Re: The Chariot

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Good, I guess. That one is a herald's stick, like Mercury's caduceus. This one does seems to be just a stick, maybe with a circle on the end that's faded. But what is that where the gold dots are, above his hand? An artist's mistake? The gold dots are strange and probably misleading. i am not at all sure what or who this little angel is supposed to be. When I connected the World card with Fame, I was only referring to the CY and Catania/Charles VI card. And now I don't know. I do like Nathaniel's idea of connecting it with the figure on top of the Metropolitan Chariot. But I don't know if he has a wing or a flag. If it is a wing (more likely), it should also be connected with the Metropolitan card's angel.. All I can think of is God's Love, or the Eros of Hesiod and the Orphics. The Metropolitan Angel with its hands around a globe lacks any suggestion of Fame except wings, but wings don't always mean Fame. It is more like Providence, i.e. God's Love. And that could apply to the Charles VI and Catania, too, I suppose. And especially to the lady with the sail, on another deck. Well, it's a quandary.
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How do you upload images on this Forum? I don't like doing it the way I have been, by posting them to a blog first.

Re: The Chariot

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I have a theory about the d'Este card. The small boy suggests Eros. That he is sitting on a world with symbols of authority in his hands indicates his rulership of the world . That fits the Orphic hymn to Eros, of which the Taylor translation is online, https://www.theoi.com/Text/OrphicHymns2.html#57.
I call great Cupid [Eros], source of sweet delight, holy and pure, and lovely to the sight;
Darting, and wing'd, impetuous fierce desire, with Gods and mortals playing, wand'ring fire:
Cautious, and two-fold, keeper of the keys of heav'n and earth, the air, and spreading seas;
Of all that Ceres' [Deo's] fertile realms contains, by which th' all-parent Goddess life sustains,
Or dismal Tartarus is doom'd to keep, widely extended, or the sounding, deep;
For thee, all Nature's various realms obey, who rul'st alone, with universal sway.
Come, blessed pow'r, regard these mystic fires, and far avert, unlawful mad desires.
According to the translator's introduction to another translation (the hymn itself isn't online, but the introduction to the hymns is), the Orphic Hymns first arrived in Italy in 1423, with several more following, and by 1550 there were 36 codices now extant. So pretty well known. https://books.google.com/books?id=TTo3r ... es&f=false. Eros is a fitting god for a marriage deck, as this one is, between Este and Aragon.

Then the little guy, apparently with wings, on the Metropolitan Chariot card is also the Orphic Eros., with his passengers being Dionysus and Ariadne, or in general the people on the Love card. There is an Orphic medallion that is similar. I seem to see the faint outlines of wings on the boy holding the reins. It makes sense that he would be Eros, the desire for unity with the divine of the Orphics, while it is Mercury that knows the path. Er And it is not so much Dionysus and Ariadne as the male and female initiates into his cult:
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.

The Estense were great collectors of buried antiquities.

Then for the Metropolitan card, it is another world-ruler, but less like Eros. Perhaps Sophia, God's Wisdom, of whom it was said, "She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well" (Wis. 8:1), or the anima mundi of the Timaeus. Or God's Providence.

What does that do to my analysis of the "Alessandro Sforza" and "Charles VI" World cards? It makes the interpretation much murkier. I was seeing the baton and ball as attributes of Fame, when they might be attributes of rulership. I have four arguments for its being Fame, three now rather weak: (1) its position in the sequence, similar to Fame's in Petrarch, if we assume that Time is out of sequence; (2) a certain similarity to the CY card; (3) that these attributes are common on Fame illustrations; and (4) most importantly, the birth tray by Lo Scheggia, where Fama stands on a globe. I say most importantly, because arguments 1-3 are pretty weak, seeing as Fame could also be the Chariot, out of place like Time, and the Florentine World cards are enough different from the CY to make the comparison questionable. What is significant about the birth tray is that it is not much later than when the fashion for Trionfi illustrations began earlier in the decade, and that the artist, Lo Scheggia is a known producer of playing cards whose work bears rather unique resemblance to the "Alessandro Sforza" cards, especially the stag-rider. On the other side, the Florentine World-lady could be a world-ruler, like on the Metropolitan, or Providence, like on the Leber card. With the allegory unclear, that is all the more reason just to call the card "The World", even if the lady is just as prominent. So yes, thanks, Nathaniel.
Last edited by mikeh on 10 Mar 2020, 07:11, edited 3 times in total.

