Re: The 14 + 8 theory

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Nathaniel wrote
I'm not sure that I was actually even aware that Huck was the first to propose the 5x14 idea.
Was he? I don't know. I just know he did a lot of work to promote it, when it wasn't very popular.

For 14 trumps (not the same as 5x14) there is Decker in 1974, who proposed it for the Cary-Yale, and 14-16 trumps for the Visconti-Sforza (PMB). He continues to argue for 14 as the original number (in his 2013 book), although a different set of trumps. And there have been others who at least thought less than 22. Dummett in 1989 proposed 16 trumps for the CY (viewtopic.php?p=24066#p24066), a 16x5 hypothesis, and in 2004 18 plus the Fool (missing the 3 virtues, viewtopic.php?p=16421#p16421), again purely as hypothesis. There's also John Berry, 1987. Here is one other post to catch you up.
viewtopic.php?p=19153#p19153

I don't mind five big posts all at once. It's good to see the whole thing. It's just that it will take some time to think it over. And then maybe discuss it piece by piece, but with an eye to the whole.

Re: The 14 + 8 theory

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Huck wrote: 11 Mar 2022, 06:39 Agreement to some points? Disagreement? Any questions ?
Again, I am familar with all of these points. You have made them before. I don't see anything in them which would prompt me to modify my position, and I don't have any further comments to make on them. I agree with some things you have said, and you can already see which those are from what I have written above. Everything else I disagree with, for the same reasons that other people have disagreed with it in the past. I have no arguments to make about that which other people have not already made. I see no point in repeating what you have already heard from others.
But it was not possible, that Bianca Maria got cards from Milan during her stay in Ferrara. Sagramoro was a Ferrarese artist.
I did not suggest that Bianca Maria tried to get cards sent to her from Milan. I suggested that she introduced the 14-trump game of Trionfi to the Ferrarese court. It seems that she had 14 cards made for use in that game, which were presumably added to a regular deck. I imagine that either she described the 14 cards to Sagramoro so he could make them, or—more likely—she brought a deck with her and Sagramoro copied the cards from that (one deck would not have been sufficient for the entire court, because Trionfi was a game for only three or four players). The 14 figure seem to have been made at her instruction, because the record says they were not merely created for her, but were sent directly to her.
mikeh wrote: 11 Mar 2022, 13:06 Here is one other post to catch you up.
viewtopic.php?p=19153#p19153
Again, nothing new to me here, but this might be useful background for others reading this thread, as you said in regard to Huck's post earlier.

Re: The 14 + 8 theory

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[Part Six: Update]

STEP 1 UPDATES

1. More evidence of the link between the World card and the Triumph of Eternity:

In the Tarots Enluminés exhibition, one wall showed a large reproduction of the following Florentine painting of Petrarch's Triumps of Fame, Time, and Eternity, by Francesco Pesellino ca. 1450:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Petr ... ernity.JPG
Two of the four evangelical creatures can be seen in the celestial spheres above the heavenly "new world" of Eternity. The other two are not visible, presumably because they occupy the other two "corners" of the world and are therefore on the lower half of the celestial spheres, beyond the frame of the picture.

As far as I am aware, the evangelical creatures do not normally appear like this in depictions of the world and the celestial spheres, so I presume this is inspired directly by the Book of Revelation, which is the main biblical source for the four creatures and also a major source for the content of Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity poem. The four creatures appear in Revelation chapter 4, which describes God enthroned in majesty, receiving honor and worship from the four of them and from 24 enthroned elders; this scene is the main inspiration for the upper half of the early Florentine illustrations of this Triumph.

I admit that my knowledge of late medieval and early Renaissance depictions of the Ptolemaic world is limited; perhaps there were some depictions of our earthly world which also showed the four evangelists? But I have not yet seen any, so I am assuming for the moment that they have been added here because it is not our earthly world being depicted, but rather the eternal new world after the Last Judgment.

The obvious connection to the tarot World card is the four evangelical creatures on the Tarot de Marseille card, the earliest form of which is the World card found in the Castello Sforzesco, which probably dates to around 1600. This is, of course, too late to be directly connected to the Petrarchan Trionfi illustrations of mid-15th century Florence. But the four creatures also appear around the Ptolemaic world on the highest card in the S series of the "Tarocchi di Mantegna," the card called Prima Causa. The Tarocchi di Mantegna, especially in its S-series version, appears to have been partly based on trump cards from a tarot deck, most likely in Ferrara in the 1470s. This suggests that there was version of the World card in Ferrara at this time which depicted the four evangelical creatures around the world.

