I made a comparison of Dummett 1993 (
Il Mondo e L'Angelo and Kaplan 1986 (vol. 2) regarding the various surviving decks of Milanese/Lombard hand-painted cards. Dummett lists 21 decks for Milano (not 25 as I previously said), of which two are late 19th or sometime in the 20th century). Kaplan has 15 decks, but includes all but two of the others in the category "other hand-painted cards". Of the two Kaplan does not mention, one is a group of two 20th century forged cards (number 21), the other (number 15) a group of five PMB-type cards that surfaced at an exhibition at the Estense Castle in 1987 Ferrara (catalog edited by Berti and Vitali). Here are the details, with some explanation of Dummett's reasoning for including them as he has them, and Kaplan when it is different.
Dummett's numbers 1, 2, and 3 of the Milanese hand-painted cards Cary-Yale, Brera-Brambilla, PMB) Milan are included in Kaplan vol. 2 as numbers 1,3, and 2 respectively. As regards the authenticity of these cards as 15th century decks and their belonging to three distinct decks of Milanese origin, I don't think I need to repeat what Dummett or Kaplan say.
(For me the main issue is whether the Brera-Brambilla is really a tarot as opposed to an Imperator deck, given that its extant only trumps are the Emperor and the Wheel, with its men on it in various relationships to rulership. And there is to be sure the question of whether to include Marziano's game, a matter of definition.)
Dummett's number 4 is the "Tozzi" pack, 13 cards, both triumphs and suit cards. Equals Kaplan number 6, "Von Bartsch".
Dummett's number 5 is the Fournier group, 5 cards, just one triumph, an Emperor. It corresponds to Kaplan's number 7, who gives it 6 cards. Even though Kaplan does say (vol. 1 p. 103) that the Popess is from a different set, because its back is red while the rest of the Fournier backs are black, he groups it with the others. Dummett calls this an error on Kaplan's part. Dummett puts this Popess in his group 7; for his reasoning, see my discussion of that group. Dummett thinks that his numbers 4 and 5 are from the same pack. as the dimensions and style are similar, both have black backs, and there is no duplication of cards.
(How do we know that group 5 is from a tarot and not an Imperator deck? Answer: Even without assuming it is of the same deck as Dummett's 4, the "a bon droit" on the 2 of Coins indicates too late a date, because the earlier cards all have "a bon droyt".)
Dummett's number 6 is the Victoria and Albert, 4 cards, Kaplan's number 8.
Dummett's number 7, 2 cards, is the Fournier Popess plus the Page of Batons of Kaplan/Marzoli. Corresponds to Kaplan's number 13, 1 card. Both are the same size, style, and have red backs, whereas the rest of the Fournier have black backs.
(So we see here one way of associating a suit card with a tarot deck: if it looks like it belongs with a triumph in some other collection.)
Dummett's number 8 is what Kaplan calls the "Benomi", his number 10, 4 cards, including 2 triumphs.
Dummett's number 9 is that of the Pages of Swords and Coins of the Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum of Hannover. It is not necessarily a tarot pack. In vol. 1 p. 108, in the chapter on "other early hand-painted cards", Kaplan shows pictures of these two cards and says that they are of the Kestner Museum of Hannover, which is perhaps the same as the other.
Dummett's number 10 is Warsaw/Patocki, a Queen of Cups and a Knight of Coins. Dummett p. 60 says that the presence of a Queen suggests the probability that it is from a tarot deck. Kaplan does not consider these as "Visconti-Sforza"; he lists them under "other early hand-painted cards", vol. 1 p. 109.
Dummett's number 11 is two of the Guildhall cards, the pair that is wider than the other two. One is an Ace of Cups similar to the Victoria and Albert Ace of Cups (group 6). The other is either an Ace of Swords or a Sun. These two cards correspond in Kaplan to two of three Guildhall cards listed under "other early handed painted cards", p. 111.
(Why Kaplan considers one Ace of Cups as "Visconti-Sforza" and the other as "other" he does not explain; they look very similar. I assume it has to do with the decks he groups them with.)
Dummett's number 12 is the other two Guildhall cards, narrower in width than the other two (66 vs. 72 mm.). One is a "very true" copy of the PMB World, the other would appear to be a Page of Batons. Kaplan groups the World card as from a "Visconti-Sforza" deck, Kaplan's number 11, and the Page of Batons with the cards of Dummett's group 11. Dummett says that Kaplan is mistaken in his grouping, owing to the differences in widths.
(This difference is indeed apparent on the cards in Kaplan's pictures, vol. 1 p. 111, of the three he calls "other" as opposed to "Visconti-Sforza". He does not appear to have noticed this fact.)