Re: The Chariot

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mikeh wrote:
Two problems: first, to explain "mundus parvus" you need to find a little world on the Chariot cards, not an angel or putto or Mercury. "Mundus" is the operative word. It's there on some Chariot cards: the globe in the guy's hand, divided into three parts, for Asia, Africa, and Europe
.
A good point... And one that I would have been aware of already if I had bothered to do just a little more research on this forum beforehand, because I found a post from Phaeded just over a year ago where Phaeded made essentially the same point, that the traditional orb design resembles the medieval T-O world map. However, I still think the overall resemblance between the Chariot figure and the World figure is relevant to understanding the mundus parvus name. I don't have a crystal ball that tells me anything either, so all we can do is try to work out what is most likely by examining the details we see on the surviving cards and comparing those to the names given to the cards by the players. (Regarding the latter point, I don't think it's terribly significant that the list of names in the Steele Sermon was recorded by a clergyman in a sermon; all of the other names in the list seem to accord with the names of the cards used by the players in later eras as well, so I think we can safely assume that mundus parvus and Dio Padre were also names actually used by players at the time, especially as the latter was written in the vernacular like most of the others, and not in Latin.)

And as in all things, it seems, my interpretations of what we see on the cards are simpler and less convoluted than yours and Huck's, and are based more directly on what seems obvious, without introducing more speculation and fanciful association than absolutely necessary... ;-)

As the Budapest/Metropolitan Chariot card and the Este World card were central to my discussion and you were having difficulty interpreting the imagery on both of them, I'll describe what I see on them first.
a card that perhaps had no world in it (at least I don't see one on the Metropolitan card, nor anybody who could be holding a little globe)
.
There is an orb with the classic T-O design fairly clearly visible on the Budapest/Met Chariot card, but it deviates significantly from the way it usually appears on Chariot cards, and the significance of that deviation was not apparent to me before I saw Phaeded's observation about the T-O map: The orb is somewhat larger than usual and is placed below the charioteer's feet. Can you see it? (I don't want to insert new copies of the cards here; I figure people can just scroll back up to the images of the cards in the previous posts, and the images shown there are quite clear enough.)

The relevance to our discussion of its unusal position there is fairly obvious, no? I also think it's clear that the figure has wings—that triangular object looks much more like a wing than a flag. Again, this is a striking departure from the usual image: No other surviving Chariot card shows wings on the charioteer. Again, a connection to the World card imagery is highly likely, not just on the World card in the same deck, but also on the Este World card, as I said before.

Moving on now to that Este card: Yes, it's a beautifully clear image of that card. I was pleased to discover it. It comes from this website, which has a wealth of high-resolution images of the early hand-painted cards: http://cards.old.no/t/ (the main page is also full of great stuff: http://cards.old.no/ )

First, you asked " But what is that where the gold dots are, above his hand? An artist's mistake?" No. It's just part of the gold decoration on the background, which is visible here through the gaps between the cherub's arm, the baton/scepter, and the cherub's body. It's confusing because the part of the baton there is not the same color as the rest of the baton (presumably because the paint has flaked off in that section). It looks to me as if there was also originally a golden ball on the top of that baton, almost all sign of which has now faded away; this would be appropriate as the baton was almost certainly intended as a scepter, to go with the orb in the cherub's other hand.

