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Re: Problems with positing the Papi in the ur-Tarot

Posted: 04 Jul 2020, 12:55
by mikeh
I am going to respond to Nathaniel. Thanks for taking up my challenge to explain the "equal papi" rule, Nathaniel. I'm not going to give a full reply now. but just a few things.

First, if there are any difficulties with my explanation of the "equal papi" rule, please tell me. Karnoffel is only a grandparent, I want to emphasize; a different game, with permanent trumps (as I imagine for "VIII Imperadori"), is the parent. But what I've just said is not the explanation, which I've already given and see no need to repeat, although I will if anyone needs it.

About your explanation of the "equal papi" rule, Nathaniel, I see a few problems. First, everywhere else seems to have managed to come up with hierarchies they could agree on, at least at that time and place. It isn't that hard. What is different about Bologna? The only thing I can think of is its form of government: signorial rather than by a hereditary family. In that way it is like Florence. A hereditary ruler who enjoys card games could simply dictate an order. The signoria might not have wanted to bother spending meeting time discussing it. But still, you'd think that some specific order would dominate after a while, especially once the Bentivoglio were the leading family - unless, of course, they were the ones that wanted the four to be equal, so as to undermine the idea of loyalty to the papacy alone. That in itself is an argument against the rule being post-Bentivoglio, because after them the papacy ruled. And despite Phaeded's four hats, two of the hats on the cards simply aren't papal. (Please be clear that I am not addressing the issue of gender at this point.) Having an emperor trounce a pope isn't how the papacy likes to see things.

Another problem is that if the pope is agreed as highest, then it shouldn't be one of the equal papi. There should be just three fighting it out.

Added an hour later: Actually, I may have answered my own question: what makes Bologna different is precisely that it was struggling, with the aid of the Bentivoglio, to get out from under the papacy. Having an emperor trounce a pope is pretty nice. But I don't think it is enough in itself, because there would have been plenty of people who thought it was the Ghibellines up to their old tricks. There has to be the precedent of an earlier game with equal trans-natipnals as trumps. Added later: Also, Piedmont still has to be explained.

Now about gender: while your explanation of Florentine Minchiate makes perfect sense, I don't see that it applies to the Bolognese case. In Bologna there were two types of kings, old and young, and it makes sense that both types would be represented in the Emperors. The corresponding differentiation among queens was profile vs. full face. But it didn't suit the papals' portrayals to have them in profile, because then the one in profile would be seen as looking at, and so subservient to, the other one. That's ok with queens, because they're a lower rank, but not with papals. Here's a head-to-head comparison, using the full-faced queens:
Image
Image
There are 2 reasons for using queens as models for papals: (1) they are the closest in rank to kings; and (2) popes were clean shaven then. Mind you, I'm not saying that they were all-male from the start. I just can't see my way clear one way or the other.

Another thing is about the "papotes", as they were called. To me this signals that some people from Piedmont recognized the affinity of their game with that of Bologna. I would expect them to have been students rather than courtiers, because there wasn't much court-to-court interaction between the two that bypassed Lombardy, where the term would not likely have been used. I can't see that the term itself says anything about when it was introduced.

I suppose the rule itself could have been introduced by aristocratic students coming home from Bologna, before the game as introduced from Milan was established, but I like the idea of it coming from Lombardy instead, more authoritative. Both it and Angel-high are perfectly compatible with the 15th century Milanese cards.

One final thing: the "papi" and "mori" in Bologna have never been numbered, except by a few players hand-writing numbers on them. The numbers on the BnF copies, as I expect you realize, are on all the triumphs, in Marseille order. The numbers, when they were added, started with 5 Love and ended with 16 Stella.

Re: Problems with positing the Papi in the ur-Tarot

Posted: 04 Jul 2020, 15:57
by Ross G. R. Caldwell
To Nathaniel's comments specifically to me -
Nathaniel wrote: 04 Jul 2020, 02:04 This oddness is in itself one of the strongest reasons for believing that this rule would not have been original. It looks inherently like a later modification. So it is definitely something Ross would need to explain to convince us of his argument. Another big difficulty he has is the one that Phaeded repeatedly points out: "Does it not seem at all odd to you that none of the surviving 15th century decks have two popes?" Indeed. The early decks and early documentary sources all suggest an ur-tarot that featured an Empress, Emperor, Popess, and Pope (the "Imperatori e Papi" in Piscina's words); there is nothing anywhere in those early sources to contradict this. The third major difficulty Ross has is that Piedmont and Bologna are the only places we know of where this rule appeared. There is simply no evidence that it ever existed anywhere else; on the contrary, as I just said, all the evidence suggests that the other orders all derive from a common ancestor that had those four unique trumps, ranked in the same sequential way as all the others.

