Re: The Tower

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Ross's recent posts on the Tower over on his Tarot History facebook group got me thinking about the Tower again, and led me to wonder:
Was the Tower perhaps the only card that originally bore an image that caused discomfort to early tarot players in the 15th century?

First, let's make it clear that nothing else seems to have made them particularly uncomfortable. They don't seem to have been unduly disturbed by either Death or the Devil, or by the Traitor. The religious figures in the deck (including the angels and the pope) gave great offense to many pious people, as we know from the Steele Sermon and from the various attempts (successful or unsuccessful) to eliminate those figures from tarot decks in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. But there's no indication that those who actually played tarot were ever offended by those religious figures, and in any case being offended is not the same as feeling uncomfortable or perturbed: even the author of the Steele Sermon might have felt only outrage, never disquiet.

But the Tower might have been different.

Its earliest known name is the Thunderbolt, and it was probably originally intended to represent God smiting evil with lightning, thus triumphing over the Devil and his works (and thus forming a useful bridge in the trump order: the Thunderbolt beats the Devil but is inferior to the greater celestial light of the Star).

But the card's designer seems to have chosen to represent that with a fairly conventional type of "Tower of Babel" image, showing people falling down towards a devil at the base of the tower—and that devil probably didn't look terribly discomfited.

This reconstruction of the original design is based on a comparison of all the surviving historical cards, which finds that four elements are very likely to have been present on the original card:
- A fortified tower, with crenellations at the top
- Lightning striking it, probably causing visible damage to it
- Human figures (probably two, maybe just one) falling from the tower
- A devil at the base of the tower, maybe depicted only with its head visible, emerging from behind the tower or from its doorway
I'm assuming that all four of these were present originally because:
- They (or likely descendants of them) all appear in different design lineages from different regions
- The first two seem essential because they are present in some form on nearly all cards
- The latter two are present less frequently, but must surely be original because it is hard to imagine that they would have been added in multiple different regions if they were not there to begin with.
The original image probably looked a little like the mid-15th century Tower of Babel that Mike drew our attention to in 2010.
Image
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Villabianca in the 18th century appears to have called the old Sicilian Tower card il novissimo dell'anima = "the last judgment of the soul" (Dummett, Il Mondo e l'Angelo p. 299; Dummett and McLeod, A History of Games Played With the Tarot Deck vol. 1 p. 373 note 3). Given that the sight of that Sicilian card inspired much the same tristezza (melancholy, suffering, unpleasantness) as the Sicilian Devil card did at that time, we can fairly safely assume that it depicted only a soul or souls being damned to hell, and not any souls being raised to heaven. Since this disquieting design was then replaced by a simple tower, it's very probable that the card Villabianca was describing clearly depicted at least three of the elements listed above: the tower, the human figure(s) (although possibly not shown falling) and a devil. It probably showed the lightning in some form too, interpreted as signifying divine judgment.

There were probably a lot of people who similarly saw the Tower card as depicting the damnation of souls, even in the earliest years, regardless of the designer's intention.

The Sicilian deck seems to have been the only one anywhere that preserved the original design elements intact to such an extent as late as the 18th century. The Roman tarot deck almost certainly had a very similar Tower, because the Sicilian deck seems to have been a direct and close descendant of the Roman one, and a Roman name for the card was casa del dan[n]ato (house of the damned). But the Roman deck seems to have died out by Villabianca's time.

In all other regions, at least one of the vital elements was removed much earlier: the Charles VI deck and the Rosenwald deck (both probably descended from a common source) removed both the devil and the human figures already in the 15th century; the Venetian version did the same, either in the 15th or early 16th century. The Bolognese one removed the devil, probably also before the end of the 15th century. On the evidence of the Cary sheet and the Tarot de Marseille, it seems the Milanese deck did that too, and likewise in the 15th century, but in that case a remnant of the devil seems to have stayed for a while in the form of a cow (the early tarot devils nearly always had cow's ears and horns, so this transformation is not too surprising). The Vieville version (which I suspect came from Piedmont but it could have been from another Lombard lineage) took that Milanese development a lot further, turning the cow into a small flock, the exploding tower into a tree, and the human figure into a shepherd. The Minchiate version, probably an offshoot from the same Central Italian lineage that produced the Roman and Sicilian cards, likewise retained nearly all the original elements, but the person (only one now) was no longer falling and the image no longer clearly implied damnation. We don't know what the Ferrarese card looked like but it must have kept the devil like Minchiate did, because the Bertoni poem calls the card Casa del Diavolo and Lollio and Imperiali call it Inferno, but Il Sivello describes it as an infiammata casa, so it could have just shown a flaming building with a devil in it, with nothing obviously indicating the damnation of souls in that version either.