I think this is yet another piece of evidence that the Ferrarese retained an understanding of the World card as the "new world" of Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity for quite a long time, much longer than in probably all other regions of Italy (which came to see it solely as our earthly world). The other evidence of this long-lasting Petrarchan understanding is as follows:

- The alternative name of "Dio Padre" (God the Father) given to the card in the Steele Sermon, which suggests either that some early Ferrarese designs of the card actually depicted God enthroned above the world just as in the early Florentine Trionfi illustrations, or, at the very least, the Ferrarese had such a clear association of the card with the Triumph of Eternity that they understood the figure on the card (whatever it was: an allegorical lady or an angel) to represent God's sovereignty.

- The Ferrarese promotion of Justice to the second-highest position in the trump order, between the Angel card (as the Last Judgment card was always called in Italy) and the World card. I believe this shows a keen understanding of the original Petrarchan meanings of the Angel and World: Justice is obviously being used here to signify the Last Judgment itself, while the Angel is interpreted only as calling the souls to that final judgment. That is indeed what the Angel card nearly always depicted: one or two angels blowing a trumpet to raise the dead from their graves. Apart from the highly unusual Visconti Sforza card, which shows God with the sword of justice, it never depicts the event of judgment itself. The Ferrarese used Justice to represent that event. And that, in turn, emphasizes the meaning of the following World card as the heavenly world of Eternity, for those judged worthy of it.

So this appears to be further evidence that the World card initially represented the eternal world of heaven in Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity, and that the Ferrarese remained aware of that for a remarkably long time. In my hypothesis, this long-lasting awareness is readily explained by the Ferrarese (or at least some of the Ferrarese, including the Este court) continuing to play the 14-trump Petrarchan version of Trionfi up until at least 1457.

Nevertheless, the Mantegna S-series "Prima Causa" image suggests that the Ferrarese understanding of the card may have shifted by that time: The World card was apparently still associated with God just as it is in the Steele Sermon (which must have been roughly contemporary with the S-series) because God was the "Prima Causa." But the card must have now been seen as representing this world, not the next: It is this world to which the Prima Causa is relevant, not the next world. In other words, God's association with the World card seems to have become perceived as being cosmological instead of eschatological.

2. The likely ranking of the cardinal virtues in the 14-trump Petrarchan deck supports a Florentine origin for the 22-trump deck:

In the hypothetical 14-trump Petrarchan deck, the lowest card would presumably have been Love, not only because it is the first Triumph, but also because it matches the position of Cupid in Marziano's Sixteen Heroes game. It is also very unlikely that Love would have been permitted to triumph over any of the virtues. At the same time, it seems very unlikely that any of the cardinal virtues could have outranked Chastity, because in Petrarch's poem cycle, the virtues are Chastity's entourage—her foot-soldiers (Armate eran con lei tutte le sue chiare Virtuti).

The virtues named in the Chastity poem do not include any of the traditional seven, but they are quite similar in nature to the four cardinal virtues, especially Perseveranza, Modestia, Senno, Accorgimento (Perseverance, Moderation, Prudent Judgment, Foresight).

So, I think we can assume that the four cardinal virtues must have been clustered together between Love and Chastity, just as the three theological virtues would have been clustered between Time and Last Judgment (as already discussed in Part Two above).

This positioning of the cardinal virtues matches the Type A order used in Florence, where the three cardinal virtues were grouped together, probably between Love and the Chariot in the earliest sequence. As I said above in footnote 2 of Part Four, if that was the original sequence of the 22-trump game, we would have to assume that the 22-trump game originated in Florence, and went from there to Milan, where the order was modified before continuing on from Milan to Ferrara.

I think Fortitude was probably the highest of the cardinal virtues originally, as it seems the one most closely aligned to Petrarch's rather martial description of Chastity as a strong fighter overcoming the powers of Love. This matches my reconstruction of the order of the virtues in the earliest standard deck in the footnote cited above.

STEP 3 UPDATE

Another reason for the choice of the Tower as the card to bridge the conceptual gap between the Devil and the Star:

Something I overlooked in my earlier discussion is that the Tower, which appears to have been called the Lightning Bolt originally (la Saetta), works well from two perspectives. Not only is it appropriate from the perspective of the Devil, in the sense of God's wrathful power striking down evil, but it also works from the perspective of the Star, Moon, and Sun as a fourth celestial "light," lesser than the other three and therefore lower in rank. I am sure that this particular point has already been made by others, but I don't remember exactly who.

