The 14 + 8 theory
Posted: 08 Mar 2022, 06:52
[Part One of Five]
[ I started writing this well before the invasion of Ukraine, and it seems quite frivolous to spend so much time thinking about such matters now, in the light of the horrific suffering there and the calamity that the war is unleashing on all of us. But we all need an escape from the horrors of the world from time to time, and playing-card history has been mine for more than two years now; I believe it also provided similar relief to Michael Dummett from the efforts of his academic work and his anti-racist activism. So I persevere... ]
I should be writing a post on something quite different at the moment, but after reading the excellent catalog of the Tarots Enluminés exhibition, I couldn't resist finally sharing my own wild speculations on the origin of tarot, which I currently think of as "the 14 + 8 theory."
Tarots Enluminés repeatedly raises the much debated question of whether tarot, or Trionfi as it was originally known, was invented in Milan or Florence, the two most credible candidates. One advantage of my preferred hypothesis is that it allows the invention of tarot to be shared between both these cities. Indeed, it requires the involvement of at least two separate creators, and it is entirely possible that one could have been in Milan and the other in Florence.
It is a tarot creation theory of the type that postulates a process of two or more steps. This contrasts with those that propose a single act of creation, in which the 78-card tarot deck with the standard set of 22 trumps are entirely designed in one single moment, as one unitary vision.
To my mind, the single-act theories all fail to adequately address the following problems:
1. The "messiness" of the standard set of 22 trumps.
The standard 22 are an assemblage of disparate subjects that was bizarre even by the standards of the 15th century. It includes real human figures, abstract concepts, stars and planets, and religious subjects—all mixed together in a sequence which, by the 16th century at least, had no immediately understandable meaning to anyone. Even in the 15th century, the sequence and some of its subjects do not seem to have had an obvious meaning to most people, judging by the names given to some of the cards. The relatively obscure allegorical subject of Time ended up being simply called "the Old Man" or "the Hunchback" in most regions, and the Tower seems to have been prone to a very wide variety of interpretations, reflected in names which ranged from Thunderbolt to Fire and even Hell. The "Triumphal Chariot" (as it was generally known at the time) surely did not begin its life as the simple representation of Triumph which it was generally taken to be, because every card in the trump sequence triumphs over those below, and it is inherently illogical for Triumph itself to triumph over anything at all. So this "Triumph" card must have been derived from something else, the meaning of which was then lost in the stages of the deck's development.
As Michael Dummett pointed out on p. 388 of The Game of Tarot, it is also unusual to find only the Sun, Moon, and a "Star" rather than the full series of the planets, and it is odd that the Pope and Emperor are not accompanied by figures of other ranks—this is especially hard to explain in the case of the Pope, who appears in isolation from the rest of the clerical hierarchy (the Emperor is at least accompanied in the deck by kings and knights).
But the messiest feature of all is the presence of only three of the four cardinal virtues, and none of their three theological sisters. The proponents of single-act theories have made various attempts to explain that peculiar omission, but none have been convincing.
It is therefore extremely hard to believe that anyone would have deliberately put together a sequence like this as a single creative work. If the sequence were born of a single coherent vision, one would expect it to have a certain beauty or elegance, like Marziano's Sixteen Heroes, but the standard tarot sequence has no such elegance. It must surely have been a further development of something that came before.
2. The existence of a 70-card tarot deck at the court of Ferrara in the mid-15th century.
There is a record from 1457 of two very valuable trionfi decks made for the ducal court of Ferrara with 70 cards per deck (see, for example, Gherardo Ortalli, "The Prince and the playing cards. The Este family and the role of courts at the time of the Kartenspiel-Invasion," Ludica 2 (1996) 175-205, p. 186). Either this was some kind of direct precursor of the 78-card tarot deck, or it was an early variant in which the 78-card deck was shortened in some way. The single-act theories would require the latter explanation, but the problem there is that Ferrara evidently abandoned the 70-card deck before long in favor of the 78-card standard version. The "Este" tarot deck, made for the wedding of Duke Ercole and Eleonor of Aragon in 1473, appears to have been a standard tarot deck, and the "Steele Sermon", likely written around 1480 or 1490, also appears to be describing a standard deck. Early tarot decks from the Ferrara-Venice region, such as the Sola-Busca deck, the Leber-Rouen deck, and the non-standard Boiardo deck all appear to have had 78 cards. If Ferrara started with a standard 78-card tarot deck, shortened it to 70 cards, and then returned to the 78-card version just a few decades later, this would be an absolutely unique and extremely unusual development in tarot history. We know of several instances when the deck was shortened in some way (normally by removing some of the numeral cards) but there is no known instance of players then abandoning their shortened deck and returning to the original larger one. Therefore—unless this 70-card deck was nothing more than a fleeting variant produced only for some special occasion and otherwise never used—it is likely to have been a early version of the tarot deck which predated the standard 78-card form and which was eventually ousted completely by that later form.
