Tarot History Forum

For Mirtella's Lot we get:

Sun. Death. Time. Chariot. Empress. Fool.

Upon which Limerno creates a Tarocchi Appropirati Sonnet upon a Momento Mori theme & a Carpe Diem message:

I find no such madness under the Sun:
To wait for Time, that you may enjoy Time,
Death urges the Empress upon the Chariot,
to reduce our human kind to dust.

In a short time, under the Sun,
the peasant sets violets among straw upon the Chariot.
A Fool is he who fears the deadly dart,
which also seeks to strike the Empress down.

So you will rule over Fools from the Chariot,
if you delay, lady, while you are still beautiful,
for the Sun of all beauty waxes old and dies.

Rejoice, foolish woman—why tarry? Enjoy the flower.
The Chariot flees the Sun, and the Black Empress
Adorns herself by filling the cemetery.

*Gloss:

“Just as the one who built a ship or a house can destroy it most easily,
so too is a man best dissolved by the very nature that once held him together.”
— Cicero

A black Empress who adorns herself by filling in the grave!? Perhaps our Mirtella was a Black Widow figure, yet still in her prime, and ready to further wait upon Time (Old Men). lol

Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote: 23 May 2009, 10:16 in the Renda edition ... in the margin as a gloss to "mia Stella" it reads "Venere" (these must be Folengo's own glosses as printed in the first edition).

I missed this tidbit way back when. More evidence the "star" was indeed originally Venus, and some later enlightened souls continued to identify it as such.

Incidentally, this supports the notion that the ur-tarot in Florence did not have the "celestials"; Venus is instead germane to the Visconti. Besides the oft-reproduced Michelino illumination for the Elogium on Giangaleazzo Visconti by Pietro da Castellato, where Venus places a hand on her belly in a pregnant del parto gesture (just as "the Star" does in the PMB), Venus also features in the Visconti genealogy of the Semideus manuscript:


None of this has anything to do with Florence and they would not have featured Venus.

SteveM wrote,

The Chariot flees the Sun, and the Black Empress
Adorns herself by filling the cemetery.

The original:

Fugge del Sol il Carro, è il cimiterio
La Nera Imperatrice empir s’abbella

Perhaps:

The Chariot flees the sun, and it is a Black Empress
Who adorns herself to fill the cemetery.