As Huck pointed out, that orb there is surmounted by the usual cross. This type of orb was known in Latin as the globus cruciger. As I'm sure you are aware, our word "orb" comes from another Latin term, orbis, which also meant "world" and became associated with the orb because the latter symbolized Christ's dominion over the world. So both words "globe" and "orb" are tied up with the symbolic connection between such orbs and the world. This is how Wikipedia summarizes the symbolism of it in medieval and Renaissance times:
The globus cruciger (Latin for "cross-bearing orb"), also known as "the orb and cross", is an orb (Latin: globus) surmounted (Latin: gerere, to wear) by a cross (Latin: crux). It has been a Christian symbol of authority since the Middle Ages, used on coins, in iconography, and with a sceptre as royal regalia.
The cross represents Christ's dominion over the orb of the world, literally held in the hand of an earthly ruler.
[..] Holding the world in one's hand, or, more ominously, under one's foot, has been a symbol since antiquity. [..] With the growth of Christianity in the 5th century, the orb (in Latin works orbis terrarum, the 'world of the lands', whence "orb" derives) was surmounted with a cross, hence globus cruciger, symbolising the Christian God's dominion of the world. [...] Although the globe symbolized the whole Earth, many Christian rulers, some of them not even sovereign, who reigned over small territories of the Earth, used it symbolically.
On the World cards, the orb, usually accompanied by a scepter, acted as a symbol of rulership and dominion over the world. The world is always below the figure, usually with the figure standing on it, emphasizing the figure's dominion over it. The symbolism of the orb in this respect is particularly vivid on the Tarot de Paris World card, where the orb and the world are literally made one: The allegorical figure is shown standing on a stylized globe designed to look like a royal orb, a globus cruciger.

The dominion over the world symbolized by this image was most likely understood to be God's divine dominion, as the figure was also given a halo and/or wings on several of the early cards, and its position in all trump orders after or immediately before the Last Judgment/Angel reinforces this divine aspect. (This is incidentally one of the few aspects of the Petrarchan symbolism of the Cary Yale deck which seems to have survived into the later decks more or less intact, even though the crowns from the CY World's Triumph of Eternity image were not preserved; however, I very much doubt that people at that stage consciously associated the card with Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity, any more than they appear to have associated the Triumph poems with any of the other cards.)

On the Chariot cards, on the other hand, the orb does not appear as often, and is not as consistently accompanied by a scepter. Sometimes the charioteer holds only a baton or scepter and no orb, or only an orb and no scepter, and sometimes neither. The most obvious explanation of this variation in attributes is that the charioteer was in most cases simply being portrayed as a triumphator, with no particular allegorical meaning: a male figure holding weaponry or symbols of dominion over the conquered (scepter and/or orb).

So the basic significance of the orb was somewhat different on the two different cards. However, it resulted coincidentally in a certain resemblance between the two figures, and that resemblance, coupled with the broader symbolic association of the orb with the world, is, I believe, what gave rise to the mundus parvus name.

To describe how I think this happened, here's a revised summary of how I see the development of the Chariot card, from the Cary Yale deck through to the mundus parvus:

In the Cary Yale deck, the Chariot card represented Petrarch's Triumph of Chastity/Pudicitia, as indicated fairly unequivocally by the shield prominently held by the female allegorical figure on the chariot, who holds a baton or wand in her other hand.

The PMB and Issy Chariot cards also displayed a female allegorical figure, but now the allegory appears to be that of Fame, depicted in a very conventional way on the Issy card as a woman holding a sword and orb and riding a chariot, and in a rather less conventional way on the PMB (due to the influence of the earlier CY design, stronger in this Milanese deck than in the other decks from this era) where the figure is a woman holding a baton or scepter and orb, riding a chariot pulled by winged horses. The wings appear to have been added to make the Fame association clear because the figure lacked the sword one would expect to see in Fame's right hand.