I think Ross is right to say that the symbolism of the figures is not hugely important, and that it would not necessarily have had much effect on the gameplay. But the question of whether or not the four cards each showed a unique figure, clearly differentiated from the others, is hugely important. If the four cards all looked identical in the ur-tarot, then the rule would have had to have existed. If they were all unique, then it's very likely the rule did not exist. And the evidence overwhelmingly suggests the latter.

Nevertheless, I agree with Ross that the equal papi rule probably goes back a long way, for the reasons he cites: "To me it seems that the coincidence of the equal-papi rule - and name "papots" - and the high Angel (and the name "Angel") in Bologna and Piedmont at the same time, is alone sufficient proof of the antiquity of the rule." Moreover, the rule must surely have taken root in Piedmont before the Type C order exerted its influence on the Piedmontese (which may have come about even before the Tarot de Marseilles; possbily it was because the Lombard deck took over the Piedmontese market and that deck was numbered, like the World card from the Castello Sforzesco). So the rule probably goes back to the 15th century. I disagree with Ross about how the Bolognese game reached Piedmont—I incline more to the view of Dummett/McLeod that it bypassed Lombardy, or at least bypassed most of Lombardy—but that is a side issue.
To me the "oddness" is a mark in its favor, rather than the opposite. Especially since it is found in two unrelated places. The principle in textual criticism, when you have various manuscripts with different readings, is that "lectio difficilior potior," or "the more difficult reading is the stronger." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_difficilior_potior - it's a short read, look at it before reading me further.

LIke the textual critics say, it is not a mechanical principle - the odder the better. But when the identical oddness (in fact two identical oddnesses with the high Angel) is found in distinct and geographically separate "textual traditions" - in this case, Tarot playing traditions - it is almost axiomatic that it should be considered at the origin of both traditions, since neither created the other. The only issue is when to place that origin, i.e. when did the same game that Bologna played reach Savoy? The equal-papi rule and high Angel means that those rules came with the game. There is no other way to look at it.

Therefore the only discussion we need to have is about when the game reached Savoy. Whether it is likely that the game reached various places in Savoy, including the court at Chambéry, as early as the 1440s, or whether it took until "the early 16th century," Dummett's latest thoughts on it (note that his extreme conservatism on the timing of the spread of the game was consistently wrong; in Italy, it was much faster than he thought). I am not sure that Thierry Depaulis, who knows more, has expressed an opinion on when the game reached Savoy. You know my opinion - Visconti was as close to Savoy as to Ferrara, if not closer by reason of marriage and diplomatic concerns, and the game was in Ferrara and Milan simultaneously. I think therefore that the game must have been known in Savoy at the same time.

I can only conclude that the equal-papi rule existed in the 1440s, and that is as good as saying it is original.

On the iconography, I view it as a red herring. The depictions of the papi can tell us nothing about the rule observed when playing them. Even numbers cannot tell us. If we had no rulebooks from Savoy and Piedmont at all, we would assume from their cards that the World card was the highest card. But it NEVER is. They make XX higher than XXI everywhere and always.

It is the same with the papots. Even when they are numbered and labelled with names, in French or Italian, from 1787 to 1930, when printed rules are known, they are played by the equal-papi rule. Neither their iconographic differences, nor even their numbering, indicates their hierarchical value or use in the game. Looking at the cards gives us no idea about the rules observed by those who played them.

Re: Problems with positing the Papi in the ur-Tarot

Posted: 04 Jul 2020, 17:09
by Ross G. R. Caldwell
As for why the rule exists, or what it means, I've had a couple of speculations over the years.

One is that it is a kind of “fossil” of an earlier trump experiment, in which each suit, headed by a king, was trumped by an emperor or a pope. This is sort of a real world view, in which real kings or dukes or princes were ultimately under the authority of one or the other ultimate authority. But those authorities themselves were always struggling to gain supremacy over the other. So the rule was the same with these "papi," but they were the only trumps. If somebody played one, it meant that they got your king, if you could not follow suit. This makes strategy important, since it depends what place you are in the trick. If second, and you play that trump, somebody else could take your "pope" AND the king you wanted. Best to play out your weakest suit until you are well-placed to play your "pope" and get the king.

