And this happened approximately 1 year after Giusti gave Malatesta the first known
trionfi deck.
Can this literary event shine any light on the origins of the ur-tarot in Florence given the temporal proximity?
Of course how one defines the ur-tarot matters, and for me the equally close proximity to trionfi production in Ferrara with a reference to a number 14 images (made for Bianca Visconti, which I take to be trumps) on 1 Jan 1441 and the CY of about November 1441 which suggests all seven virtues as trumps, possibly with 7 matching ant-types or exemplars, would allow a reconstructed deck of 14 trumps.
Of course all we have pictorially is the CY and its highest "World" card was clearly influenced by the productions of the French court into which the Visconti had intermarried; below on the left are Venus and Mercury upon a nimbus cloud and their exempli or "children" from Pizan's
Othea ("Letter from the
goddess of Prudence, Othéa, to Hector of Troy", c. 1400), while on the right is the CY World with similarly-placed allegorical divinity (fama-prudence to my mind, or rather the "fame of the prudent ruler" indicated below). The key difference is the celestial vault above the planetary divinities has been moved to below the divinity, the CY divinity thus placed in a tutelary position over the landscape below - her "children" are at once the knight-ruler arriving on the scene and the dominion itself (the fame of the prudently ruled land to be lauded by the divinity).
As I previously remarked in an old post:
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Why is the form of the CY “World” the only arch?
All of the other 15th century hand-painted or engraved “worlds” are a tondo/mirror shape featuring an urban or urban-dotted landscape view (veduta), typical of representations of the earth at the center of concentric cosmological diagrams. Why then does the oldest known example, the CY, not conform to a model that was readily adopted almost universally once it was created (the PMB being the oldest example of the tondo version)? Was the arch especially meaningful in the context of the creation of the ur-tarot?
...
What gets little attention in regard to the Florentine victory after Anghiari are the specific prizes meted out. The following excerpt from the biography on Castagno provides the basic details of the prize awaiting the Florentine commissioners, Benardo (aka Bernardetto) de Medici and Neri Capponi, who were with the army as official commissioners and alerted the commune of the great victory:
"The citizens of Florence recognized the importance of the victory as well [as the commissioners]. The dome of the cathedral and the campanile were illuminated as they were for the feast day of John the Baptist. Litta reports that upon their return to Florence the commissioners were honored with a pennon, a caparisoned horse, a shield with the arms of Florence, and a helmet."
(John Richard Spencer, Andrea Del Castagno and His Patrons, 1991: 19).
Source for illumination of dome: Howard Saalman, Filippo Brunescelli: the Cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore, 1980: 279, doc. 303 (misdates illumination as June 11, 1440. Which must be July 1, per Spenser).
...
The Florentine Signoria’s herald, Anselmo Calderoni, also charged with celebrating the victory praised not Attendolo but the name of Sforza, so overshadowed was he by his uncle Francisco:
“O Lord, we praise you, all of us singing, / together with your Mother the glorious Virgin…And all honor to the men of Sforza,/who enforced the triumph of the Holy League,/pursuing and driving out the mend of the duke” (translation in Dale V. Kent, Cosimo de' Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: the patron's oeuvre, 2000: 280).
...
...in 1436 when the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore was completed and the cathedral officially consecrated by this same pope, with Sigismondo Malatesta at his side (the same recipient of an ur-tarot deck). It doesn’t take too much of an imagination to perform a sort of shorthand of this complex fresco and place Mary on the arch, as we find with Bianca-fama in the CY, perhaps conflated in her guise of “del Fiore” with the historical symbol of Florentia. The lilies held by Mary are in fact the same motif that would have been depicted on the pennant and caparisoned horse’s shield “with the arms of Florence.”
...
The dome itself had taken on mythical dimensions for the Florentines, an arch civic symbol in which she was thought of as imposing herself over the rest of Tuscany, indeed described as such in the dedicatory letter of Alberti’s
Della Pictura to the dome’s creator: “…an enormous construction towering above the skies, vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow.”