Were all these changes merely the result of the usual process of playing-card design evolution, with people being confused about what they were seeing and/or trying to embellish the design in small ways? Yet all of the changes effectively moved the design in the same direction, namely away from the suggestion of damnation. So maybe a lot of people in the 15th century and possibly the early 16th century disliked that aspect so much that they felt an urge to remove it from the image.

Why should that have made the players so very uncomfortable? Well, the reason might have been all those preachers like San Bernardino, Savonarola and the author of the Steele Sermon, constantly banging on about how people who played cards would go to hell. That might have preyed on players' minds just a little too much for them to feel happy being constantly reminded of it by the image presented to them on this card.
Last edited by Nathaniel on 08 Feb 2025, 15:54, edited 1 time in total.

Re: The Tower

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When I wrote that post yesterday, I had unaccountably forgotten that a Roman Tower card does survive, part of a sheet fragment from the 16th century, now in the Archivio Colonna at the Biblioteca S. Scolastica. It most likely dates from the mid-16th century, when the use of recycled paper in pasteboard bookbindings was still widespread in western Europe. That is the same period that gives us the Roman name casa del dannato ("house of the damned" or "house of the damned man"). Only part of the left side of the card survives, but it does at least confirm that the card showed a tower and also some form of the thunderbolt, as can be seen from the flames that pass across the top of the structure.
Image

Re: The Tower

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[The following is quoted from a comment by Ross on his Tarot History facebook group on February 8, 2025]
For the interpretation of the image, I wonder if the Minchiate image is not a classicization similar to Ferrara Sun, with Diogenes and Alexander, and, probably, the Tarot de Marseille's Lover, showing Hercules' choice. In the Casa del Diavolo of the Minchiate, it might then be a depiction of the Rape of Proserpina, making the male figure Pluto.

But I'm not persuaded that this card reflects the original imagery and meaning of the card, which I take to be Saetta. The only things that remain in the Minchiate showing this are the blast of light in the upper right corner, in some designs showing a bolt of lightning, and the building itself.

In terms of the original elements you describe in your THF post:

1. Thunderbolt. 100% This is the meaning of the card.

2. A tower or fortress being struck by said bolt. 99%. The tiny uncertainty comes from the tradition represented by Viéville and the Belgian Tarots. In other words, it could be that even the tower was merely a prop for the lightning to strike in the original, not an essential feature that represented Hell. Of course its proximity to the Devil makes it easy to see why players and interpreters made such a connection.

3. Figures falling. 50/50. The uncertainty here comes from Charles VI and Rosenwald, and even Budapest. No-figures has priority, at least, and at least as much claim to reflect the Ur-Tarot design as the versions with falling/fallen figures, like BAR and Bologna.

4. Devil emerging from the doorway. Unlikely, in my view, given what I've expressed above.

Titles, in the absence of a picture, can be misleading. For instance, Anonymous Parisian is titled "La Fouldre", but there is no lightning to be seen in the picture. It shows a hellmouth, and all the fire is coming from below. If all we had were a list of the titles of the Anonymous Parisian cards, we'd be justified in thinking that it showed something more like the traditional Maison-Dieu, or even like Viéville, who knew the same title but shows a tree being struck rather than a tower.
I'll begin by addressing your comments about the "casa del diavolo" name. Your observation about Pluto is interesting, because in Le Carte Parlanti, Aretino referred to that card of the Minchiate deck as "the house of Pluto" (la magion di [Plutone]). He also then explicitly explained the image as depicting "Pluto" dragging a hapless victim into his "accursed house" (egli trascina a casa maledetta qualunque manca alla prudenzia, alla temperanza e alla fortezza). Thus he confirms my interpretation of the Minchiate Tower card, if we read his "Pluto" as a classicized reference to the devil.

You also have a point when you say that we can't quite be sure that the "casa del diavolo" in the Ferrarese deck actually had a devil on it. It's true that Il Sivello simply described it as a "house aflame" and we have no other clues to its appearance (the Bertoni poem also refers only to the flames, apart from the name it gives to the card). But it's not as if the Ferrarese did not know of any other names that they could have given the card (they could have called it Saetta, like the Bolognese did and as the Steele Sermon suggests the Ferrarese themselves had done in earlier years, or they could have called it Fuoco like the Venetians). And the only context I am aware of where the name "casa del diavolo" was otherwise used is the Minchiate card in the 17th century, and the Minchate card evidently did show a devil at that time. So on the whole, I think it is more likely than not that the Ferrarese card did indeed feature a devil, shown in or near the base of the building.

However, as I said in my first post above, I don't think the tower was originally intended to represent Hell or a "house of the devil". But at the same time, I don't think it could have been intended as just a "prop for the lightning to strike" either. The similarity to all those 15th and 14th century images of towers being destroyed by divine force (whether the Tower of Babel or some Apocalyptic scene) is too striking for that. That, together with the ranking of the card just after the Devil, definitely gives the impression that the tarot image must have been intended to recall those other images of divine wrath punishing evil.