So it is a “proto-Tarot” of a sort. You'll probably remember that Fernando de la Torre, a Spaniard, had studied in Florence in the early 1430s, definitely 1431-1432. By 1450, he had designed a card game with the Spanish pack, but adding one trump, an emperor. It seems possible to me that this is indirect evidence of the existence of an “emperor” game of some sort in Florence in the early 1430s.

Another idea is that it is simply a “game within a game,” given the many innovations already in the game of Triumphs. Every moderately complex game has bonuses and penalties, and other quirks, in the moves and point-counting, that add a little spice and difficulty to the play. So, given the period in which the trump sequence was brought together, it seemed natural to include the proverbial struggle for allegiance and supremacy between popes and emperors.

But why four, in this scenario? If we exclude the “fossil” view, which had each matched to a suit, then it could be that the number reflects the number of original players, which I posit was four, so that each could conceivably play in this game-within-a-game during a hand. Remember that game-designers think in terms of possibilities like this, ideal occasions and perfect hands and the like. Otherwise, the number might also reflect the need to fill out a pre-chosen number of this group in the chosen number of total trumps. The designer could not have a grouping of merely two cards, but had to have four at least (not counting the Fool and Bagatto, which, while at the bottom, are not thematically or symbolically in the group of lowest cards in the divisions I posit). Otherwise the middle group, already complicated, would have seven unnumbered cards to remember in a single grouping.

Thus, in terms of groupings, the player at the table for the first time only had to remember “four papi” as a group, and then only had to remember two more groupings of five each and the four “lights,” and the counting cards, the two highest and two lowest, a single group.

Re: Problems with positing the Papi in the ur-Tarot

Posted: 04 Jul 2020, 19:43
by Phaeded
Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote: 04 Jul 2020, 10:43 My scenario is that the original game, the one that was all over Italy within 20 years of its invention, had the equal-papi rule and the high Angel (i.e. it was A type). ...t the original game reached the duchy of Savoy soon after it reached Milan, and they kept those rules, just like Bologna did.

In other words, in the 1440s and 1450s in Florence, Bologna, Lombardy, and Savoy, the same game was being played.

In Bologna and Savoy the game became deeply rooted among the population. But In Milan it appears that, like in Ferrara, the game was too elite to survive the end of the ruling dynasty. There was, somehow, a close association between the Sforzas and the Estes and the class of people who played the game. The end of the House of Este in 1597 coincides with the disappearance of the Ferrarese form of the game (any kind played with the B order). For Milan the evidence is far sparser; we have no evidence whatsoever about the popular form of the game in the Milanese until Alciato in 1547.
I'll put together the diffusion and papi innovation timeline as I see it separately, but first my issues with the above assumptions, which generally speaking, is that you are constantly applying 16th century evidence to the 15th century. That everyone is initially playing the same game in the 1440s I agree with, but then you make implicit WHOM is playing in that early period, and state that because of mass produced decks (or lack thereof) in the 16th century that Milan was always "elite". What evidence do you have that tarot was popularly played in Bologna and Savoy by non-elites in the mid-15th century?

Unlike the other 15th century luxury decks, we have several fragments of PMB decks that suggest Milan (or rather Cremona) was at least a mass producer of luxury decks. Otherwise we only have the Dick sheet and thus no real information other than merchants' records (heavily weighed in favor of Florence due to Pratesi) which reveal widespread sales of cards. One simply can't make any definitive conclusion about mass-produced tarot cards in the 15th century due to the dearth of evidence.

As for the French influx of cards into Northern Italy in the early 16th century, nothing could be more easy to explain. First of all, since Milanese tarot is rife with Sforza-Visconti stemmi, it was overtly political; of course it was going to be replaced if the Sforza were ousted. But your argument:

But already in 1505, in Pinerolo, near Turin, they were importing Tarots from Avignon and cards from Lyon. Why were they doing this if the nearer and easier Milan was supplying their cards and dominating their style of play?
Because it became politically expedient to dissociate with the Sforza once Louis XII of France descended on Milan by way of Savoy? Don't even need to dive any further than Wiki for this:

In March 1499, Louis signed an agreement with the Swiss Confederation that promised 20,000 francs as an annual subsidy for simply allowing the French to recruit an unspecified number of troops in the Confederation.[29] In exchange, Louis promised to protect the Confederation from any aggression from Maximillian and the Holy Roman Empire. Louis opened negotiations with the Duchy of Savoy and by May 1499 had hammered out an agreement that allowed French troops to cross Savoy to reach the Duchy of Milan. The agreement with Savoy also allowed France to purchase supplies and to recruit troops in Savoy.[30] Finally, Louis was ready to march into Italy.