Thus in the very mind of the organizer of the Certame, the dome was omnipresent and the only concrete urban triumphal pomp for celebrating Anghiari being the illumination of this very dome. The minor trappings of the pennant and horse to the commissioners present at the victory could have course been translated into a generic Florentine Guelph knight beneath the dome or the triumphal arch shape of the dome as we find in the Milanese adaptation in the CY World (a different post of mind of why an arch would have been especially relevant for Sforza:
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For the Certame to be more meaningfully grounded beyond just the "World" trump, in my reconstruction at least, the following parallels would need to be present:
* A reference to the Virtues
* clear links to the Duomo
* perhaps even a reference to the number 14
First off, an article by Brian Maxson, "The Certame coronario as Performative Ritual" in Jurdjevic, Mark and Rolf Strøm-Olsen (eds.), Rituals of Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Edward Muir. Essays and Studies, 39. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2016: 137-163. Maxson sets the stage as it were:
On 22 October 1441 the eyes of Florence were fixed upon a raised platform at Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral’s towering dome completed less than a decade before and still lacking its lantern...At one level, the Certame, as a ritual, sought to ensure the success of the marriage — occurring almost on the exact same day — in the north between Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti, daughter of Sforza’s long-time rival Filippo Maria Visconti, as well as the related peace negotiations to end the wars in Lombardy. Additionally, the Certame had another context closer to home, where it served to attempt to quell tensions rising over the death of the condottiere Baldaccio d’Anghiari..
The allegorical figure would of course go where the lantern was missing, but the important thing is a stage had been set up for 10 papal judges in front of the cathedral so that the silhouette of the dome was indeed visually present. The connection to Sforza was self-evident yet Maxson spends a good deal of ink on the subtext of Capponi and the Pope's favored condottiero Baldaccio recently murdered by Medici henchmen (which need not concern us here). The general point is the connection of all of these cultural productions and condottiere.
In reimagining the Milanese CY version of the "World" trump, Maxson offers this, in which we can conceive the allegorical divinity as the urban patron of Mary herself instead of a more generic fama:
The choice of the Virgin Mary as the key saint for the event and the Florentine cathedral as its host were ripe with significance. One of the most prominent iconographical traditions associated with the Virgin Mary was that of Misericordia images. In these paintings the Virgin appeared spreading her cloak with her arms to protect the individuals within its confines. In Florence, a popular image featured the entire Florentine community under her charge.
This resonates with Alberti's earlier description of all of Tuscany under the shadow of the dome and implicitly, Mary of the flowers.
Maxson again, back to the place of judgment and its parallel at the Palazzo Vecchio:
The setting for the Certame coronario mirrored the rituals accompanying the Protest to Justice speeches while moving the action from the civic center of the city to its religious heart. Instead of speaking from the ringhiera, a raised platform was installed in front of Santa Maria del Fiore. The ten apostolic secretaries took over the role of the nine members of the Florentine Signoria. 153
Justice is course a virtue as well, but the new context of the duomo would call for a theological virtue (arguably Charity, as touched on further below). What is significant in not naming one winner was the little known fact that ten apostolic secretaries named four poets as tied and so gave the crown to Santa Maria del Fiore. The 10 judges and 4 nominees gives us the magic number 14 - just a coincidence so close in time to Anghiari?
The planners had dictated that the best poet would be crowned “with a silver crown worked into the likeness of a laurel,” that is, a laurel crown. The papal judges determined that “there were four individuals who deserved the prize equally.” thus, “they gave the
said crown to the before-mentioned church of Santa Maria del Fiore.” 156
To get to that number four seems like a random number of winners (who were not
the winner, which was "Mary"). If the point was to highlight the number 14 then it would have meaning. And the crown going to Mary matches precisely what is retained on the subsequent CY World...but is absent on the Pizan children of the planets prototype. In this case the hypothetical ur-tarot would have featured a lily-holding Mary in a misericordia position atop the dome silhouette framing Florence, perhaps with her contado (newly enlarged with the annexation of the Casentino/San Sepolcro), and thus the awarding of the Certame crown to Mary a foregone maneuver by the Medici regime with the willing consent of the resident Papacy, selecting four winners to get to 14 to match the newly coined
trionfi sequence (all of this to the great frustration of Alberti).