I don't see the Viéville/Belgian design as introducing any real uncertainty about the original presence of the tower, because the transformation from tower to tree is all too easy to explain. Indeed, the tower on the Budapest card actually looks like an earlier stage in that transformation, halfway between the Cary Sheet tower and the Viéville tree. The Viéville tree would have simply been a modification of an image something like the Budapest card but with some kind of livestock present, like the Cary Sheet cow.

As for the figures falling and the devil, the test for me in these cases is always to ask
"What is the likelihood of such details being added later if they were not there in the original image?"
And further:
"What is the likelihood of them appearing in multiple design traditions if they were not in the original image that must be the source of all those traditions?"

I think that it's reasonably likely that a falling figure (or two) might have been added to a card that originally just showed a tower struck by lightning, but it is less likely that exactly two figures would have been added in separate design traditions—and that is what we see (Cary/Marseille and also Bologna).

We can assume that there must also have been at least one human figure on the Roman and Sicilian Tower cards too, as the names "casa del dannato" and "novissimo dell'anima" would be exceedingly unlikely without one. However, given the use of singular nouns in those names rather than plural, it's likely that there was just one human figure on those cards, not two.

It's very probable that the human figure on the Minchiate card is derived from the same source as the "damned" human figure that must have appeared on the Roman/Sicilian card, because there are many notable commonalities between the designs of the Roman/Sicilian tarot trumps and the Minchiate trumps.

In other words, we have three design lineages that feature one or two human figures falling (in either the physical sense of falling or the religious sense, or both): Cary/Marseille (which I think of as the Milanese tradition), Bologna, and Minchiate/Rome/Sicily. That's not counting the Viéville/Belgian design, where a standing human figure is present, presumably derived from a falling figure on some earlier card.

The case for a devil being present originally is even stronger: While it's true that a devil was depicted on the Tower of Babel image that Mike found (reproduced in my post above), it still seems fairly unlikely that card designers would have added one to an image of a tower being struck by lightning, even if the image showed people falling from the tower. Yet we have evidence suggesting the presence of a devil on the Tower card in three different design lineages: the Minchiate/Roman/Sicilian lineage (because the earliest Minchiate card shows one and the names of the Roman and Sicilian cards strongly suggest one), the Ferrarese (because the card was called "casa del diavolo" as discussed above), and the Milanese (because of the otherwise inexplicable prominence of the cow's head on the Cary Sheet card).
Last edited by Nathaniel on 09 Feb 2025, 09:51, edited 1 time in total.

Re: The Tower

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On the question of whether there was a devil on the original Tower card, there is another consideration that has also influenced my thinking, namely the rarity of this card among the surviving cards from the 15th century.

All the trumps in the standard set of 22 are represented by at least two surviving hand-painted cards from 15th century Italy, with just three exceptions: the Popess, the Devil, and the Tower. There is not a single surviving Devil card, and just one example of each of the other two.
(See https://cards.old.no/t/; note that the ones labeled there as "Visconti-Sforza 'clones' " are widely believed to be later forgeries and therefore cannot be reliably included in the count.)

In the case of the Popess, this is partly explainable by the fact that the card is known to have caused offence to the pious in many regions and was evidently eliminated from the deck at least in Florence before the end of the 15th century. In Bologna she was transformed into a second pope and it is quite likely that this also was done as early as the 15th century. So the relative rarity of that card among the survivals is consistent with it being used less than the other trumps at the time.

The scarcity of Devil and Tower cards, on the other hand, has no obvious explanation. It could just be a matter of chance, of course. But the matter is made more intriguing by the fact that these are the only two trumps absent from the Visconti-Sforza deck, and two of just three cards lost from that deck in all the time between its creation and the early 20th century (the third being the Knight of Coins). This recalls the story of the Sicilian deck, where Rosalia Caccamo Massa, duchess of Casteldaci in the mid-18th century, found those two cards so unpleasant that she had them both eliminated and replaced by less distressing images.

Therefore, one can't help wondering if the owners of the Visconti-Sforza deck, and perhaps also the owners of other decks of 15th century hand-painted tarot cards, were similarly disturbed by the sight of those two cards to the point of wanting to rid their decks of them—perhaps simply by storing them separately from the rest of the deck, leading to them then being lost while the rest of the deck survived, or perhaps they found them so horrible that they destroyed them completely.