So the card simultaneously had both a religious meaning and a cosmological meaning within the trump hierarchy, depending on which side you viewed it from. This would explain why it was called the Lightning Bolt and not something like the Wrath of God. All in all, it was a truly ingenious solution to the challenge of finding something appropriate to place between the Devil and the Star.
Last edited by Nathaniel on 13 Mar 2022, 07:03, edited 1 time in total.

Re: The 14 + 8 theory

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Something I overlooked in my earlier discussion is that the Tower, which appears to have been called the Lightning Bolt originally (la Saetta), works well from two perspectives. Not only is it appropriate from the perspective of the Devil, in the sense of God's wrathful power striking down evil, but it also works from the perspective of the Star, Moon, and Sun as a fourth celestial "light," lesser than the other three and therefore lower in rank. I am sure that this particular point has already been made by others, but I don't remember exactly who.
Yes ... :-)
He is seated on a starry throne, with regal emblems. The images of four stars attend him: in the higher part, at the right, a splendour of right reason of the conduct of humanity, by which he first taught rustic men political customs; at the left that light by which he published the inviolable laws and he decreed the society which would be cherished by humankind, being guarded by equality. Truly in the lower part, on the right side, appears a burning star like Mars; if in mine it shines maximally with frightful contemp when deployed so that the republic may be preserved, how much brighter in Jupiter, who for the sake of sacred worship happily defeated the blaspheming Giants by war! To the left, a certain radiance which he commended greatly in his sacred laws, but forcibly hid from the man who was greedy for it.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: The 14 + 8 theory

15
I am still working on a response to you, Nathaniel, but in the meantime there is the small issue between you and Huck.

Nathaniel wrote,
I did not suggest that Bianca Maria tried to get cards sent to her from Milan. I suggested that she introduced the 14-trump game of Trionfi to the Ferrarese court. It seems that she had 14 cards made for use in that game, which were presumably added to a regular deck. I imagine that either she described the 14 cards to Sagramoro so he could make them, or—more likely—she brought a deck with her and Sagramoro copied the cards from that (one deck would not have been sufficient for the entire court, because Trionfi was a game for only three or four players). The 14 figure seem to have been made at her instruction, because the record says they were not merely created for her, but were sent directly to her.
Imagine what you like, but it seems to me impossible to tell from the entry whether the images were Ferrara-inspired or Milan-inspired. They were paid for by Ferrara, so probably Leonello was involved. If so, they might well have been examples of Ferrara's 14, or even of the same 14 as Milan's, for Bianca Maria to take back with her to Milan. The main significance of the entry is the number 14 and that it was images (figure).

Actually, my imagination conjures up the reverse of yours. The entry says "to make festive the new year." We think of playing a game of cards. But surely a triumph deck at that point had more than 14 cards. That is not enough to introduce the game to others. Even if Sagramoro made them precisely the same size and with identical backs, it would be easy to tell the new cards from the pack they were added to. He would have had to paint all 70, but that is not what the entry says. It is possible that the court already had a freshly made deck regular available, for the painter to match. But it seems to me more likely just a gift, probably from Leonello, to take back with her. If so, there is no reason for her to take back precisely the same images that Milan's miniaturists had made themselves. It is more likely Ferrara introducing Milan to its images than the reverse, it seems to me.

There is also Huck's imaginary scenario, of the game's being invented then and there, or else of a more irreverent version of her father's game, exchanging virtues for other subjects. But I find it hard to believe that they would be so bold with her father's game, or that they would have invented it then and there.

Re: The 14 + 8 theory

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1.1.1441 is after 16.9.1440. Sigismondo Malatesta was the husband of a daughter of Niccolo d'Este, Ginevra by Parisina.