In Milan itself would any tarot production be eliminated and replaced with French product (French merchants following in the wake of the French army and of course provisioning the occupation) once Ludovico Sforza was removed from Milan for good in 1500, just five years before the appearance of Avignon cards in Turin? Rhetorical question.

Re: Problems with positing the Papi in the ur-Tarot

Posted: 05 Jul 2020, 00:45
by mikeh
deleted; somehow my "edit" got placed as a new post, for which see next post.

Re: Problems with positing the Papi in the ur-Tarot

Posted: 05 Jul 2020, 01:02
by mikeh
Ross wrote,
On the iconography, I view it as a red herring. The depictions of the papi can tell us nothing about the rule observed when playing them. Even numbers cannot tell us. If we had no rulebooks from Savoy and Piedmont at all, we would assume from their cards that the World card was the highest card. But it NEVER is. They make XX higher than XXI everywhere and always.

It is the same with the papots. Even when they are numbered and labelled with names, in French or Italian, from 1787 to 1930, when printed rules are known, they are played by the equal-papi rule. Neither their iconographic differences, nor even their numbering, indicates their hierarchical value or use in the game. Looking at the cards gives us no idea about the rules observed by those who played them.
Does this, in the context of the rest of the post, mean you are conceding that two of them in Bologna might have been females originally, with the same names as we see elsewhere, because what is original is the "equal papi" rule, not what they looked like or were called (which is what I think, with emphasis on the "might have")? Another thing: on the page you reproduced (279, top), the word in the plural is spelled "papote", considered by the author a masculine form, since it is followed by "dernier" rather than "derniere". I am not sure what the singular would be. The difference might be that while "papots" suggests a masculine noun, "papote" is more ambiguous, as befits how the cards looked in Piedmont; but you know more about French than I do.

Re: Problems with positing the Papi in the ur-Tarot

Posted: 05 Jul 2020, 02:27
by Nathaniel
mikeh wrote: 04 Jul 2020, 12:55
About your explanation of the "equal papi" rule, Nathaniel, I see a few problems. First, everywhere else seems to have managed to come up with hierarchies they could agree on, at least at that time and place. It isn't that hard. What is different about Bologna?
I wasn't suggesting that Bologna was any different at all in regard to the process involved in ranking the papi, only in regard to the outcome of that process. My point was that the profusion of different papi hierarchies indicates that there were a lot of different opinions about how they should be ranked, just as there must have been with the virtues. So it is very likely that there were a lot of arguments everywhere about how to rank the papi, not just in Bologna. Everyone arrived a solution eventually, of course. Bologna's solution was simply a rather ingenious one, which sidestepped the whole issue of having to assign ranks to the cards.
mikeh wrote: 04 Jul 2020, 12:55
Another problem is that if the pope is agreed as highest, then it shouldn't be one of the equal papi. There should be just three fighting it out.
I really can't imagine anyone thinking that this would be a good solution. The four papi all look very similar, and were very similar in nature. It would be rather bizarre to have three of them ranked identically and one a notch higher—especially when you recall that the cards at this time presumably depicted an Empress and Emperor and a Popess and Pope. To do what you are suggesting, you would have to split up one of those couples and put one half together with the other couple, while isolating the fourth figure in its own separate little category. I can't imagine this idea even occuring to anyone, let alone everyone else finding it appealing enough to do it. It is far more sensible to keep all four cards together and put them all on one rank, as they did.
mikeh wrote: 04 Jul 2020, 12:55
Actually, I may have answered my own question: what makes Bologna different is precisely that it was struggling, with the aid of the Bentivoglio, to get out from under the papacy. Having an emperor trounce a pope is pretty nice. But I don't think it is enough in itself, because there would have been plenty of people who thought it was the Ghibellines up to their old tricks. There has to be the precedent of an earlier game with equal trans-nationals as trumps. Added later: Also, Piedmont still has to be explained.
If the Bolognese were willing to continue playing with the four equal-ranking popes and emperors for centuries without anyone finding it sufficiently objectionable to change the subjects depicted on the cards—even during the period when other nearby regions removed the pope from their tarot decks—then I think we can safely conclude that Bolognese players in the 15th century would have sufficiently appreciated the witty implication of emperors trouncing popes (and vice versa) to enjoy it without requiring a precedent for it, and without finding it unacceptably offensive. I don't think it would have been a problem for players in Piedmont either. The Guelph-Ghibelline conflict was a very familiar part of everyone's world in northern Italy, and I think they would have loved seeing it reflected in a card game. So unless there was someone who seriously objected to some aspect of it and that person was in a position of power, it should not have been a problem.
mikeh wrote: 04 Jul 2020, 12:55
One final thing: the "papi" and "mori" in Bologna have never been numbered, except by a few players hand-writing numbers on them. The numbers on the BnF copies, as I expect you realize, are on all the triumphs, in Marseille order. The numbers, when they were added, started with 5 Love and ended with 16 Stella.
I'm not quite sure what you meant by this, because I thought I made it pretty clear in my post that the papi didn't have numbers printed on them in Bologna. In fact, it was an important part of one of the points I was making toward the end. Maybe I wrote in a more confusing way than I intended. What I wrote was: "In Piedmont, where the papi themselves were numbered, the rule died out almost completely; in Bologna, where only the trumps from Love to Star were numbered, the rule held on"
mikeh wrote: 04 Jul 2020, 12:55
First, if there are any difficulties with my explanation of the "equal papi" rule, please tell me. Karnoffel is only a grandparent, I want to emphasize; a different game, with permanent trumps (as I imagine for "VIII Imperadori"), is the parent. But what I've just said is not the explanation, which I've already given and see no need to repeat, although I will if anyone needs it.
My difficulty with your explanation of the rule is the same as my difficulty with Ross's explanation of it, and it's a difficulty I have with a lot of the hypotheses I see on THF: It seems implausibly complicated and convoluted, in a way that immediately makes me think of those geocentric astronomers in the 16th century who had to come up with ever more convoluted and unlikely planetary orbits in order to reject the simple, obvious solution of the heliocentric world.