3. The relationship between tarot and the sudden emergence of a widespread (and lasting) interest in illustrations of Petrarch's Trionfi poem cycle in Florence in the early 1440s.
As is well documented by Ada Labriola in her essay "Les Trionfi de Pétrarque" in Tarots Enluminés, illustrations of the six Trionfi ("Triumphs") in Petrarch's poem cycle became very popular with wealthy people in Florence from about 1440 onward. Prior to this time, most manuscripts of these poems featured few or no illustrations of their subjects, and interest in the poems themselves appears to have been limited. But in the 1440s, Florence produced numerous fully illustrated manuscripts of the poems, and images of their six subjects began to adorn many precious household objects and gifts, like cassoni and birthing trays.
Tarot was known as Trionfi for the first half-century of its life. The first reference we have to the Trionfi deck is from 1440. The subjects of Petrarch's six poems are the Triumphs of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity, in that order. The standard tarot trumps include easily recognizable depictions of three of these: Love, Death, and Time. They also include the Last Judgment, which is mentioned in the Eternity poem. The subjects of the remaining two poems appear on early hand-painted cards from Milan: Chastity is clearly depicted on the Chariot card of the Visconti di Modrone deck, while the Issy Chariot card looks very much like a depiction of Fame.
Scholars like Thierry Depaulis are right to say that it seems like there would be some connection between the images in the newly created Trionfi deck and the Trionfi images being produced at the same time in Florence (see Depaulis' "Introduction" to the Tarots Enluminés catalog, pp. 19-20). But as Depaulis goes on to observe (p. 20), it is hard to see exactly what the nature of this connection could have been. The Petrarchan subjects in the tarot deck were not ranked according to Petrarch's order (tarot's Death comes after Time, not before it as in Petrarch's cycle), and the depictions of them on the cards differ significantly from how they were portrayed in the Florentine illustrations. Moreover, only four of the six are readily identifiable in the surviving cards from Florence: Love, Death, Time, and the Last Judgment from Petrarch's Eternity. We have no Florentine card which shows anything like a standard depiction of Chastity or Fame. The Florentine World card, with its allegorical figure holding symbols of sovereignty, looks like it could represent the divine sovereignty of God over the "mondo novo, in etate immobile ed eterna" as described in Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity, but nevertheless the adjacent presence of the Sun, Moon, and Star in the standard sequence suggests that its creator thought of the World merely as a representation of our own earthly world, and not Petrarch's eternal "new world" of Heaven after the Last Judgment.
So the deck does not seem to have inspired the Florentine illustrations nor vice versa, yet their co-emergence must surely be more than mere coincidence. The only likely explanation is that both had a common source in some earlier development. Could that earlier development simply have been a new interest in the poem cycle in 1430s Florence? This is conceivable, but does not well explain why this would then give rise to a fashion for various kinds of pictorial representations of the poem subjects, nor why the images on the cards would differ so much from the Florentine illustrations. It seems more likely that there was an earlier type of Trionfi deck, more closely based on the Petrarchan poem cycle, which was linked to both of these later developments.
To address these and other difficulties, I propose the following hypothetical creation process, involving three steps (each of which I will elaborate later in this thread):
Step 1:
A proto-tarot deck and game are created, inspired by Petrarch's Trionfi poem cycle and based on previous games like Marziano's Sixteen Heroes (which is likely to have been the earliest Italian game of the type). The deck has 14 trump cards with a symmetrical structure: seven represent Petrarch's six Triumphs (with the highest Triumph, Eternity, being honored by two cards) and the other seven are the cardinal and theological virtues. These 14 are added to a regular deck of four suits which themselves have fourteen cards each, including a queen among their four court cards (this being a reasonably common kind of deck in parts of Italy in the early decades of the 15th century, as evidenced by a sermon of San Bernardino from 1425). The resulting deck of 70 cards and the game played with it come to be known simply by the name of Trionfi. For reasons I will explain below, I think this step is most likely to have occurred at the court of the duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti. The game and deck then spread from Milan to Florence and Ferrara. In Florence, it inspires a newfound interest in Petrarch's poem cycle, and in pictorial representations of the six subjects of that cycle.