The actual research problem is, that we don'know, when this daughter died, cause there are competing dates. One was, if I remember correctly, September 3 and the other a vague date in early October.

http://trionfi.com/niccolo-d-este-iii-children .... written c 2004
8./9. Ginevra [by Parisina] *24.3.1419, twin; married 1433 Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, died (possibly killed by her husband) in October 1440; the news should have reached Ferrara in late October 1440 during Bianca Marias visit and should have influenced the mood of all persons present.
It was the 3rd marriage in short time between the houses of Este and Malatesta and all ended in a catastrophe: Parisina - Niccolo (1418), Margherita - Galeotto Roberto (1427 or little later), Ginevra - Sigismondo (1433).
Some art historians, suggesting a date between (1436 - 1438), believe, that she was painted by Pisanello on the famous picture "unknown Este princess".
The death of Ginevra in late 1440 occurred in a familiary situation, where all marriages of the generation of the Niccolo-children had ended in disaster (early death of one of the partners) - and that all after the familiary drama around Ugo and Parisina. Under these conditions Bianca Maria might have viewed on a possible marriage to Leonello with great scepticism. And she would have been right with it - Isotta's first marriage (1444) ended in the same year by murder, Leonello's marriage (1445) ended after 4 years and Beatrice had her first husband for only one year (1448). Isotta's second marriage was the first marriage which endured a longer distance of ca. 10 years.

8./9. Luzia [by Parisina] *24.3.1419 (twin), +28.6.1437; m.1437 Carlo Gonzaga, Signore di Sabbioneta (+21.12.1450); in 1441 dead nearly for 3 years, she died short after the marriage and "the whole court mourned"; her husband Carlo Gonzaga, the new widower, fighting at Filippo Maria Visconti's side, might had become Bianca Maria's husband and was a serious candidate, when the Filippo-Francesco-alliance was in dispute. After the death of Leonello's wife, however, in 1439, Leonello seems to have been the more promising husband-in-spe, or Carlo discarded his chances, when he became prisoner in the recent Venetian-Milanese wars (battle of Tenno/Castel Romana, November 1439).
The date of September 3 was found later (c 2014) :
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=950&p=15422&hilit=ginevra#p15419
It was 3 September, here ...

Inside the Anghiari debate ...
http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic ... vra#p15419

Later it was reflected here ...
http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic ... vra#p15751

Image
Image
Basini Parmensis poetae opera praestantiora: 2. Della vita e de'fatti di Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta ... commentario del conte Francesco Gaetano Battaglini
by Basinio Basini, Laurentius Drudius, Ireneo Affò, conte Angelo Battaglini, conte Francesco Gaetano Battaglini
ex typographia Albertiniana, 1794

https://books.google.de/books?id=WYEcAQ ... pi&f=false
page 340/341
The rumor, that Sigismondo Malatesta had murdered 2 wifes probably occured later, after June 1449, the death of Polissena (the pope accused him in 1461). Sigismondo had married parallel to the wedding between Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti (October 1441) an illegitime daughter of Francesco.

********************

The scenario of 1440, September 16, the gift of playing cards from Giusto Giusti, has a rather different character, if the wife Ginevra had died at September 3 (before September 16) or in early October (after September 16).

Anyway, there were good chances, that the court of Ferrara had direct access to news of the current playing card culture in Florence. Naturally Bianca Maria could have influenced the choice of motives, but that's an assumption with no security. The idea, that examples of Florentine card production influenced the choice of motives, is just an alternative, also with no security.

Btw the wedding between Ginevra and Sigismondo was involved with a sort of Olympic program, which might have had some similarities with 16 Olympian gods celebrated by a card deck in Milan.
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=841&p=13105&hilit= ... ods#p13105
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: The 14 + 8 theory

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There's the possibility, that Leonello felt as a serious candidate for a wedding. Playing cards belonged to the standard mechanisms to "become closer" as drinking eating together etc. .
Also there's the possibility, that the 14 pictures had nothing to do with playing cards. Though I believe, that they had something to do with playing cards.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: The 14 + 8 theory

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mikeh wrote: 14 Mar 2022, 00:04 But surely a triumph deck at that point had more than 14 cards. That is not enough to introduce the game to others. Even if Sagramoro made them precisely the same size and with identical backs, it would be easy to tell the new cards from the pack they were added to. He would have had to paint all 70, but that is not what the entry says. It is possible that the court already had a freshly made deck regular available, for the painter to match.
This is a good point, and it is something that occurred to me too. But I think it's possible that either the backs of the other 56 cards were repainted to match the new ones (the record admittedly does not mention this, but it would be a simple business) or, as you say yourself, there may have been a freshly made deck to which the 14 could be added. That seems very plausible too.

The fact that the Ferrarese court paid for the new cards is not a problem at all, because the new cards would have been intended for their use only, and were probably being created precisely because the Ferrarese had expressed interest in the game. She was a young girl staying there as their guest. They would not have expected her to pay for the manufacture of the cards, or to give them any gift other than something she had already brought with her.