That's what I feel is happening again here: I prefer my hypothesis because it explains all of the observed facts with elegant simplicity.
Ross has to try to convince himself that the papi rule was "unstable" to explain why it left no trace anywhere except in Bologna and Piedmont (even though it seems extremely stable in Bologna, and survived surprisingly well in Savoy too when you consider that they played with numbered papi cards for centuries) and he has to come up with some other rather complicated and questionable gameplay rules—which are not corroborated by any other surviving evidence—to explain this very simple one. And he just flat out denies that the images on the cards can have any relevance at all, because the clues they offer support another theory but not his own.
Mike, your own explanation of the rule is not unlike Ross's "fossil" idea, and has the same difficulties: You're both proposing a degree of complexity which is unnecessary, questionable, and also not attested by any other evidence we have. In both your version and Ross's version, the story gets rather complicated and raises tricky new questions. In the case of Ross, we have to ask why would the trumps at the head of each suit not all be the same? Such as four emperors—wouldn't that be more likely than two popes and two emperors? Sure, there's the Guelph-Ghibelline thing, but that would surely prompt you to add just one of each, not two of each. And why not simply rank the suits like Marziano did?
In Mike's case, we have to believe that two of those four trumps were Empresses and two were Emperors, all ranked equally, which, in the very patriarchal world of 15th century Italy, seems at least as implausible than Ross's idea (all-female court cards might have been acceptable north of the Alps, but there is no sign of it south of them). And then, presumably, we have to believe that two of them turned into a Pope and Popess. And again, as with Ross, there is no real corroborating evidence for any of this. (The de la Torre reference is very weak, as surely Ross himself must realize.)

So yeah, I still very much prefer my simple theory, which doesn't require us to postulate various implausible things for which we have no evidence.

Re: Problems with positing the Papi in the ur-Tarot

Posted: 05 Jul 2020, 04:19
by Nathaniel
Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote: 04 Jul 2020, 15:57
To me the "oddness" is a mark in its favor, rather than the opposite. Especially since it is found in two unrelated places. The principle in textual criticism, when you have various manuscripts with different readings, is that "lectio difficilior potior," or "the more difficult reading is the stronger." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_difficilior_potior - it's a short read, look at it before reading me further.
Ross, card games are not manuscripts, and their rules don't work the way language does. This idea of yours seems to imply that we should expect card games to start out full of strange complicated rules, and then become simpler over time, as they spread to other places. I'm not exactly an expert on card games, but I think that's basically the exact opposite of how card games usually evolve, isn't it?