Step 2:
Someone has the idea of taking this Petrarchan Trionfi deck and merging it with the deck used for the game of Imperatori.
I am assuming that Imperatori was closely related to the German game of Karnöffel, and featured eight special cards with names such as Emperor, Pope, and Devil, which functioned in the game in a broadly similar way to the trumps of the Petrarchan Trionfi deck. At least some of these cards were probably specially made cards like the Trionfi trumps which depicted the named figures (rather than simply being names and roles assigned to normal cards of the regular deck, as in Karnöffel). The Imperatori deck could have had other similarities to the Petrarchan Trionfi game too, such as four suits of fourteen cards each, with queens.
These similarities between the two games are what gives someone the idea of combining them, to form a deck with four suits of fourteen cards each as before, but now with a set of 22 trump cards (14 + 8). The game played with this new deck is much closer to the Petrarchan Trionfi game than to the Imperatori game, and is consequently seen as an improved, expanded version of the former. So it has the same name: Trionfi.
Step 3:
Many people, especially the less educated, who are not familiar with Petrarch's poems, find it very difficult or impossible to remember the ranking of such a large number of trumps. So changes are made to the subjects that make up the set of 21 ranked trumps, to make their order easier to remember, without reducing their number in total (the larger number of trumps being the most appealing feature of the newly merged game). Fame and Chastity, both showing similar allegorical female figures riding chariots, are thus replaced by just one Chariot card, and four of the virtues are replaced by subjects that include the Sun, Moon, and Star, which are easier to identify and to rank. Modifications are also made to the ranking of other cards, to make the overall sequence more intuitive.
This step must have occurred in direct succession to Step 2, very shortly after it, and it could be better to view the two not as separate steps at all, but simply parts of one process in which the earlier Petrarchan Trionfi deck and Imperatori deck were transformed into the new, larger Trionfi deck. We can therefore assume that this Step 3 would have occurred in the same city as Step 2: possibly Florence, possibly Milan.
This new, more enjoyable version of Trionfi then begins to spread. Not surprisingly, the cities which are most receptive to it and which adopt it first are those where the earlier form of the game was already played: Florence, Milan, and Ferrara. At the end of the 1440s, it begins to spread to cities where the earlier version was never played, including Bologna.
[ I started writing this well before the invasion of Ukraine, and it seems quite frivolous to spend so much time thinking about such matters now, in the light of the horrific suffering there and the calamity that the war is unleashing on all of us. But we all need an escape from the horrors of the world from time to time, and playing-card history has been mine for more than two years now; I believe it also provided similar relief to Michael Dummett from the efforts of his academic work and his anti-racist activism. So I persevere... ]
I should be writing a post on something quite different at the moment, but after reading the excellent catalog of the Tarots Enluminés exhibition, I couldn't resist finally sharing my own wild speculations on the origin of tarot, which I currently think of as "the 14 + 8 theory."
Tarots Enluminés repeatedly raises the much debated question of whether tarot, or Trionfi as it was originally known, was invented in Milan or Florence, the two most credible candidates. One advantage of my preferred hypothesis is that it allows the invention of tarot to be shared between both these cities. Indeed, it requires the involvement of at least two separate creators, and it is entirely possible that one could have been in Milan and the other in Florence.
It is a tarot creation theory of the type that postulates a process of two or more steps. This contrasts with those that propose a single act of creation, in which the 78-card tarot deck with the standard set of 22 trumps are entirely designed in one single moment, as one unitary vision.
To my mind, the single-act theories all fail to adequately address the following problems:
1. The "messiness" of the standard set of 22 trumps.
The standard 22 are an assemblage of disparate subjects that was bizarre even by the standards of the 15th century. It includes real human figures, abstract concepts, stars and planets, and religious subjects—all mixed together in a sequence which, by the 16th century at least, had no immediately understandable meaning to anyone. Even in the 15th century, the sequence and some of its subjects do not seem to have had an obvious meaning to most people, judging by the names given to some of the cards. The relatively obscure allegorical subject of Time ended up being simply called "the Old Man" or "the Hunchback" in most regions, and the Tower seems to have been prone to a very wide variety of interpretations, reflected in names which ranged from Thunderbolt to Fire and even Hell. The "Triumphal Chariot" (as it was generally known at the time) surely did not begin its life as the simple representation of Triumph which it was generally taken to be, because every card in the trump sequence triumphs over those below, and it is inherently illogical for Triumph itself to triumph over anything at all. So this "Triumph" card must have been derived from something else, the meaning of which was then lost in the stages of the deck's development.
