viewtopic.php?f=11&t=901
... Phaeded and me had in snippets this exchange
...Huck wrote:
We have, that the first sign of illustrated Petrarca "Trionfi poem" editions happens in January 1441, so "after" the battle of Anghiari, not before. Naturally one doesn't know if this "after" is totally sure ... one doesn't know, what one overlooks. Similar we have the Trionfi deck September 1440 "after" the battle of Anghiari, as the first evidence, that a card deck was named "Trionfi". Similar we can't be sure, that there was nothing before, but considerable research was done without success in both cases.
....Phaeded wrote:Huck,
For the record, I find the Bruni/Arezzo/Albizzi faction much more interesting than the Petrarch angle (Petrarch's Trionfi series simply did not form the basis of the trump series).
...Huck wrote:
We have a Cupido at the love card. We have a female charioteer (Chastity). We have a Death card. We have Fame = World in the Cary-Yale (symbol "winged trumpet"). We have a Hermit as Father Time. We have symbols, which might be interpreted as Eternity. So ... why we don't have Petrarca symbols at the base of development?
To 1. We have other subgroups in the Trionfi or Tarot series (3 or 4 or 7 virtues, Sun-Moon-Star as a Trio, the six persons 0-6 etc.), so it isn't so astonishing, that we have also Petrarca's group.Phaeded wrote:
I don't want to belabor this point too much as it will lead off onto another tangent best dealt with in another thread, but there are way too many problems with seeing Petrarch's trionfi as anything more than a secondary means of informing the meaning of some of the cards. Just a few problems with the Petrarch thesis:
1. 6 subjects has no relationship to a series of 14, 16 or 22 subjects. No one posits trioni started out even as 12 cards (Petarch's themes plus exemplars).
2. Petrarch only describes the Love triumph (gods and heroes driven before Love) and that has almost nothing to do with the iconography of either the marriage themes of CY and PMB or the courting scene of CVI.
3. The winged trumpet is already irrelvant by the time of the PMB (which shows a city, not "the world")- there is nothing in the PMB "world" card that says "fame"; ergo, why would that be the World card's primary meaning?
4. Chasity is a bit hard to explain when the charioteer becames male - so again, like "world/fame", was that really the primary meaning of the card?
5. "We have symbols, which might be interpreted as Eternity." No we don't, not in the the earliest CY and PMB decks. There simply is not a single card in either of those decks that can be objectively labeled as "eternity" as its principal meaning.
To 2. Well, it's stated, that the Petrarca's real Trionfi poem and the following 6-Trionfi-as-pictures fashion had their differences, nonetheless a form of standard iconography for the poem was arranged after 1441 ... with some similarity to some of the Trionfi cards.
To 3. I didn't state, that the PMB included a fame card. A specific Cary-Yale-Tarocchi card has the "winged trumpet. You seem to be fixed on the idea, that the PMB is a prolongation of just the Cary-Yale Tarocchi. But there are various differences between the both decks. And when we're interested to study the question of the origin of the Trionfi cards around 1440, we don't know about the PMB, as this is from a later time. The Cary-Yale Tarocchi might have played a role.
To 4. In the earliest decks the charioteer is female, so again, when we're interested to study the earliest Trionfi decks, we cannot "invent" the condition, that the charioteer was male. Naturally it might be, that around 1440 already Trionfi decks existed, which had a male charioteer, but we have no evidence. The female charioteer isn't so surprising, as there were bride journeys and if these brides were expected to present a virtue, then it should have been "Chastity" in any case, this was important.
To 5. We have the Cary-Yale Judgment card. 2 angles above with trumpets, 3 persons below raised from the death. At the right a Tower with a very large door, possibly the way to paradise (including the interest to connect this deck to the Chess game). Is it impossible, that the time of 1440 recognized this as a possible iconographic expression of eternity? What do we know? We cannot trust in the iconographic value of later Trionfi decks. PMB has a godfather on top of judgment. Could we assume, that godfather belongs to time and NOT to eternity?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... ernity.jpg
Collected by Michael Hurst, and too late to be really of interest, this seems to have been a way to present eternity. The left picture is somehow near to Judgment, though it has elements of the "15 signs of last judgment", which we discussed here:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=865