Dummett's number 13 is the Andreolotti card, a Page of Coins. It is classified as tarot because it is a copy of the corresponding PMB card. Its dimensions are within 1 mm. of those of group 12, Dummett says. This is Kaplan's group 12.
Dummett's number 14 is Biedack/Kaplan King of Cups, similar to the "Tozzi" king of Cups (group 4). This is Kaplan's group 14.
Dummett's number 15 are the Cocchi cards of the exhibition at the Estense Castle: Love, Sun, Page and 5 of Coins, and the 2 of Cups, all copies of the corresponding PMB cards. This group does not seem to be listed by Kaplan, probably because it wasn't publicized anywhere until Berti and Vitali's exhibition in Ferrara of 1987.
Dummett's number 16 is four cards of an anonymous collection, 2 triumph and 2 suit cards. They correspond to Kaplan's number 9, "Lombardy II". Three are poor copies of the PMB, plus a Death that is similar to the V & A (group 6).
Dummett's number 17 is from another anonymous collection, a copy of the PMB Page of Coins. It corresponds to Kaplan's number 15, his "Lombardy III".
Dummett's number 18 is the nine Goldschmidt cards, which Kaplan classifies under "other hand-painted cards". One is an Ace of Cups similar to the Guildhall (group 11) and Victoria Albert (group 6), another is an Ace of Swords similar to the Guildhall Ace of Sword/Sun. Another is a Sun similar to that same Guildhall card. The others are harder to identify. One might wonder if it was really a tarot deck, as opposed to a regular deck with odd figure cards. But the dimensions, some of the backgrounds, and a stave of the Goldschmidts correspond to that on the narrower Guildhall card (Dummet's number 12). Since the other Guildhall is a World, it follows that the Goldschmidt is also from a tarot deck, he says. Moreover, the iconography of some of the other Goldschmidt's is similar to that of the wider Guildhall (D's number 11), lending more credence to that deck as a tarot. (Dummett gives these arguments on pp. 71-72, where he concludes:
È pertanto plausibile congetturare che le carte Goldschmidt (18), la coppia Guildhall più stretta (12) e forse anche il Fante di Denari Andreoletti (13) provengano tutte da uno [72]stesso mazzo di tarocchi fortemente atipico 31.
______________
31. R. Decker, nell’articolo ‘Early Tarots: Copies and Counterparts’, Journal of the Playing-Card Society, Voi. IX, 1980, pp. 24-31, fece indipendentemente la stessa congettura.
(It is therefore plausible to conjecture that the Goldschmidt cards (18), the narrower Guildhall pair (12) and perhaps also the Andreoletti Jack of Coins (13) all come from one and the same strongly atypical tarot deck 31.
_______________________
31. R. Decker, in the article 'Early Tarots: Copies and Counterparts', Journal of the Playing-Card Society, Vol. IX, 1980, pp. 24-31, independently made the same conjecture.)
I would also think that group 11 is strengthened as a tarot. However a key part of Dummett's reasoning is that group 12's World card really belongs with the other n that group. It is a lot to pin on dimensions alone. Dummett's discussion of the Goldschmidt and related groups is really interesting and begs for more discussion.
Dummett's number 19 is the 23 cards that Kaplan calls "Lombardy I" and constitute his group 4. They are all copies of the corresponding PMB cards, in fact exactly to the figures and triumphs of the group now owned by the Morgan Library. Dummett says that they may safely be considered 19th of 20th century copies of those cards, possibly copied in the period immediately before the Morgan Library purchased the originals in 1911, at a time when they had been out of the hands of their former owner since 1903.
Dummett's number 20 are the 23 cards that Kaplan calls "Rosenthal", his number 5, known only from photographs. Kaplan says they were in the possession of a collector named "Rosenthal" at least until 1939, when they were shown to another collector who declined to purchase them because of doubts of their authenticity. Dummett, says that Albi Rosenthal an Oxford antiquarian, reports that his father in the 1920s sold some hand painted Italian cards to a Swiss collector named Hardt, but has no idea where the cards are. Also, he had been shown some other cards in his office that were clearly false. The photographs (Kaplan vol. 1 p. 99) are nonetheless of interest; some of the cards resemble PMB cards and others more the Goldschmidt. Guildhall, Fournier, and Stozzi, but "are clearly different from the ones we have described so far", Dummett says. The Ace of Coins has a Cardinal's portrait in a circle on the card, quite unlike anything in any other deck. Dummett speculates that this was the forger's attempt to pretend that the deck is one recounted by Cicognara, since lost, as painted for Cardinal Ansconio Sforza. However the chronicle that Cicognara cited in evidence has no record of any tarot painted for the Cardinal or any reference to the alleged painter, one Antonio Cicognara. (These issues are also discussed in
The Game of Tarot, end of chapter 4.