As Michael Dummett pointed out on p. 388 of The Game of Tarot, it is also unusual to find only the Sun, Moon, and a "Star" rather than the full series of the planets, and it is odd that the Pope and Emperor are not accompanied by figures of other ranks—this is especially hard to explain in the case of the Pope, who appears in isolation from the rest of the clerical hierarchy (the Emperor is at least accompanied in the deck by kings and knights).
But the messiest feature of all is the presence of only three of the four cardinal virtues, and none of their three theological sisters. The proponents of single-act theories have made various attempts to explain that peculiar omission, but none have been convincing.
It is therefore extremely hard to believe that anyone would have deliberately put together a sequence like this as a single creative work. If the sequence were born of a single coherent vision, one would expect it to have a certain beauty or elegance, like Marziano's Sixteen Heroes, but the standard tarot sequence has no such elegance. It must surely have been a further development of something that came before.
2. The existence of a 70-card tarot deck at the court of Ferrara in the mid-15th century.
There is a record from 1457 of two very valuable trionfi decks made for the ducal court of Ferrara with 70 cards per deck (see, for example, Gherardo Ortalli, "The Prince and the playing cards. The Este family and the role of courts at the time of the Kartenspiel-Invasion," Ludica 2 (1996) 175-205, p. 186). Either this was some kind of direct precursor of the 78-card tarot deck, or it was an early variant in which the 78-card deck was shortened in some way. The single-act theories would require the latter explanation, but the problem there is that Ferrara evidently abandoned the 70-card deck before long in favor of the 78-card standard version. The "Este" tarot deck, made for the wedding of Duke Ercole and Eleonor of Aragon in 1473, appears to have been a standard tarot deck, and the "Steele Sermon", likely written around 1480 or 1490, also appears to be describing a standard deck. Early tarot decks from the Ferrara-Venice region, such as the Sola-Busca deck, the Leber-Rouen deck, and the non-standard Boiardo deck all appear to have had 78 cards. If Ferrara started with a standard 78-card tarot deck, shortened it to 70 cards, and then returned to the 78-card version just a few decades later, this would be an absolutely unique and extremely unusual development in tarot history. We know of several instances when the deck was shortened in some way (normally by removing some of the numeral cards) but there is no known instance of players then abandoning their shortened deck and returning to the original larger one. Therefore—unless this 70-card deck was nothing more than a fleeting variant produced only for some special occasion and otherwise never used—it is likely to have been a early version of the tarot deck which predated the standard 78-card form and which was eventually ousted completely by that later form.
3. The relationship between tarot and the sudden emergence of a widespread (and lasting) interest in illustrations of Petrarch's Trionfi poem cycle in Florence in the early 1440s.
As is well documented by Ada Labriola in her essay "Les Trionfi de Pétrarque" in Tarots Enluminés, illustrations of the six Trionfi ("Triumphs") in Petrarch's poem cycle became very popular with wealthy people in Florence from about 1440 onward. Prior to this time, most manuscripts of these poems featured few or no illustrations of their subjects, and interest in the poems themselves appears to have been limited. But in the 1440s, Florence produced numerous fully illustrated manuscripts of the poems, and images of their six subjects began to adorn many precious household objects and gifts, like cassoni and birthing trays.
Tarot was known as Trionfi for the first half-century of its life. The first reference we have to the Trionfi deck is from 1440. The subjects of Petrarch's six poems are the Triumphs of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity, in that order. The standard tarot trumps include easily recognizable depictions of three of these: Love, Death, and Time. They also include the Last Judgment, which is mentioned in the Eternity poem. The subjects of the remaining two poems appear on early hand-painted cards from Milan: Chastity is clearly depicted on the Chariot card of the Visconti di Modrone deck, while the Issy Chariot card looks very much like a depiction of Fame.
Scholars like Thierry Depaulis are right to say that it seems like there would be some connection between the images in the newly created Trionfi deck and the Trionfi images being produced at the same time in Florence (see Depaulis' "Introduction" to the Tarots Enluminés catalog, pp. 19-20). But as Depaulis goes on to observe (p. 20), it is hard to see exactly what the nature of this connection could have been. The Petrarchan subjects in the tarot deck were not ranked according to Petrarch's order (tarot's Death comes after Time, not before it as in Petrarch's cycle), and the depictions of them on the cards differ significantly from how they were portrayed in the Florentine illustrations. Moreover, only four of the six are readily identifiable in the surviving cards from Florence: Love, Death, Time, and the Last Judgment from Petrarch's Eternity. We have no Florentine card which shows anything like a standard depiction of Chastity or Fame. The Florentine World card, with its allegorical figure holding symbols of sovereignty, looks like it could represent the divine sovereignty of God over the "mondo novo, in etate immobile ed eterna" as described in Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity, but nevertheless the adjacent presence of the Sun, Moon, and Star in the standard sequence suggests that its creator thought of the World merely as a representation of our own earthly world, and not Petrarch's eternal "new world" of Heaven after the Last Judgment.