On all the later Chariot cards, the figure is no longer female and no longer seems to have any allegorical significance at all; the objects the now male figure is shown holding don't seem to signify anything other than that the charioteer is a triumphator, riding his triumphal chariot, and the name used for the card in the Steele Sermon reflects this: "Lo Caro Triumphale." Often the figure holds a a scepter or baton and/or an orb, and those objects can be assumed to have had much the same significance as the axe on the Charles VI card and the sword on the Beaux Arts/Rothschild card, namely signifying a triumphant conqueror, in his new dominion over the conquered territory.

At this stage, some people began to notice the similarity between the Chariot figure and the World figure: in at least some decks, both figures would have been holding an orb and scepter/baton. The orb in the hand of the World figure—which was a remarkably consistent feature of the that card in the early decks, absent only from the PMB and Budapest/Metropolitan cards (where the figures are simply angels)—was naturally associated very strongly with the orbis terrarum, the world, which always appeared on the card too. So the similarity of the two figures and the fact that they were both holding orbs seems to have led players to dub the Chariot card the "little World", mundus parvus in the Steele Sermon.

Because the Sermon comes from the Ferrara region in the later decades of the fifteenth century, we can assume that this "little World" name was in use in that region at that time. The sole surviving Chariot card attributed to Ferrara at that time shows a design that looks inspired directly by that name: The charioteer on the Budapest/Met card is displayed as a cherub-like naked winged figure very similar to the cherub on the slightly later Este World card (likewise from Ferrara) and somewhat similar to the angel on the Budapest/Met World card, and appears to be standing on the orb, much as the World figure is always shown on top of the landscape-globe. These two aspects—the winged cherub and the orb's position below its feet—represent a rather striking departure from every other surviving Chariot card before and after, so I feel certain that they must have been a result of the mundus parvus name, which must therefore already have been in use in the Ferrara region at that time. It also seems likely that this Chariot card was copied from an earlier deck in which the World card looked more like the Este card, giving a stronger correspondence between the imagery on the two cards.

It seems that we don't know what happened to the Chariot card in the Ferrara region after this because we have no surviving Chariot cards from that area after that date. But certainly in all other regions, with the possible exception of Bologna, the resemblance between the Chariot card and the World card was limited at best, and players and card designers in those regions do not seem to have formed this connection between the cards that people in Ferrara did, either in the names or in the imagery.

Re: The Chariot

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mikeh wrote: 08 Mar 2020, 13:49 How do you upload images on this Forum? I don't like doing it the way I have been, by posting them to a blog first.
I post it to a domain, which I have, "a-tarot.eu". I own that. This is likely the same way, as you do it with your blog. Pictures need a webadress.

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Probably one could declare all putti to "somehow Eros". PMB-2 has putti on Sun (1) and World card (2).
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Figures comparable to the early World-putti appear also on the Minchiate "World" (trump 39).
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: The Chariot

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https://www.google.de/search?q=Minchiat ... 65M:&vet=1
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Chariot with nude female rider and "Viva Viva" (Minchiate "alla Colomba" 1750/1760 Bologna ?)
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Fama from same deck with "Fama Volat"

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https://research.britishmuseum.org/rese ... 6&partId=1

"Tarot pack: incomplete pack with 66 of 97 playing-cards for Minchiate. hand-coloured woodcut, Backs printed in black with a figure of Orpheus, 18th Century"

"The atutti "Fame" and "The Chariot" are lettered "Fama Vola"."
Curator's comments: "This pack is similar to 1896,0501.103. The cards are very coarsely executed and coloured. On the 4 of coins is a woman riding an elephant. The missing cards are the 4 and 10 of cups, and atutti Nos. I-IX and XVI-XXXV. This is assumed to be part of a Minchiate pack, the coin suit-marks having human heads, and the sword cards being decorated with figures of animals; but the knights are men on horseback as in the tarocchi packs, instead of monsters with human bodies."

My comment: The deck belongs to the unsolved object "Lucca Tarocchi".
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FAMA VOLA at top of Chariot, card 10 ... difficult to decipher cause of the dark background
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FAMA VOLA at bottom of Fama, card 40

One has to consider, that in the shortened trump series of the Lucca Tarocchi the card X (=10) has the role of the lowest trump (which gets a success bonus of 5 points, if you capture with it a trump or if you capture the card from somebody else). This might have caused the double "FAMA VOLA" in the deck.