In fact Alberti favored one of the poetic participants above all the others as following the intent and rules of his competition, Leonardo Dati (whose piece had an absence of literary citations in keeping with the
volgare), out of the distinguished line up of Francesco Alberti, Antonio Agli, Mariotto Davanzati, Anselmo Calderoni (the herald who wrote the Anghiari poem hailing Mary and Sforza) , Benedetto Accolti, Cyriac of Ancona, and Leon Battista Alberti himself, although Antonio di Meglio and his son Gregorio recited the poems by Agli and Davanzati for them (Maxson, 154; but see also Stefano Pezze', "
Sul processo elaborativo del Certame coronario", in L'autorialità plurima. Scritture collettive, testi a più mani, opere a firma multipla, Atti del XLII Convegno Interuniversitario (Bressanone, 10-13 luglio 2014), especially 376, where indicates more of a sense of collusion between Alberti and Dati).
What is intriguing is that Alberti, a vicious wit (see his
Momus,which is partially a disguised attack on the papacy), came up with a proposal for a second Certame, whose theme would have been
invidia/envy and for which Dati actually wrote a play (but ironically only a Latin version survives). Why Envy, when the first contest was about "friendship")? Given the pre-eminence of Giotto and the seven virtues we can only recognize Envy as the paired vice opposite Charity, the penultimate virtue associated with the papacy (and the literally elevated virtue of the seven virtues on the Loggia dei Lanzi); the example of this paired virtue/vice most famously painted in Padua:
Charity in her special niche on the Loggia dei Lanzi (flanked by her sister Theological virtues, all facing the Palazzo Vecchio; the Cardinals face the piazza)
Although the first Certame was about friendship, hypothesizing that Alberti casts aspersions at how the Papacy colluded with the Medici to pre-select four (non)winners he must have been making fun of something associated with the virtues - the
trionfi - explains the the theme of the second proposed contest. And being something of a prelate himself, chose the vice opposite the virtue of charity associated with the 10 papal judges and papacy:
Invidia. Why else would Alberti's reaction to the fiasco made of his competition be in terms of that particular vice?
I will also point out that Dati was responsible a little later for the
Trophaeum Anglaricum (c. 1443), the poem celebrating the victory of Anghiari and used for Da Vinci's famous painting of the same, which points to its longer term relevance. Near the beginning of the poem we see Dati's use of the phrase
fama volat
Line 17:Fama volat, tum finitimi terrore tremiscunt. Lindner, T. (2011). Leonardo Dati: Trophaeum Anglaricum. Textkritische Edition. Herausgegeben von Thomas Lindner (Praesens TextBibliothek, 8). Wien: Praesens Verlag 2011: 8.
We meet the phrase again in Minchiate, which splits off the landscape/orbis element of the "World" from the "Fama" trumpet over a landscape aspect; in the latter we find just that phrase, right beneath the dome:
Did the original Florentine "World" trump contain the phrase
fama volat? Some of the CY have tituli on them (for instance the Judgement card).
Finally, I've made much about the dome and its conversion into a triumphal arch in the CY version, with a knight beneath, so let me offer one more comparable data point. No one can dispute Ferrara was in close diplomatic relations with both Florence and Milan at the time the ur-tarot was created (notably hosting both the original Church Union and Bianca Visconti's visit). Their earliest decks do not survive, but assuming they were similar to the Florentine ur-tarot and CY, then the arch might have been employed on the "World" card there. The ruler of Ferrara at that time was Niccolo d'Este, d. 26 December 1441. An equestrian monument was then planned for him and executed a few years later. What is interesting is the prototype for the statue, holding a baton in the same manner, is clearly Uccello's paining of Hawkwood in the Santa Maria del Fiore in 1436. But instead of a pedestal, as in Uccello's version, Niccolo is mounted on an arch...what we have is the knight beneath fama/prudence in the CY, now elevated in her place as a humanist token of the apotheosis of the learned condottiero prince:
Trionfi wasn't invented in a vaccum and reflected the aspirations of the historical moment, that had become condottiere-centric - the above I think makes that clear. It merely pressed an omnipresent series of ideals - the canonical virtues - into a new expanded series celebrating victory in terms of the symbols of a given dominion and the mercenary captains she employed. And not to end on a tangent, but the series was expanded later (arguably with the PMB in c. 1451) - there is zero evidence for a series of 22 subjects ca. 1440.
Phaeded