It is easy to imagine how the Devil card could have caused this degree of repugnance, but it is harder to explain in the case of the Tower card—unless the Tower card also featured a devil, set to grab a hapless human victim (or victims) falling from the tower. As I have outlined above, we have good reasons to believe that this was what many of those earliest Tower cards depicted. In this regard, it is notable that the sole surviving 15th century Tower card is a representative of the most innocuous of all the early design variants: It does not even show the falling human figure(s), let alone a devil; it depicts only a normal building struck by lightning.

So if the rarity of Tower and Devil cards from the 15th century is to be ascribed to something more than chance alone, then the presence of devils on both cards seems the most obvious and likely explanation for their shared fate.

Re: The Tower

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Thanks for the clarifications, Nathaniel. I agree with Ross, except that I would give the smug devil at the bottom around a 25% probability. I am far from reaching a conclusion, however. I am so far just investigating possible sources for the imagery - including of the lightning itself, in combination with falling figures or devils.

I looked at the text that went with the image that I had posted in 2010, Lydgate's Fall of Princes, done in England for Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, 1440-1460 (https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objec ... e707caaf5/). The Bodleian catalog has this ms, Bodley 263 as "1440-1460." There is nothing in the text about devils at the base of the tower, or for that matter people falling from it; there is just the lightning (see https://archive.org/details/lydgatesfal ... 2/mode/2up, starting at line 1172 (you may have to join archive.org to see it, I don't know). Line 1172 reads:
He [God] made with thondir & with leuene liht 1172
Theroff to falle a ful gret partie;
Here "leuene", according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can take the meaning "lightning", and "liht" is light, or at least radiation from a warm object). Here is what I get, in modern English (the rest is just a matter of modernizing the spelling):
He made with thunder and with lightning light [or radiation]
Thereof to fall a full great part;
The boisterous winds and the raging sky,
And God's power on the other side
Went thus to cut off a part of his pride
And in descent and falling of the stones
Of the workmen fully many a man was dead,
And oppressed, their back broken and bones,
The masonry with their blood was red.
Yet Nembroth [Nimrod], who of this work was head,
With all these signs to his Lord neither listens nor knows,
For which his pomp was after brought fully low.)
Then there is Lydgate's source, Laurent de Premierfait, a French author writing in Troyes freely enlarging upon Boccaccio's De Casibus. From what the editor says, the French is much the same as the English (https://archive.org/details/fallofprinc ... 0/mode/2up). For confirmation, if only of the lightning, there is the moralizing lesson the author draws from the story (same page), where he describes the Tower as: "des pierres de babilonne fondee par nembroth qui par la voulente de dieu fut cassee et demolie par vne petite fouldre (of the stones of Babylon which by the will of God were broken and demolished by a little lightning).

Boccaccio himself, who just writes:(https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/De_casib ... lustrium/I):
Quod tam ingens nec ante nec post visum simile edificium, maxima imperantis superbia surgens, dum iam fere nubes actingeret, factum est ut eius repente, seu ventorum impetu seu divine manus inpulsu, non absque maxima obsequentium clade, pars ex sublimi corrueret.

(That such a huge building, never seen before or since, the great pride of the ruler rising, when it almost reached the clouds, it happened that suddenly, either by the force of the winds or pushed by the divine hand, not without great destruction of the submitting, a part of it fell from its height.)
If "obsequentium" means people, the workmen, and not just the stones of the tower, then we at least have people being destroyed, possibly by God's hand. That hand might well be lightning, one of God's favorite means of destruction, as of Job's son's sheep and Sodom and Gomorrah. Yahweh like Jove is a storm god. By itself, these descriptions correspond precisely to the Charles VI and Rosenwald. But there is enough vagueness in the wording to allow for falling figures if an artist chooses.

In fact, figures tumbling from the Tower of Babel are to be seen in a slightly earlier English illumination, a Book of Hours acquired by the Duke of Bedford, regent of France, around 1420 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Hours) and dated a little before. There may be fire - the color at the top is lost - but no devil at the bottom. (This image and many other relevant ones - albeit not the one in my 2010 post and the ones I am adding here - are included in a pretty good web-page on the card at https://tarot-heritage.com/from-trionfi ... the-tower/.)

It is possible that the Budapest Devil was inspired by the Lydgate illustration's devil - they look very similar to me (below: for the whole card, see the previous link). It is late enough: England and northern Italy were connected by trade and diplomacy. But any predecessor to the Charles VI card, ca. 1460, would likely have been too early to exert such influence. Below is the Lydgate, followed by the high resolution color version, then the low-resolution black and white image in Kaplan. It is odd that the two reproductions should suggest a devil in such different ways. The Kaplan is obvious, the colored one less so; the horns can be made out, but the body would seem to be on the left side, as opposed to the right in Kaplan.
Image
Another odd thing is that fire, lightning, falling figures, and devils are not in any of the ancient accounts of the Tower of Babel. Genesis just has confusion of tongues, leading to an abandonment of the project. Other accounts mention winds, and there are early illuminations with wind. It is possible that the Botticelli drawing's horizontal arrows are to indicate wind rather than lightning.
http://www.rosscaldwell.com/images/taro ... dante1.jpg
http://www.rosscaldwell.com/images/taro ... dante2.jpg
In any case, where did the lightning come from?