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Female riders on the Trionfi chariots appear in Cary-Yale, PMB (here in the style of "horses with wings", as the single example), Issy-les-Moulineaux (given to Ferrara, a group of women) and a printed deck in Ferrarese number style (a half card with also a group women)

Nude female riders are typical for Minchiate decks.

http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/decks07/d05115/d05115.htm
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https://research.britishmuseum.org/rese ... 8&partid=1
Image
Huck
http://trionfi.com

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So you have to import images and not upload them directly. Well, if anybody knows a way, please tell us.

These Minchiate cards are surely allegorical - naked women on chariots can't be taken literally. I would have thought someone in the 17th or 18th century would have talked about the allegory, but I don't know of anybody. Naked women where you wouldn't expect them are goddesses or nymphs. Someone apparently thought they were Fama, judging from the labels. But they aren't always there. Of course the Phaedrus fits perfectly: Beauty, which inspires lust in the dark horse and makes the charioteer bow down in awe at the memory of Beauty seen before birth in heaven, a flying Glory. And also, Fame flies, and is fleeting. One of the horses even looks at the other, the one with a rider. Very consistent with the Cary-Yale and PMB cards, as though combining the motifs of both (i.e. the rider on the noble horse from the CY, the goddess of the PMB, who there is not only a goddess, but also Bianca Maria).

I am working on a reply to Nathaniel. He is a hard act to follow. Meanwhile, here's another:, the Leber. Not Fama, as far as I can tell.
Image
from
http://pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/2009/04 ... tarot.html

about which Michael said:
The motto of the Chariot is Victoriae Premium (right), the reward of victory. This is about as straightforward as imaginable, given that the celebration of a Roman triumph was a reward for a great military victory.

Re: The Chariot

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For the development of Germini/Minchiate we have the impact of a satyric poem in 1553, in which the 4 virtues 16-17-18-19 are compared to 4 bordell-mothers. A triumphal nude (number 10) would fit the scheme.
We have no good idea, when the more or less stable iconography of the trumps of Minchiate has developed. We have a date, when the Medici became dukes and when they became grand-dukes. We have a suspicious crown symbol in the Minchiate version, which behaved stable.

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number 5 with crown, lowest card of 5-15


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number 16 with crown, lowest card of 16-35


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number 36 with crown, lowest card of 36-40
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: The Chariot

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Nethaniel wrote,
On the World cards, the orb, usually accompanied by a scepter, acted as a symbol of rulership and dominion over the world. The world is always below the figure, usually with the figure standing on it, emphasizing the figure's dominion over it. The symbolism of the orb in this respect is particularly vivid on the Tarot de Paris World card, where the orb and the world are literally made one: The allegorical figure is shown standing on a stylized globe designed to look like a royal orb, a globus cruciger.

The dominion over the world symbolized by this image was most likely understood to be God's divine dominion, as the figure was also given a halo and/or wings on several of the early cards, and its position in all trump orders after or immediately before the Last Judgment/Angel reinforces this divine aspect. (This is incidentally one of the few aspects of the Petrarchan symbolism of the Cary Yale deck which seems to have survived into the later decks more or less intact, even though the crowns from the CY World's Triumph of Eternity image were not preserved; however, I very much doubt that people at that stage consciously associated the card with Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity, any more than they appear to have associated the Triumph poems with any of the other cards.)
This, as well as the Wikipedia account, seems to me a little oversimplified. A cross means Christ, "savior of the world", as Wikipedia puts it, not to mention it again. There is also, "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son." So when an Emperor carries the orb, it is not only dominion but care and love; he is even their earthly salvation. God's love for man (agape) and man's love for God (eros) was a continual theme in 15th century Florence, e.g. Ficino. If the figure on the World expresses that love, then the message is that He cares for us in this world, and moreover has secured a good place for us beyond it, as well as messengers (angeli) to help us get there.
Image
It seems to me that the "Charles VI" image was inspired by the guide in Boccaccio's Amorosa Visione, who appears to the narrator in a dream and wants to lead him through a narrow gate up a difficult path to the heights. Boccaccio describes her.
(p. 7, Hollander translation):
....I raised my eyes to her blonde head
adorned with a crown and more splendid
and fair then the sun, and her comely
clothing seemed to be of a violet hue.
Smiling, she had in her right hand
a royal scepter, enclosed in her left
she held up a beautiful golden apple.
Her description rather closely matches the lady on the "Charles VI" card, except for not standing on a circle with hills and castles on it. And it is not quite an apple.