Dummett's number 21 is two cards at the Leinfelden Spielkarten-Museum, one a Falconer, another the Queen of Cups. They are "sicuramente dei falsi", definite forgeries. The Doemer Institute of Monaco showed the chemistry of the paint to be fairly recent. The Falconer resembles that of the Falconer of group 20. Assuming that the card was not a forgers' invention, he speculates that the Falconer may correspond to the Magician.
(To me the Falconer fits in with the Page of Batons of Dummett's group. Perhaps both are variations on a "falconer" deck of normal cards.)
So there you have it, Dummett's 21 vs. Kaplan's 15. The main difference is Kaplan's distinction between "Visconti-Sforza" vs. "other early hand-painted cards".
In "other" we have:
Dummett's group 9, classified under "other" as the Kestner cards.
Dummett's group 10, classified under "other" as the Warsaw cards.
Dummett's group 11, the Guildhall cards Kaplan classifies under "other".
Dummett's group 18, the Goldschmidt cards.
Also Dummett has a couple of groups not in Kaplan at all:
Dummett's group 15, the Cocchi cards.
Dummett's group 21, the two Leinfelden forgeries of non-standard cards.
And Kaplan has one group not in Dummett namely: the Fournier Popess card; even though he groups it with the other Fournier cards, it is clearly for him from a different pack (or "set", as he calls it).
I hope you can see some of how Dummett deals with suit cards. It is mainly by the dimensions of the cards and the color of the backs, but also partly style, and in one case the presence of a Queen. Queens were often not included in regular decks, he says, although it was not unknown.
Whether there are indeed two Lombard groups, Visconti-Sforza vs. non-standard, is another question. As you can see, there is some overlap, especially if the two Guildhall narrower cards really are from the same deck. I will return to this issue shortly.
An interesting question is: how many PMB clones were there, i.e. tarot decks that closely resemble the PMB, not counting the PMB itself and done in the 15th or 16th centuries? If we start with Kaplan's number, 15, subtract the first 3 (CY, BB, PMB). then the Lombardy I (Dummett's group 19), and the Rosenthal (Dummett's 20), the first clearly a modern copy, the other probably), we are at 10. Kaplan's 6 (his Von Barsch; Dummett's 4, his Stozzi) and 7 (Fournier minus Popess; Dummett's 5) are probably from the same deck, so 9. But we have to add Dummett's number 15, the Cocci, not known by Kaplan in 1986. So probably 10 "PMB clones", of which 4 are represented by only one card, a court.
10 will be an underestimate if it turns out that the backs of Dummett's numbers 4 and 5 do not match (4, unfortunately, is inaccessible and known only by reliable but incomplete description). Another possibility is that three of the groups are actually from the same deck. Here again is Dummett pp. 71-72 (never mind his reasoning):
It is therefore plausible to conjecture that the Goldschmidt cards (18), the narrower Guildhall pair (12) and perhaps also the Andreoletti Jack of Coins (13) all come from one and the same strongly atypical tarot deck (31).
Since 12 and 13 are both "Visconti-Sforza" in Kaplan's sense, that would reduce the number of decks by one again, down to 9. It seems to me that one way of testing this "xonjecture" would be to turn the cards over and look at the backs, as none of Dummett's 18, 12, and 13 are listed as inaccessible. If that was done, neither Kaplan nor Dummett has recorded the result that I can find. Perhaps I have missed something, or it is in somebody's article somewhere.
To have made such an observation is important, because there is a more serious consequence, if (18) (12) and (13) are possibly all from the same deck. The Goldschmidt nine cards reflect a paradigmatic "other early hand-painted deck". Kaplan's distinction between the two types, "Visconti-Sforza" vs. "other Milanese hand painted decks" has utterly broken down, at least for decks that are like either the PMB or the Goldschmidt or both (or like the Cary-Yale but not the PMB, a possibility I will consider in a moment). That is probably why Dummett does not use Kaplan's distinction. So we are back to Dummett's 15 probably authentic groups after the 3 oldest decks are excluded. And since the 19th-20th century copies have really distinctive cards, it is possible they are copies from some deck since lost. So there are possibly 2 more (still not counting Dummett's "Lombardy I', which are most likely modern copies of PMB cards, unless there has been an astounding coincidence).
