This is where, I would suggest, a wide variety of sources for both the single images as well as the sequence, and their uses in contemporary (and earlier) places, becomes useful to aid in solving the development and 'mutations' of tarot.
So let's again pick up one of Michael's early comments in this thread, viz:
I would suggest that this is quite legitimate and useful in solving the many riddles, both iconographic as well as historical, that tarot brings our way.Those who feel compelled to escape the actual provenance of the work, deconstruct the cycle, and focus their attentions on what the individual pieces meant in other contexts
Certainly it is important to eventually be able to account for card sequence, but the lot may have various influences, from some that Michael suggests, to later influences that may (... I know which forum area I'm in...) even include, as an example, Mark Filipas's abecederium idea. After all, both the images of very early design (as in the hand painted Visconti-Sforza decks and cognates) and the possible sequence (and even total number of cards) is at variance with what becomes 'canonised' as what we now term the 'Marseille' (whether as Tarot de Marseille-I or dM-II).
AND these are quite distinct to whatever different influence may have been at play in decks such as the Vieville and anonymous Paris decks of the same period as the Tarot de Marseille.
...of course these last three examples are later by a couple of centuries to the 15th C. hand-painted northern Italian decks. Yet it is those that become 'canon', and not the hand-painted ones: it is, as example, Empress and Emperor, not individuals with ducal crowns of a local family.