She urges him to follow her through the narrow gate" toward "the high place where your soul will be in glory [gloria]." But hewants first to go nearby, where he hears "festive sounds." The entrance hall is lined with frescoes. The first one features a beautiful lady with figures from history at her feet, all philosophers or poets. She holds a book and scepter, typical attributes, of Wisdom. The next fresco has another beautiful lady; besides the ubiquitous golden apple, she holds a sword. A banner overhead proclaims her as "the Fame of worldly folk"; the people around her are mostly people who won fame by force of arms. Then come Wealth and Love, surrounded by famous rich men and lovers . In the next room he sees, triumphing over all, Fortune and her companion Death. He then meets his dream-beloved and after getting acquainted (although she is the Fiametta of previous poems) the two resolve to undertake the trek up the mountain together. Then he backslides, but the intent was there.

Of interest here is the figure of earthly glory. He says (p. 29) that "around about this supreme lady ...was a perfect circle" declaring:
I do not believe there can be anything
in the whole world, town or country, domestic or foreign,
which would not appear within this circle.
This lady in the fresco is inside the circle, which goes "from beneath her feet to above her head," as in Pesellino's "Triumph of Fame" (second left above) The card's designer seems to have taken the circle from one section of the poem and placed it below the lady of another section. It seems to me a matter of where the two ladies consider home: one in the world and the other above it, since she wants to lead the narrator on a steep path going above the plain into the heights.

For the World card, it is the first lady that is of interest. Modern commentators have called her "Virtue in general" and "Celestial Venus." among other things. In the context of the poem, "Divine Love" also would be appropriate, in the sense of a God's care for humanity manifesting in a heaven-sent guide. to the path that Boccaccio later calls "honest love". If so, the apple could serve not only to glorify her but offer the gift of eternal happiness to the narrator. (The golden apple, mythologically, is both the prize - the apple of Discord - awarded by Paris and the treasure of Hera stolen, or rescued, by Hercules.) This eternal happiness is glory in a different sense from Petrarch's, which is the fame of special people who tower over the rest in this world. In Florence it is primarily a game of the people. Everyone can aspire to the esteem of Heaven, even if no one fully deserves it. By disregarding earthly fame, one can focus on achieving eternal Glory (which does not negate earthly glory, if it happens), the gift of God's love, which is the goal of the mountain climb, the climb being the life of virtue. When a lady holds out a golden globe, it is a prize as well as an attribute. "Fama" and "gloria" are fairly equivalent, both can be qualified by "earthly" and "heavenly".

There is also the Bolognese card. It seems to me to be Mercury, even if the caduceus is not quite right. Raphael in this fresco series (the Farnesina) portrayed Mercury's staff variously, including just a rod, disappearing into the border, and with a trumpet; this is the only one where there are clearly snakes on the rod. See the views featuring Mercury at https://www.wga.hu/html_m/r/raphael/5roma/4a/index.html. The main thing is that it is a herald's staff. In the context of the fresco, he is the conveyor of Psyche, allegorically the soul, to Olympus, allegorically heaven. It is also irrelevant that he is naked; the card maker doesn't want to give offense.
Image


It is also relevant to see how the card serves its possessor in the game: it is the second most powerful card and can win many points when the score is totaled at the end of the game. He can still lose it to the Judgment card, but hopefully that won't happen, if he plays his cards right." That, I think, is how this card lives up to its appearance,having the trappings of Fame but not the same fame as a lower card in the deck. In other words, the figure on the "Charles VI" is saying, this golden ball can be yours. Her hand with the golden globe is outstretched, not held close to the body like the Emperor's.