However, I have also pondered the other possibility which you mention, namely that it could have been Ferrara which invented the 14-trump game, and Bianca then took it back to Milan. But there are several problems with that scenario which lead me to favor a Milanese creation instead, namely:

- There is no record of Trionfi in Ferrara before this, even though we do have several records of it shortly after this. The early documentary record is not perfect anywhere, of course, but the records from Ferrara during this time seem to be relatively good—they seem to give us a reasonably good picture of what was happening there, certainly much better than in Milan or even in Florence. So, since there is absolutely no mention of Trionfi before Bianca's visit and then several mentions of it shortly after, I am inclined to think she is more likely to have been introducing it to them rather than the other way around.

- The Visconti di Modrone deck has now been dated with reasonable reliability to no later than about 1442. This is the assessment of Roberta Delmoro in her work for Tarots Enluminés, and it is supported by a watermark found on the deck's paper by the project that Marie-France Lemay is working on. If my hypothesis is in any way correct, the Visconti di Modrone deck must have been created after the merger of the eight Imperatori cards with the 14-trump deck. If the 14-trump deck only arrived in Milan in 1441, this does not allow a lot of time for that development to happen. But if the 14-trump deck was being introduced to Ferrara in 1441, and they kept on using it until 1457, our timeline looks a lot more comfortable.

- Filippo Maria and his court still seem to me to be the perfect candidates for the creators of a Petrarchan Trionfi deck. Maybe the Ferrarese court was also very interested in Petrarch's poems about Laura, and maybe they were also into experimenting with card games, but we have no evidence of it, whereas we do have quite solid evidence of both those things on the part of Filippo Maria.

So, all things considered (and it is very important to always consider all things, and not just one tiny part of the story at a time), I conclude that it is much more likely that Bianca was introducing the game to the Ferrarese court, rather than them introducing it to her.

Re: The 14 + 8 theory

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I was not supposing that the 14 figures might have been to introduce the game into Milan, but a set of triumph or triumph-inspired images done differently from that used in Milan: either stylistically, or different ways of presenting certain subjects (for example, the World), or even not all the same subjects (for example, something else besides theologicals, or different imperatori). The Cary-Yale would then have reflected Filippo's preferences, not Ferrara's. I will try to be clearer.

About records: Nathaniel, do you think we have records of all the decks either purchased by the Este court from elsewhere or made in-house? Well, I haven't heard of many, of ordinary decks or triumphs. If so, not many people in the d'Este household played cards, and even fewer played triumphs, and those that did, did so without wearing them out. (And we have to bear in mind that this is only the Este household, and not purchases by others in town.) From Ferrara, ther is one early record of repainting and repairing cards - and just one, with no record of any originals. Perhaps we only know about certain special cases, involving outsiders and the Este, I don't know. On the other hand, it is not unthinkable that they considered it only a game for children, and that even they got bored with it quickly. So when Galeazzo Maria came to visit in August of 1457, they would have had some decks made because they wanted to entertain him with a game they assumed he liked, or maybe one remembered from Bianca Maria's visit. And Galeazzo did write home about playing cards with his host (per Lubkin's A Renaissance Court), one of the Pico della Mirandolas (he didn't mention the boys, but perhaps he wanted to make it clear that he was being properly chaperoned). I find all this dubious, of course, but it is the picture you get assuming we have fairly complete records.

Well,these do not seem very important questions to resolve. More important is to understand your hypothesis, and I am very confused, even about step 1. I thought I understood, but then I read this:
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. The earliest known orders for Milan and Ferrara adhere to this order except that at some stage Milan promoted Temperance to the upper end of the trump order while Ferrara did the same to Justice. But in the earliest known Florentine order, and the orders used in all regions whose tarot traditions can definitely be traced back to Florence, all three virtues are clustered together, either between Love and Chariot or to one side of that pair. If Florence was the origin of the 22-trump deck, then we could hypothesize that the order of the virtues in that deck was originally 6. Love 7. Temperance 8. Justice 9. Fortitude 10. Chariot. This order then goes to Milan where the virtues get spaced out as above, and then that order goes to Ferrara. Some years after that, Milan and Ferrara promote Temperance and Justice respectively (and Florence meanwhile swaps the ranking of Justice and Fortitude, making Justice the highest in the cluster).
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? Reading your first post in the light of what you say in the part I just quoted, I would have thought something like, in order: Temperance, Justice, Fortitude, Prudence, Faith, Hope, Charity, Love, Chastity (in a chariot), Death, Fame (in a chariot), Time, First Eternity (Angel), Second Eternity (World). Or perhaps the Petrarchans first, then the virtues, so that Love would be 1. But I seem not to have understood properly. Perhaps you meant Petrarchans and yirtues to alternate in some way, either singly or in groups or both. You said something about the theologicals coming just before the last two Petrarchans. Or for some reason you think it unwise to hypothesize an original order, even approximately. Please explain.
Last edited by mikeh on 14 Mar 2022, 11:14, edited 1 time in total.