Re: Problems with positing the Papi in the ur-Tarot

Posted: 05 Jul 2020, 09:11
by Ross G. R. Caldwell
Phaeded wrote: 04 Jul 2020, 19:43 What evidence do you have that tarot was popularly played in Bologna and Savoy by non-elites in the mid-15th century?
You know that there is nothing like Florence's evidence for Bologna. But of course Florence's cards were being exported, which is how we know of them (Arnold Esch's work on Roman imports). If you think that Florentine popular tarots were being bought as far south as Rome in 1453, but need explicit proof that non-elites in Bologna were playing it by then, I can't help you.

Ordinary people's lives are not preserved in the historical record like those of the rich and powerful; don't be misled by what has survived into thinking it is truly representative or an accurate reflection of the general situation.

But, for the record again (you should know this by heart), Marchione Burdochio was Bolognese, and he sold an imported deck, of the same price as the Florentine tarots a couple of years later (it may have been a Florentine deck, or already a Bolognese one), in Ferrara in 1442. Of course the Este bought it (for their children), which is how we know of it, but it was not a luxury item made for them.

Then there is the still-earliest explicit reference to Tarot in Bologna, Bindo da Prato's stolen deck, 1459.

After that, I suppose 1477 is too late for "mid-15th century."

Everything known in Bologna in the 15th century suggests popular rather than luxury. Girolamo Zorli summarized it here -
https://www.tarocchinobolognese.it/page ... prato.html

"These stories of ordinary people tell us how, in the second half of the fifteenth century in Bologna, the trionfi were already popular."

Here are links to the documents about Bindo da Prato and Pietro Bonozzi -
Bindo da Prato's stolen cards, 1459 -
http://trionfi.com/0/e/20/

Pietro Bonozzi and son, official cardmaker for the Bolognese government, in 1477 subcontracted by Roberto Blanchelli da Rimini for 18 months to make Tarots and regular cards -
http://trionfi.com/0/e/35/

Re: Problems with positing the Papi in the ur-Tarot

Posted: 05 Jul 2020, 09:30
by Ross G. R. Caldwell
mikeh wrote: 05 Jul 2020, 01:02 Does this, in the context of the rest of the post, mean you are conceding that two of them in Bologna might have been females originally, with the same names as we see elsewhere, because what is original is the "equal papi" rule, not what they looked like or were called (which is what I think, with emphasis on the "might have")? Another thing: on the page you reproduced (279, top), the word in the plural is spelled "papote", considered by the author a masculine form, since it is followed by "dernier" rather than "derniere". I am not sure what the singular would be. The difference might be that while "papots" suggests a masculine noun, "papote" is more ambiguous, as befits how the cards looked in Piedmont; but you know more about French than I do.
Papote is (or seems to be) the Niçoise dialect of Provençal spelling; Dummett used papots in his descriptions, which may be the French spelling (the Annecy rulebook he cites is French), which is why I generically use it. Obviously they are the same word. The gender of the word is clearly male, in both Provençal and French. Note that "papa" is grammatically male too; it's "il papa" not "la papa," and "le pape," not "la pape." The question of the singular is interesting. I'll have to see if there a dictionary with the word. I would guess "papot," which makes the final /t/ silent in French, as well as the /ts/ in the plural. Papot and papots are therefore pronounced identically. But the Provençal I can't tell you. I'll try to find out.

For the iconography, obviously I can't say what the original Florentine or Bolognese papi looked like. The artist, or engraver, could have decided to distinguish two of them as feminine, and two as males. In my view, though, the designer did not specify the iconography beyond "two popes and two emperors." If you stick an imperial crown on a woman, you can call her an empress; if you stick a papal crown on a woman, you can call her a popess. But the crowns were what mattered (with cross and keys, orb and scepter), since they distinguish the papi. Everything else is artistic embellishment.

Added: some dictionaries of Provençal-Français give "papo" and "papou" as the singular form of "pape.". So far I haven't found the plural. Note that a final /o/ in Provençal is pronounced /ou/ - in other words, "papo" is pronounce "papou," and sometimes writings in Provençal and Occitan will spell it more phonetically. For instance, Béziers' totem animal is the camel, called "Lo Camel," which is very often found as "Lou Camel." But the article is pronounced the same way.

1723, "papou" -
https://books.google.fr/books?id=UVZ0m9 ... 22&f=false

1841, "papou, see papo"
https://books.google.fr/books?id=z1kVAA ... 22&f=false