Nathaniel wrote,
On the Chariot cards, on the other hand, the orb does not appear as often, and is not as consistently accompanied by a scepter. Sometimes the charioteer holds only a baton or scepter and no orb, or only an orb and no scepter, and sometimes neither. The most obvious explanation of this variation in attributes is that the charioteer was in most cases simply being portrayed as a triumphator, with no particular allegorical meaning: a male figure holding weaponry or symbols of dominion over the conquered (scepter and/or orb).

So the basic significance of the orb was somewhat different on the two different cards. However, it resulted coincidentally in a certain resemblance between the two figures, and that resemblance, coupled with the broader symbolic association of the orb with the world, is, I believe, what gave rise to the mundus parvus name.
This type of "lowest common denominator" reasoning is illegitimate. If an old man with wings is on a card, given the expression "Time flies" and "triumph of Time" illustrations in nearby places, and times, we have Time, regardless of what happens later. That it changes to an hourglass only confirms our guess. Even an old man by himself, in the context of the sequence, where it occurs near the Death card, suggests at least that life is short, and death is in our future. That is not true, however, when there is an hourglass or wings. When there is a lantern, that, too, is allegorical: illumination in a different sense, and darkness ahead of him in an allegorical sense, too.

It is similar for the Chariot card. The horses are allegorical and so is the chariot: they symbolize victory. All the cards around it in the sequence are allegorical. The scepter gives the victor more authority. The orb, when divided into three, suggests the extent of his triumph, of global proportions, all three continents. If it is being held out, then it has additional significance: it is the prize for the victory that has been won, and if there is a cross, then a prize with Christian significance. The rider is then either Fama or the triumphator himself or herself, holding the prize, a symbol of righteous triumph. When the orb is absent, as in the "Charles VI", then we have something else. It is still allegorical: the halbern is the weapon of the foot-soldier, the victorious citizen-soldier of Florence, exhibiting masculine pudicitia under Medici leadership. The halbern warns others against challenging that victory.
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Other early decks have feminine figures on top; whether they can be identified as Pudicitia is unclear. The chariot in itself does not indicate fame. Chariots appear on the mid-century illustrations of all six Petrarchan triumphs: Fame is not unique. The animal-drawn chariot signifies a triumph. What kind of triumph depends on who is on the chariot. Again, there is no such thing as "just a triumphator", because there are many sorts of triumphators. Well, perhaps you mean the archetypal triumphator, the one in the Roman triumphs. Well and good: but it is the victory of what? A male, if his dress or bearing indicates bravery and skill in overcoming foes or maintaining his honor or that of his country, is an example of male pudicitia, for him and his army. Again, given that the cards above and below this card are allegorical (in all of its various placements), and the items that he carries, too, and his horses and vehicle, it would be strange if he himself was not allegorical, It can be generalized to other types of achievement requiring judicious, effective discipline in the face of risk, ruled by reason. I would perhaps not say "pudicitia" unless it was in the context of other cards and Petrarch's whole sequence. But that is the context that exists.

When a woman is on top, a sword as much as a shield associates the figure on top with Pudicitia, the combatant of Petrarch's poem, even if there her only offensive weapon appears to be chains. In the original [Psychomachia of Prudentius, Pudicitia "pierces Libido's throat" with a sword (Katzenellenbogen Allegories of the Virtues and Vices, p. 2 and note 1). In the Issy, the sword seems for defensive purposes only. ""Be nice to me or I'll cut your balls off," she seems to say, as Ross observed earlier in this thread. She, like the lady in the two Bembo cards, might also refer to an actual lady, perhaps the same one, since Bianca Maria is said to have preferred red. Red is the color of Mars and her birth month, March. She is a warrior, but warrior for what? I think Pudicitia is also suggested by the abundance of ladies: she is their queen. There is also the story about how Bianca Maria had her husband's lover poisoned, after which he was more circumspect in his affairs (or maybe stopped having them, I'm not sure). And as for flying horses, they were seen on depictions of the chariots of the sun and moon. The winged horses in Plato's Phaedrus are in a similar lofty place, which might put Bianca Maria in that place, too.

