Huck wrote (2years ago!), at
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2342&p=25181
Italian wiki uses "Pedone Torre Cavallo Alfiere Donna Re", so Alfiere from the Spanish Alfil.
Al fil meaning "the elephant," which is what the piece was originally.
I am somehow back to this issue. Checking further, I see that the old name for the bishop or
alfiere was "alfino." It occurs in Boccaccio's
Filoloco, 1336, Book 4 Chapter 96, at
https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Filocolo/Libro_quarto/96. Filoloco plays three games of chess with his jailer. Here is part of the first and third games.
Filocolo giucando conosce sé più sapere del giuoco che ’l castellano. Ristringe adunque Filocolo il re del castellano nella sua sedia con l’uno de’ suoi rocchi e col cavaliere, avendo il re alla sinistra sua l’uno degli alfini; il castellano assedia quello di Filocolo con molti scacchi, e solamente un punto per sua salute gli rimane nel salto del suo rocco. Ma Filocolo a cui giucare conveniva, dove muovere doveva il cavaliere suo secondo per dare scacco matto al re, e conoscendolo bene, mosse il suo rocco, e nel punto rimaso per salute al suo re il pose.
...
E quanto più giuoca tanto n’ha il peggiore. Filocolo gli leva con uno alfino il cavaliere, e dagli scacco rocco.
FIlocolo, while playing, knows that he knows more about the game than the castellan. Filocolo therefore confines the castellan's king in his seat with one of his rooks and the knight, the king having one of the bishops on his left; the castellan besieges Filocolo's with many checks, and only one point for his safety remains in the leap of his rook. But Filocolo, who was fit to play, where he had to move his second knight to checkmate the king, and knowing it well, moved his rook, and placed it on the point left for the safety of his king.
...
And the more he plays, the worse he has of it. Filoloco takes the knight with a bishop, and puts him in check with his rook.
We have here Re for King, Rocco for Rook, Cavaliere for Knight, and Alfino for Bishop. The salto del suo rocco, leap of his rook, is a predecessor of castling, but with just one piece - oddly, the sources say that it was the king that leaped, not the rook. This is in an essay by Andrea on chess and tarocchi no longer online. But the relevant part is quoted at
http://soloscacchi.altervista.org/?p=43412.
For further verification of alfino, here is
https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/alfino/:
alfino
s. m., ant. – Forma originaria per alfiere2, pezzo del gioco degli scacchi, più vicina all’etimo arabo (come il fr. ant. aufin e il provenz. alfi): avendo il re alla sinistra sua l’uno degli alfini, il castellano assedia quello di Filocolo con molti scacchi (Boccaccio).
alfino
n. m., ant. – Original form for alfiere2, a chess piece, closer to the Arabic etymology (like the ancient French aufin and the Provençal alfi): the king having one of the alfini on his left, the castellan besieges that of Filocolo with many checks. (Boccaccio).
There is some inconsistency in the punctuation, but the terms are clear enough. The corresponding French term was aufin. Both, when divided into two words, mean "at the end." What I am after is the question, in Huck's chess/Tarocchi di Modrone (CY) analogy, we have pairs of cards corresponding to pairs of chess pieces: King/Queen to Emperor/Empress, the two rooks to the two cards with towers, World and Judgment, and the two knights corresponding to the two cards with horses in them, the Chariot and Death.
It strikes me that the pair of cards that the two bishops correspond to might derive from that double meaning alfin/al fin = bishop/at the end, where "at the end" on the Wheel is the old man at the bottom, off the wheel, and also the Old Man, at the end of his life (holding an hourglass), or possibly at the end of Time (holding an armillary sphere, as in the early Petrarch illustrations), heralding the Last Judgment.
I would also observe the term for the Knight, cavaliere rather than cavallo, the horseman rather than the horse. (I hope it was the same in the original.) And in fact the CY Chariot card has just such a horseman, on one of the horses.
It would help, in drawing visual similarities with the CY cards, if we knew what the chess pieces looked like. I know that in a later post, Huck showed an illustration of them in the German game of courier chess, which does back to the 13th century (
viewtopic.php?p=25183#p25183); but I am not sure I trust that for 15th century Italy.
The knight wasn't just a horse's head, but a knight on a horse, at least in the fancier decks. That fits with the German illustration. But what did the alfino look like? Medieval chess sets show a block with tusks sticking out, so an elephant, but that may not have been true for the 15th century.
Earlier, the rook looked like two horns coming out of a base and apparently was seen as the end of a jousting lance, called a "roc," according to a source cited at
http://soloscacchi.altervista.org/?p=43412 (which has a picture of the chess piece), namely A. Chicco, in Preface to “Il rocco come figura araldica”, supplement to L’Italia Scacchistica, 1951 op. cit.. That seems to contradict the idea that it resembled the fortification on top of Indian war elephants. Perhaps there was more than one form of the piece in the Middle Ages. Well, I am very confused and out of my depth.
