In the footnote you are quoting, I actually said Love would have been 7, not 6. I was referring to the (Milanese and Ferrarese) order for the 22-trump deck, not the 14-trump deck, which I thought I had made clear; in any case, it should certainly have become clear if you had clicked on the link I provided there, which goes to the earlier post I wrote about this reconstructed order—which you have already read anyway, because you replied to it. In other words, this footnote is about what I think was the earliest order used in Milan and Ferrara for the 22-trump sequence, as opposed to the earliest order used in Florence for the 22-trump sequence. Nothing to do with the 14-trump sequence.mikeh wrote: 14 Mar 2022, 10:39[..]In an earlier post, I postulated a reconstructed original order for the virtues as follows: 6. Temperance 7. Love 8. Justice 9. Chariot 10. Fortitude; in a Florentine-origin scenario, this order would be original only to Milan and Ferrara, not Florence.
Where I get bogged down is when you say Love would have been 6 originally. You say that the original order consisted of only Petrarchans plus virtues. If so, how can Love have been 6? What five cards, if there were only Petrarchans or virtues, would have come before it, since the imperatori aren't there yet? I also seem to remember you saying someplace that Love would have been number 1.
And what would have been the original order, anywhere?
My view on the most likely order for the 14-trump sequence is made clearer in my subsequent "update" post, which you might not have noticed yet. It is here: viewtopic.php?p=24600#p24600
In that update post, I also indicate that I am now siding with Florence for the creation of the 22-trump deck.
The problem with Milan, as you know, is that we seem to have very few records at all of what was going on at Filippo Maria's court, because of the destruction carried out during the Ambrosian Republic. There is no record of Trionfi, but they definitely had what look very much like Trionfi decks in the first half of the 1440s. We don't have any documents relating to them at all, unfortunately, so the fact that we don't have a document from his court about the Trionfi game doesn't mean much. We also don't have documentary evidence that Filippo Maria was a fan of the Trionfi poems, but that doesn't really mean much either, for the same reason. As I said quite clearly above, the lack of mentions of Trionfi in Ferrara is significant, because we do have several records from the Ferrarese court for this time. The same lack of mentions in Milan is not signficant, because we have almost nothing at all from Milan.Huck wrote: 14 Mar 2022, 10:54 The interest in the Petrarca Trionfi poem with pictures appears first in a letter of Pietro de Medici early 1441. His letter goes to Venice, which might indicate, that in Venice somebody had earlier done something like this. In this time Florence and Venice had an alliance and Sforza served in the Venetian army.
The intensive interest at the Trionfi poem in Milan was later, as far I remember in the 2nd half of the 1440s. Pietro Lapini da Montalcino and Filelfo were active on it and it had the consequence, that later Trionfi commentaries were published by Bernardino Lapini (Sohn of Pietro) and Francesco Filelfo as printed books.
[..]
Don't forget in the context of "There is no record of Trionfi in Ferrara before this", that there is also no record of "Trionfi" (in context to playing cards) in Milan.
For Milan, all we can do is look at the surviving cards, and look at what evidence we have from people like Decembrio, and draw conclusions from that. This is what I have tried to do.
Decembrio doesn't refer to the Trionfi deck, but he doesn't actually tell us any of the card games Filippo Maria played except for Marziano's game, and obviously that could not have been the only one Filippo Maria was playing, or even one of the ones he played most (because there seems to have been only that one deck ever made for that game, or at least only one luxury deck, otherwise Marcello would not have had such a hard time finding one). So Decembrio is not a good guide to the card games Filippo Maria played or the names he used for them.