Do these Chariot cards represent Worldly Fame? In part, since attributes of Fame, from the Petrachan "trionfi" illustrations, are there. In the Florentine cards, the hand with the golden globe is outstretched, just as on the World card, as though offering a prize that will convey fame. But a prize and fame for what? Not just victory, but victory earned by Pudicitia, male or female (and feminine charioteers can award masculine fama). Pudicitia and victory bring fame. But it is fame before death, as indicated also by the card's place in the sequence, as opposed to similar attributes in the World card, as we see in the two the Catania cards and the two Rosenwald cards. The World card is after Death, and so the glory of God, Christ, and the virtuous soul

Yes, unclarity remains, then as now. Yes, it is no wonder that the card became known simply as "Carro" without further specification, just as the other became simply "World". However a relationship to Petrarch's "Triumph of Pudicitia", I hope, is at least plausible, for the earliest cards, as opposed to Petrarch's "Triumph of Fame", which was concerned with Fame after death. In the Florentine cards, this Fame becomes Christ's glory and the hope of glory for His followers, but a different kind of glory than on the Chariot card. The one is in the little world of human esteem, the other in the big world of the Father, the Cosmocrator. Coincidence or not (for the Metropolitan card) that is plausibly what the repetition of "mundus/mondo" (the titles are all in Italian) by the preacher signifies.
Last edited by mikeh on 22 Mar 2020, 06:36, edited 1 time in total.

Re: The Chariot

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I usually restrict my posts to 15th century decks, but I came across this enigmatic painting at auction, and as it relates to the attributes discussed here, I thought I'd ask everyone what they thought this twist on the "allegory of fortune" meant, and if it illuminates the "World" trump in any way. Note the ghostly castle and barely discernible pine tree below the crown; also note the horse hoof on the lower right border, so this painting was cut down. I can find no comparables for the prominence of the castle nor hoof (the latter from a charioteer or perhaps even an ass [i.e., Apuleius] as a symbol of the soul?).

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Painted allegories that are comparables for the crown and (sometimes crystal) sphere along with Fortuna:

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Tarot cards discussed in this thread with the crown and/or orb (both equivalent of rule, under the whims of Fortune; but note the XVI card is clearly modeled on GIotto's spes from the Scrovegni chapel) :

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The discussion in this thread regarding the role of eros seems definitely tied to the error of placing oneself at the whims of Fortune (and certainly could be tied to valor, but these allegories don’t seem to lean in that direction; more akin to folly). The world is shot through with Eros, and by pursuing this erogenously charged ambition all become the playthings of Fortune - I don't see any other meaning. Consider this allegory featuring "good fortune", beckoning a would-be lord while cradling eros in her arms....and tellingly pointing to Scorpius on the globe's zodiacal band - the sign that covers the genitals/sex:

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https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-obje ... ml#history

So the ruler on the Chariot is ultimately humbled as the plaything of Fortune, which is what the "World" trump has become in the 16th century, when shown with the attributes of Fortune (a sail) or signs of rulership (crown/orb). What is of course odd is that we have both the Wheel and the World, both as cognates if Fortune.

Ultimately all of this was a precursor to the explosion of Vanitas subjects:
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Back to the enigmatic painting – why the ghostly castle with pine tree before it? Just another kingly symbol – “in a dark woods” (Dante) so not real – below the crown just beyond the reach of Fortune? I’d really like to know what the hoof was connected to – any thoughts there?

Thanks,
Phaeded
cron