One possibility is a humanist association to Jupiter's assault on the piled-up mountains as described by Ovid (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/tex ... 3Abook%3D1):
And lest ethereal heights should long remain
less troubled than the earth, the throne of Heaven
was threatened by the Giants; and they piled
mountain on mountain to the lofty stars.
But Jove, omnipotent, shot thunderbolts
through Mount Olympus, and he overturned
from Ossa huge, enormous [Mount] Pelion.
And while these dreadful bodies lay overwhelmed
in their tremendous bulk, (so fame reports)
the Earth was reeking with the copious blood
of her gigantic sons; and thus replete
with moisture she infused the steaming gore
with life renewed.
The 15th century humanists would have viewed this as a classical version of the Bible's story. The metamorphosis here, Ovid goes on to explain, is that from this gore nature fashions humanity, a step up from the giants - even though they, too, reject the gods. Are the giants the same as devils? They seem too primitive to me; but perhaps not for those inspired by Dante (who speaks of Jove's thunderbolts in the same breath as the Tower of Babel).

In those times, too, there was another association to the Tower of Babel. There is a nice web-page with medieval images of the Tower of Babel, http://imaginemdei.blogspot.com/2017/02 ... es-of.html. Toward the bottom (search "holy spirit") is something I found very interesting, an illumination from ca. 1350 Naples that showed the tower with fire from the sun juxtaposed with one of the disciples at Pentecost. It is an example of what was called "allegorical" interpretation: interpreting an Old Testament event in terms of the New Testament, the former prefiguring the latter.
1350_Bible moralisee_Italian (Naples), c. 1350_BNF_MS Francais 9561, fol. 14vLGE.jpg 1350_Bible moralisee_Italian (Naples), c. 1350_BNF_MS Francais 9561, fol. 14vLGE.jpg Viewed 3108 times 101.93 KiB
There are falling figures but again no devil. This web-page shows many other such juxtapositions of the two scenes, Babel and Pentecost. None have the fire and the falling figures, but that doesn't mean there weren't any. The falling figures, if from confusion among the workers, are a good parallel to the confusion of tongues at Pentecost. A devil would have been inappropriate, because there is no parallel at Pentecost.

However, once Babel was used separately from Pentecost, a devil would have fit. In Dante, Nimrod was thought of as one of the race of giants, which in Dante are compared to Satan (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/dante ... io-canto-7)
I saw that one who was created noble
More than all other creatures, down from heaven
Flaming with lightnings fall upon one side.

I saw Briareus smitten by the dart
Celestial, lying on the other side,
Heavy upon the earth by mortal frost.
The first would seem to be Satan. Briareus had been introduced in Inferno XXXI. A footnote refers us to Aeneid X, where he is a member of the race of giants who "flashed fire from fifty mouths" against "the thunderbolts of Jove." Nimrod is, too, but Dante says of him,
I saw, at foot of his great labour, Nimrod,
As if bewildered, looking at the people
Who had been proud with him in Sennaar.
This is not exactly a smug devil. The Botticelli drawing does have a devil, but it is one of the fallen figures, so Satan or Briareus, whom Dante describes as skewered by lightning bolts (absent from Botticelli). It is not a smug devil in the doorway. Botticelli shows Nimrod as an astonished human (again http://www.rosscaldwell.com/images/taro ... dante2.jpg). Nor does anyone else show any but humans standing next to the doorway.

Another allegorical interpretation is what I find in a ca. 1480 manuscript of Laurent's Cas des nobles hommes et femmes malheureux (http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/8/76971). Fire is shown descending from on high onto a tower between a castle and a body of water. On the near side of the water is John the Evangelist, writing, next to his eagle. So the scene is something from the Apocalypse. But since the Apocalypse is not covered in Laurent's work and the Tower of Babel is, it may be another interpretation of the Old Testament in terms of the New.
g35.279vbDET.jpg g35.279vbDET.jpg Viewed 3108 times 48.1 KiB
Nathaniel, I do not think your argument about the Cary Sheet holds much water. The globules on the Cary Sheet connect the scene with depictions of the Apocalypse, in which hail and fire rained on the earth - not just on habitations, but everywhere, even on the animals in the fields. Compare the Cary Sheet with an illumination in the Cloisters Apocalypse (to which I add the Vieville and Flemish cards, for more of the same)
Image
It is really mysterious what the object is whose outline we see on the left margin. Is it a tree, or a crack in the stones? It looks too large to be a person. My guess is a tree. True, the placement of the cow gives me pause. But it mostly looks like just a bewildered farm animal, put next to the tower because of lack of space.