Finally, I quibble with Dummett on a few points. He says that the Guildhall World and Page of Batons "probably" are of the same deck, because the are of the same time, place, size and (perhaps, although no one seems to have turned over the cards) color on their backs (colored images of the fronts are at
http://www.wopc.co.uk/tarot/index.html; unfortunately the web-poster has trimmed the three images, in comparison to what is in Kaplan, so that the differnce in borders is obscured). But this assimilation is not certain. The Guildhall World, as Kaplan shows it, has no border (unless of course he has trimmed it!); the Guildhall Page of Batons' border is quite in keeping with the wider Guildhall cards' borders.
Also, the World image is a very close copy of the PMB card. The Guildhall archer (presumed a Page of Batons by the club in back of him) does not resemble any known card. So it seems to me that, following Kaplan here, there is some evidence for not putting these together as from the same deck, and therefore should be listed separately, although not definitely one way or the other, following Dummett's practice in other cases, at least until someone turns over the cards. So we have another possible deck to add to our collection, for a possible 18 total incomplete Milanese decks that follow in the footsteps of the PMB. The actual number of such incomplete decks of which some trace remains is somewhere between 9 and 18, if we agree with Dummett's reasoning. It is possible that this indeterminacy will decrease in the future, but I doubt if it will by much.
So it is really important to know what color the backs of the Guildhall cards are. I don't want to email them if it is something known already. Probably they are all the same color, and the same color as the Goldschmidt, or else Dummett wouldn't say what he does. If so, it won't settle anything. But if the right ones are different, it will. The Goldschmidt, according to Detlev Hoffmann, are dark "Karmin", i.e. dark red (quoted at
http://trionfi.com/0/c/50/). I so far find nothing about the color of the Guildhall backs. I have looked at all of Dummett's references for these and the Goldschmdt cards (only three, two 1988 articles by Shephard on the Goldschmidt and one by Decker on many early decks) and see nothing about the backs.
A second thing is about the Goldschmidt in relation to the Guildhall. The Goldschmidts have very narrow borders, at least as pictured by Kaplan (and Shephard, in his
Playing Card articles), as opposed to the wide borders of the archer he hypothesizes as from the same deck. That would seem to make them a different deck, unless, of course the Goldshmidts have been trimmed (but not the Guildhall World).But then they wouldn't all be the same width, as they now are (66 mm.). Similarly, the Guildhall World has a narrow dark borer, while the Goldscmidt's, while narrow, are light. How could all these be from the same deck. This issue of borders also crops up with the von Bartsch/Tozzo cards, too; the Tmpernace has a narrow dark border, the Page of Cups a wide light border. In general, none of the experts pay any attention to the borders, although some pay great attention to the width. I don't understand why one and not the other.
A third thing I question Dummett on is his assertion that all the later decks do stem from the PMB and not either of the other two oldest decks. He says (p. 54):
Questi tre mazzi più antichi non esauriscono le carte dipinte a mano per la corte di Milano o almeno ad essa collegate. Molte delle altre hanno in comune un tratto interessante: alcune o tutte le carte sono copie, a volte esatte, a volte con volute
variazioni, delle carte corrispondenti del mazzo Visconti-Sforza — comprese, a volte, le carte del secondo artista. Era sempre questo mazzo ad essere copiato, mai gli altri due, probabilmente dipinti per Filippo Maria. A causa di questa consuetudine, si può affermare che il mazzo Visconti-Sforza ha costituito un modello standard per i tarocchi dipinti a mano di origine milanese.
(These three oldest packs do not cover all the cards painted by hand for the court of Milan, or at least related to it. Many of the others have an interesting trait in common: some or all of the cards are copies, sometimes accurate, sometimes with unintended variations, of matching cards in the Visconti-Sforza deck - including, at times, the cards of the second artist. It was always this deck to be copied, never the other two, probably painted for Filippo Maria. Because of this custom, we can say that the Visconti-Sforza deck formed a standard model for the hand-painted tarot cards originally from Milan.)
But the Warsaw Queen of Coins (below) has a second person on the card, a girl, on our right, and so is more likely derived from the Cary-Yale (
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/515802963542471154/) than the PMB (
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/515802963542474574/), which has no such girl. The only effect this issue has on how many "Visconti-Sforza" decks there is to reinforce the point that Kaplan's method of separating the Milanese early hand-painted decks into two piles is untenable.
Dummett's book came out in 1993. It may be that there is more information since then. New cards surface periodically, although I can't think of any from Milan. It may also be that the questions I have raised here have already been discussed somewhere.
If anyone wants direct quotes from Dummett, please send me a Private Message (PM). Including them would have made this post more complicated than it is. I have left out many details; hopefully I have not misread his relatively uncomplicated Italian.
Note: a couple of hours after originally posting, I added two paragraphs toward the end, the first beginning "So it is really important..." and then the one after that.
