Lorraine, than in France proper. Lorraine was part of the Holy Roman Empire and was in part German speaking. So German. There are also the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland. These are two places that had both French speakers and German speakers; so it was easy for news to come to Paris about card playing there. And if they weren't French, the next most likely possibility, based on language, was Germany.We've the French opinion in c. 1650, that Tarot had its origin in Germany. Where does this error come from? I guess, they looked at the cards, detected the emperor and concluded, that this must have been a German production. Who else should have made such cards? Well, we know, that the cards were made in Italy.
Anyway, we are talking about the early 16th century. In 1519, when Maximilian died, the French king even tried to become Emperor (I gave the reference earlier).
Another example: we have Emperor cards in the non-Imperial, even anti-imperial "Charles VI" deck, Florentine. There is nothing objectionable in having Emperor cards in non-imperial places. In the United States we still have Kings and Queens on our playing cards, even though we don't have kings and queens. We don't call them "British" decks, and have no inclination to make decks without Kings and Queens (some did, I suppose, after the Revolutionary War, but they weren't popular.)
There is absolutely no reason to assume that the French in the early 16th century had removed the Emperor card from their triumph decks, and every reason to think the contrary.
At the end of your post you quote 18th century figures about Minchiate and generalize to 15th-16th century production about triumphs. That seems to me an unwarranted generalization. Minchiate, at least the Italian kind, was not popular in France in the 18th century, but so what? It says nothing about the popularity and local production of tarot, then or at any other time.
It still seems to me that when Marcello wrote to Isabelle, he was assuming she already knew about regular triumphs and hence there was no need for explanation. Otherwise he would have said something like, have my messenger (whoever it was), explain the game to you. And if he talks of the Michelino deck as a "new kind of triumphs", that implies that the other was the "old", which she already knew about, from somewhere--if not Naples, although that is possible, then from people associated with courts elsewhere, such as Savoy or Provence. These nobles, and their ladies in waiting, did get around. For the 15th century, I repeat, I am only talking about the high nobility, the courts of dukes and kings in French-speaking places with some relationship to the French crown. I see no reason why this nobility's interest, probably not great, in a foreign card game should have survived in documents from that period, other than the two we have.