As far as minchiate's "casa del diavolo", that could easily be a later development, coming by way of Italians outside of Ferrara or Venice reading Lollio or tarocchi appropriati with such phrases (even if they stick to local convention for their titles), or seeing Budapest-like cards, or the French hellmouth cards, tarocchi alla francesa. They may have had Ferrara-area antecedents, or else have just been inspired by the phrase "casa del diavolo" that they read. In the Strambotto of ca. 1500 Florence, in contrast, the card is just "saetta" (for those who don't know it, it is in Depaulis's "Early Italian Lists," online in Academia), as in the Sermone de Ludo and other early works. So likely not a "casa del diavolo".

As for the Roman card, if there is a falling figure on the right, I have no answer, other than the same tradition that influenced the "Netherlandish" artist of the Bedford Hours and the Lydgate of the Duke of Gloucester. The Vatican had a large store of illuminated manuscripts. The card is over a century after the ones we know. Anyway, there is no reason to think that a devil is present. It is really hard to make out what is there: do slanting vertical lines with dots in them constitute a tower? I've never seen such a thing. I don't even see flames, as opposed to tears in the paper.

As for your invocation of Villabianca about how the card is about the last judgment, that come from a knowledge of either "house of the damned one" or the minchiate title "house of the devil". With such a title, even an undestroyed tower, such as the Sicilian one we know, can instill dread, as an image of the devil's prison (from which the woman on the minchiate card, now all too conscious of its illusions, is trying to escape - or from which an unfortunate is falling, if such a figure is on that card). If on the other hand it is just a crumbling tower, it serves as a reminder of the Apocalypse, of Nimrod's folly, or of Sodom and Gomorrah, for which the medieval manuscripts also showed fire from on high destroying towers and no devils below.

Another of your arguments has to do with how trumping the Devil means overcoming him; if so, he should be on the card. But the Devil himself is not overcome until just before the Last Judgment, and this is too early in the sequence. The Tower card only shows the destruction of works done by humans in thrall to the devil. If so, it isn't necessary to repeat the image of the devil in the Tower card, or to include falling figures, to achieve the transition from the Devil to the Star.

The destruction of the tower is an object lesson for the reader and viewer: pride cometh before a fall, and we are all powerless against God. So be humble, cultivate meekness, as Laurent's and Lydgate's moralizing sermon after the section on Nimrod proclaims. Taking the lesson to heart then opens the heart to the greater illumination of the Star of Bethlehem, referred to explictly in the d'Este and Rothschild Sheet, implicitly so in the Rosenwald Sheet.

I am reminded here of the third quatrain of advice cited by Andrea Vitale in his essay on the Tower, which is below a picture of an arrow aimed at the bottom of a tower.
fanti_3SM.jpg fanti_3SM.jpg Viewed 3108 times 22.88 KiB
Do not worry about telling people
That the Holy Stone has fallen into your house,
Although nobody usually boasts of such a divine manifestation,
In order to enjoy it as long as possible.
In essence: If a Holy Stone should fall on your house, it is good luck, and it's ok to share the news. That is, destruction from God has a beneficial purpose worth sharing..

Similarly, the fire from the sun is not just destruction but also illumination, in this regard like that at Pentecost, but now about the Devil's promotion of illusions of grandeur. It is the progression from lesser to greater light from Devil to Sun. To convey the lesson of the Tower, all that is needed is what we see in the Charles VI and Rosenwald. Whether there was more is still a thorny problem. There is some precedent, and some consequent, but not a lot.

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The artist of Bodley 263 was illustrating Lydgate's text, which, as a versified paraphrase, expands on his source, Laurent de Premierfait. The text doesn't mention a devil, but only that the desolate tower has now become home to "serpentis and many a gret dragoun". De Premierfait, and Boccaccio's Latin he is translating, only mentions venomous serpents.

Of the figures in the tower, Lydgate says (Book 1.1135-1141; p. 32 at the link https://archive.org/details/fallofprinc ... 2/mode/2up ):

For to this day touchyng the grete myht
Off this tour, which Babel yit men call,
Men fro ful ferr may han therof a syht,
For it surmountith othir touris all.
Off which werk thus it is befall,
Off serpentis and many a gret dragoun
It is now callid cheeff habitacioun.

