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.

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
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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
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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)
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
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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.