As far as dating, besides the "vers 1460" of Depaulis, there is Phaeded here, who dates the deck to "right after the the 1478 Pazzi Conspiracy" (
viewtopic.php?p=20390#p20390) and Emilia Maggio, who dates it and the Catania to the "mid-1430s, to celebrate [Emperor] Sigismund's visit to Italy" ("New Insights into the So-Called Alessandro Sforza Deck",
The Playing Card, vol. 44, no. 4 (May-June 2016, p. 366). That is quite a range. 1460 is indeed in the middle between these extremes
Alain, in your essay as posted on Vitali's site and translated here by me, it seems to me that Dummett's and Depaulis's later thoughts on the order of triumphs in the ChVI should be included, as both theorists seem to have changed their minds after the 1980s
So to:
Michael Dummett looked at the Roman numerals written in ink on the top of the cards (except for the case of the Hanged Man) and partially trimmed: we can thus reconstitute an order of triumphs that seems close to the Bolognese tradition ..." [...] "Unless the tarot of Bologna was inspired by it" (1)
(1) Bibliography: Thierry Depaulis, Tarot, Jeu, Magie, [Tarot, Game, Magic], pp. 40 - 41 (Bibliothèque Nationale, 1984)
It seems to me important to add something such as the following:
However, Depaulis wrote this report before the publication of Dummett’s
Il Mondo e l’Angelo in 1993 and before Depaulis came upon a c. 1500 Florentine poem (called a strambotto) that gave an order closer to that of the TdChVI than that of Bologna (2) These events resulted in Depaulis's refinement of his position. He wrote in 2007:
“As Michael Dummett has pointed out, the Charles VI pack 'differs from the Bolognese order in that the virtues are ranked below the Chariot' (footnote:
Il Mondo e l’Angelo, p. 228, my translation), a feature which seems to be a Florentine hallmark. We have seen that the
Strambotti d'ogni sorte & sonetti alla bergamasca collection was very probably printed in Rome, a city which was highly dependent on Florence for its playing and tarot cards. We may add that the anonymous
Strambotti de triumphi is set in the Tuscan form (abababcc) (Footnote: A strambotto can follow one of three kinds of rime set: Tuscan (abababcc), Sicilian (abababab), or Romagnolo (ababccdd)).
All this invites us to specify a 'sub-order' which we may call 'Florentine', distinct
from the Bolognese order, of which the Rosenwald sheet and the Strambotti de triumphi, both dated c.1500, are good witnesses. That the Tarot de Charles
VI belongs to this 'Florentine' branch rather than to the Bolognese one is
now more obvious.” (2) (3)
(2) Bibliography: Thierry Depaulis, “"Early Italian Lists of Tarot Trumps",
The Playing Card, vol. 36 no. 1 (July-Sept. 2007), pp. 39-50, on pp. 45-46.
(3) For the strambotto’s order online see Ross Caldwell at
viewtopic.php?p=5295#p5295
For a comparison of various other orders that are similar, see Dummett,
Game of Tarot, 1980 p. 399, online at
viewtopic.php?p=19235#p19235
However Depaulis in 2007, following a suggestion by Ross Caldwell, reads the number on the TdChVI Chariot card as “x”, i.e. 10, rather than Depaulis’s earlier “ix” and Dummett's “viiij”, i.e. 9.
Given that the numbers were added considerably after the cards were made, probably after 1500, a conformity to Florentine usage does not show that the TdChVI is Florentine, but only that the numbers were probably added by someone who played the game in the Florentine manner.
Correction added Sept. 6, 2018 The last sentence above - "Given that the numbers were added considerably after the cards were made, probably after 1500, a conformity to Florentine usage does not show that the TdChVI is Florentine, but only that the numbers were probably added by someone who played the game in the Florentine manner" - should be disregarded, for reasons pointed out by Ross in posts following this one. In the first place, the "given that the numbers were added considerably after the cards were made" is only a probability, not a fact, and even then the word "considerably" should be changed to "somewhat". Secondly, the rest of the sentence is misleading, in that it might suggest that I am casting into doubt the attribution of the ChVI to Florence. That was not my intention, but only to say that the numbers in themselves are not enough to show Florentine origin for the deck (this much was said by Dummett in 1993, for which see below). They are one consideration out of others, I would say now.
That said, I want to add two references to the foregoing.
First, Depaulis's 2007 article is online at
http://www.academia.edu/30193559/Early_ ... 7_p._39-50.
Second, the full passage in Dummett's 1993 book was posted in Italian with my translation at
viewtopic.php?p=15160#p15160. I translated the quote from Dummett as "since the virtues are of lower rank than the Chariot...". Dummett's original wording was "in quanto le virtù sono di rango più basso del Carro". Both are substantially the same as Depaulis's "in that the virtues are ranked below the Chariot".