(my adaptation into modern English:
Even to this day, regarding the great might
Of this tower, which Babel men still call,
From very far one can see the sight,
For it surpasses every other tall.
Of this work, thus it has befallen,
With serpents and many a great dragon,
It is now called the chief habitation. )

Lydgate's is a versified paraphrase, of Laurent de Premierfait's fairly literal translation of Boccaccio, made in about 1400:

Certainnement la grande et merveilleuse moustre de celle tour dure encores jusques a ce temps, si comme ceulz dient qui l'ont veue. Et racomptent que par longue espace de terre — pour Pespoventeur de serpens tresvenimeux dont le lieu est plain — aucun homme n'ose pres approuchier, et tesmoingnent les anciens habitans d'illeuc avoir veu celle tour non pas a la samblance, mais comme un monceau de pierre, a la maniere d'une montaingne soy elevant en une plaingne et monte presques jusques aus nues, laquele est faicte de pierre cuitte a cymant. Lequel ediffiee, sigrant que par adventure ne fut veu son pareil...
(Edition of Stefania Marzano, Édition critique du Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes par Laurent de Premierfait (1400), PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2008, p. 37
https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/server/ap ... be/content )

Indeed, the great and marvelous spectacle of that tower still endures to this day, as those who have seen it say. They recount that over a long expanse of land — because of the fear of very venomous serpents with which the place is filled — no man dares to approach closely, and the old inhabitants there testify to having seen that tower not in appearance, but like a heap of stones, in the manner of a mountain rising in a plain and almost reaching up to the clouds, which is made of baked stone with mortar. This edifice, so significant that perhaps its equal was never seen...

Boccaccio:

Stat equidem huius etiam his diebus – ut hi referunt qui viderunt – spectaculum ingens et admirabile. Aiunt enim, longo terrarum tractu interposito – cum serpentum timore noxiorum, quorum ferax locus est, nemo ausus sit accedere propius – non turris ad instar sed surgentis ex planitie montis, molem fere usque ad nubes ascendentem vidisse, quam cocto latere interlito bitumine constructam testantur etiam habitantes antiqui. Quod tam ingens nec ante nec post visum simile edificium...
http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/testo/bibit001350

Indeed, even to this day—as those who have seen it report—there stands a huge and admirable spectacle. For they say, with a long stretch of land in between—and on account of the fear of harmful serpents, since the place is teeming with them, no one dares to approach closer—not like a tower but like a mountain rising from the plain, they have seen a mass almost reaching up to the clouds, which, constructed with baked brick and bitumen as mortar, is also attested by the ancient inhabitants. This immense building, the likes of which had never been seen before or since...

Re: The Tower

77
Yes, I saw that, at least in Lydgate. (Thanks for the link to Laurent.) But what is the significance of serpents and a dragon? They surely don't inspire the building of the tower. They don't have the same function as devils or giants. And why are they added to the story? The only thing I can think of is that it was to prefigure the great dragon of Revelation 12, who in fact is identified with Satan and on earth because it was hurled out of heaven. However, that is not enough to put him in the doorway of the Tower.

From your link I get the passage in Laurent that interested me:
Comme celle tour par sa haultesse touchast presques aux 35 nues, il advint qu'une tresgrande partie cheit, ou par soubdainnete de vens, ou par ordonnance de la puissance de Dieu ; et illeuc furent accraventez pluseurs des ouvriers de Nembroth.

As that tower by its height nearly touched the 35 clouds, it happened that a very large part fell, either by the suddenness of the wind, or by the ordinance of the power of God; and there were many of the workers of Nembroth accraventez.
Accraventer = acraventer = agraventer = throw down, knock down, crush, humiliate.
https://anglo-norman.net/entry/acraventer.

For most of these, it could mean either at the bottom or to the bottom (except of course as "humiliated") - so, by the stones? by the fall? Or either? It is like "obsequentium" in Boccaccio, another word that is difficult for me.
Last edited by mikeh on 10 Feb 2025, 01:55, edited 1 time in total.

Re: The Tower

78
I don't know where Boccaccio picked up the "infested with noxious serpents" part of the legend. The traveller Benjamin of Tudela in the 12th century says the same thing, as well as attributing the tower's destruction to fire from heaven, but he wrote in Hebrew and I'm not aware of a translation into any language Boccaccio could read (Latin, Italian, French, or Catalan, for instance):
"Thence (from the town of Gazigan or Resen) it is a day's journey to Babylon, which is the Babel of old, that now lies in ruins thirty miles in extent. The ruins of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar are still to be seen there, but people are afraid to enter them on account of the serpents and scorpions. (...)
"Thence (from Hillah) it is four miles to the Tower of Babel, which the generation whose language was confounded, built of the bricks called Agur... At every ten cubits' distance there are slopes which go round the tower by which one can ascend to the top. One can see from there a view twenty miles in extent, as the land is level. There fell fire from heaven into the midst of the tower which split it to its very depths."
- Marcus Nathan Adler, "The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (Continued)", The Jewish Quarterly Review, Volume 17, number 3 (April 1905), pp. 514-530; quote 527-528;
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/145098 ... acceptTC=1
or
Marcus Nathan Adler, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela Critical Text, Translation And Commentary, London, 1907, pp. 42-43
https://archive.org/details/HighRes3288 ... 3/mode/2up
You can see that Tudela actually ascended the tower, which appears to be the ruins of the ziggurat of Borsippa, 11 miles SW of Babylon; the snakes and scorpions live in Babylon itself, where he saw, from a distance, the ruins of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. Boccaccio's description conflates the dangerous serpents with the tower (and also neglects to mention scorpions), so it seems that Tudela cannot be his direct source. Perhaps a garbled transmission of Tudela, or some source I haven't come across yet.