Re: The 14 + 8 theory

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The interest in Petrarca had in Milan and Padova/Venice an older tradition, which one can see, when one has a list of early Petrarca biographies. Petrarca in his life time lived in Milan since the early 1350s and later in Padova, this manifested the condition, that these regions had a lot of material from him.
The Florentine interests in Petrarca came late, it developed an interest to have a crown of three great Florentine poets and the desired trio was Petrarca, Dante and Boccaccio (in old time Petrarca and Dante were difficult for Florence, cause both were fugitives ... Petrarca as a son of a fugitive, and Dante by his own opposition). The start of it likely was made by Leonardo Bruni with biographies around 1433 with some smaller attempts before by others.

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.

Nathaniel, you wrote:
However, I have also pondered the other possibility which you mention, namely that it could have been Ferrara which invented the 14-trump game, and Bianca then took it back to Milan. But there are several problems with that scenario which lead me to favor a Milanese creation instead, namely:

- There is no record of Trionfi in Ferrara before this, even though we do have several records of it shortly after this. The early documentary record is not perfect anywhere, of course, but the records from Ferrara during this time seem to be relatively good—they seem to give us a reasonably good picture of what was happening there, certainly much better than in Milan or even in Florence. So, since there is absolutely no mention of Trionfi before Bianca's visit and then several mentions of it shortly after, I am inclined to think she is more likely to have been introducing it to them rather than the other way around.
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.
As far I remember, Decembrio, who wrote the biography of Filippo Maria Visconti, didn't use the word "Trionfi" for cards.
Pietro Lapini wrote 1443 a commentary on the Canzonieri, Filelfo is mentioned to have worked 1443-47 on them.
I had collected once (the source is lost, the link doesn't work) ...
The first complete commentary to the Canzoniere is now lost. It was compiled in 1443 by Pietro Lapini da Montalcino for Francesco Maria Visconti, and apparently argued for an allegorical interpretation of Laura. The most important 15th-c. commentary followed in 1444–7, again compiled for the same Visconti; it is by Francesco Filelfo , who has doubts about the acceptability of love as the major theme, and covers only poems 1–135, discussing linguistic difficulties, classical sources, and poetic technique, though he recognizes only sonnets and canzoni, and treats the overall structure of the collection as arbitrary.
Pietro Lapini possibly started with the Trionfi commentary in 1444, around 1450 he's called dead. Bernardino, his son, was born c1430 and so between 1444 and 1450 14-20 years old, so hardly an independent writer.
You write:
Filippo Maria and his court still seem to me to be the perfect candidates for the creators of a Petrarchan Trionfi deck.
To me it seems, that the Petrarca specialists at the court of Filippo Maria were Lapini and Filelfo. Both had commissions about the Canzonieri , not about the Trionfi poem first.
We have the Cary-Yale Tarocchi deck (as you claim, made at least 1442 or before, thanks for this) , but we don't have evidence, that Filippo Maria would have called them Trionfi decks. And there are alternative reconstructions, in which the Cary-Yale is not dependent on the Trionfi poem. But for instance on chess, another hobby of Filippo Maria Visconti.

In Florence as contrast we have a broad spectrum of painted Trionfi-poem-trumps in books and on other objects. We've a declared interest in early 1441. In 1439 we have a council with many celebrated events as for instance the entries of 3 different delegations in Florence arriving from Ferrara and all 3 got their own Trionfo. Additionally we have many visitors from many other cities in this year, who brought a lot of money and filled the Medici bank. And the pope had something, that he could call a success. Florence had a reason to speak of a Triumph. When we hear from the momentary oldest mentioned Trionfi deck in September 1440, then there is another possibility, that this deck might have been made cause of the Florentine victory at Anghiari.
Huck
http://trionfi.com
cron