So the deck does not seem to have inspired the Florentine illustrations nor vice versa, yet their co-emergence must surely be more than mere coincidence. The only likely explanation is that both had a common source in some earlier development. Could that earlier development simply have been a new interest in the poem cycle in 1430s Florence? This is conceivable, but does not well explain why this would then give rise to a fashion for various kinds of pictorial representations of the poem subjects, nor why the images on the cards would differ so much from the Florentine illustrations. It seems more likely that there was an earlier type of Trionfi deck, more closely based on the Petrarchan poem cycle, which was linked to both of these later developments.
To address these and other difficulties, I propose the following hypothetical creation process, involving three steps (each of which I will elaborate later in this thread):
Step 1:
A proto-tarot deck and game are created, inspired by Petrarch's Trionfi poem cycle and based on previous games like Marziano's Sixteen Heroes (which is likely to have been the earliest Italian game of the type). The deck has 14 trump cards with a symmetrical structure: seven represent Petrarch's six Triumphs (with the highest Triumph, Eternity, being honored by two cards) and the other seven are the cardinal and theological virtues. These 14 are added to a regular deck of four suits which themselves have fourteen cards each, including a queen among their four court cards (this being a reasonably common kind of deck in parts of Italy in the early decades of the 15th century, as evidenced by a sermon of San Bernardino from 1425). The resulting deck of 70 cards and the game played with it come to be known simply by the name of Trionfi. For reasons I will explain below, I think this step is most likely to have occurred at the court of the duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti. The game and deck then spread from Milan to Florence and Ferrara. In Florence, it inspires a newfound interest in Petrarch's poem cycle, and in pictorial representations of the six subjects of that cycle.
Step 2:
Someone has the idea of taking this Petrarchan Trionfi deck and merging it with the deck used for the game of Imperatori.
I am assuming that Imperatori was closely related to the German game of Karnöffel, and featured eight special cards with names such as Emperor, Pope, and Devil, which functioned in the game in a broadly similar way to the trumps of the Petrarchan Trionfi deck. At least some of these cards were probably specially made cards like the Trionfi trumps which depicted the named figures (rather than simply being names and roles assigned to normal cards of the regular deck, as in Karnöffel). The Imperatori deck could have had other similarities to the Petrarchan Trionfi game too, such as four suits of fourteen cards each, with queens.
These similarities between the two games are what gives someone the idea of combining them, to form a deck with four suits of fourteen cards each as before, but now with a set of 22 trump cards (14 + 8). The game played with this new deck is much closer to the Petrarchan Trionfi game than to the Imperatori game, and is consequently seen as an improved, expanded version of the former. So it has the same name: Trionfi.
Step 3:
Many people, especially the less educated, who are not familiar with Petrarch's poems, find it very difficult or impossible to remember the ranking of such a large number of trumps. So changes are made to the subjects that make up the set of 21 ranked trumps, to make their order easier to remember, without reducing their number in total (the larger number of trumps being the most appealing feature of the newly merged game). Fame and Chastity, both showing similar allegorical female figures riding chariots, are thus replaced by just one Chariot card, and four of the virtues are replaced by subjects that include the Sun, Moon, and Star, which are easier to identify and to rank. Modifications are also made to the ranking of other cards, to make the overall sequence more intuitive.
This step must have occurred in direct succession to Step 2, very shortly after it, and it could be better to view the two not as separate steps at all, but simply parts of one process in which the earlier Petrarchan Trionfi deck and Imperatori deck were transformed into the new, larger Trionfi deck. We can therefore assume that this Step 3 would have occurred in the same city as Step 2: possibly Florence, possibly Milan.
This new, more enjoyable version of Trionfi then begins to spread. Not surprisingly, the cities which are most receptive to it and which adopt it first are those where the earlier form of the game was already played: Florence, Milan, and Ferrara. At the end of the 1440s, it begins to spread to cities where the earlier version was never played, including Bologna.