Vittorio Zaccaria's notes to the Nembroth chapter of De casibus virorum illustrium don't mention this passage. See the edition of Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittorio Zaccaria, De casibus virorum illustrium, volume IX of the series Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, editor-in-chief Vittore Branca, Arnoldo Mondadori, 1983, pp. 915-916
https://www.enteboccaccio.it/s/ente-boc ... -set/10276

Lydgate adds dragons to the serpents, perhaps to make it even more mysterious and terrifying, and to make the rhyme "dragoun-habitacioun". I wouldn't think it has anything to do with the Apocalypse.

Re: The Tower

79
The reason why adding a dragon would have to do with the apocalypse is that it would have been part of an accepted and pervasive method of interpretation: seeing Old Testament events as precursors of New Testament events, either typologically or anagogically (see here Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_senses_of_Scripture).

An anagogic parallel would also explain the illustration I showed from a 1480 manuscript of Laurent's text with John the Evangelist across from a tower with fire descending onto it. I could find only two illustrations from this manuscript, both multi-scene, full-page affairs on the Morgan Library site; this is the only scene with anything similar to the Tower of Babel.

And if the parallel leaves out some details, it helps this interpretive method to put them there. So we have the parallel between Babel and Pentecost in numerous medieval manuscripts; Genesis doesn't mention fire descending onto the Tower, but for some, it was there. Similarly, fire from heaven and a great dragon appear in the Apocalypse, presented together in works such as the Cloisters Apocalypse (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/471869), f. 20r, from much the same milieu as Lydgate, Laurent, and their illustrators: Norman France/southern England/Flanders. The same 20r has the cow, tree, and globules as in the Cary Sheet, together with monsters sending fire from heaven (in place of the usual sun, in the Cary Sheet).

The Vulgate's word "draco" includes both serpents and dragons: "et ecce draco magnus rufus habens capita septem et cornua decem et in capitibus suis septem diademata." Moreover, the adjective "gret" before Lydgate's "dragouns" has no particular reason for being there except as an echo of the Vulgate's "draco magnus". Borrowing a phrase from the Apocalypse seems straightforward enough, given the medieval interpretative mindset.

And yes, it would be nice to find a commentator addressing this aspect of the texts.

You haven't said why you think the serpents and dragons are relevant to the Tower card. Are you finding there a devil at the base of the tower, or what?

Re: The Tower

80
You haven't said why you think the serpents and dragons are relevant to the Tower card.
I don't. You're thinking of Nathaniel.
Are you finding there a devil at the base of the tower, or what?
Lydgate's illustrator puts three dragons in the tower of Babel. The one in the doorway has horns and a human face, so he could be taken as devilish. And he has a tail, but no legs, so I find him rather ambivalent.

In any case, Lydgate and his illustrator are irrelevant to the Ur-Tarot design of this card, which is what my comments quoted by Nathaniel were addressing. He believes there should have been four essential details in the original card, the fourth of which was a devil, which he sees as emerging to snatch a figure falling from the tower as it is destroyed. He speculates that such a devil evolved into the cow's head seen in the Cary Sheet. He hypothesizes that this evolution, like other differences in the design of the card in various decks, might be attributed to superstitious fear of what it represented.

Boccaccio only mentions serpents inhabiting the place (not only the tower, but the whole region around it, which is why people were afraid to approach it). I cited Boccaccio and De Premierfait in order to show that Lydgate invented two details which are in neither De Premierfait his source nor Boccaccio, that inform the illustration: thunder and lightning (leuen liht, "lightning-flash"), and "many a great dragon." Whether the dragon in the doorway is a devil from hell is an arguable point. But however we interpret it, it is not directly relevant to Tarot.

Two other of Nathaniel's supporting proofs for his fourth point are the name of the card "Casa del diavolo" and the image in Minchiate (which I speculated might represent the Rape of Proserpina (modern commentators prefer "abduction" to "rape"), to which Nathaniel provided Aretino's remarks in Le carte parlanti, in agreement with my interpretation). But these points aren't related to Lydgate's image.