Tarot History Forum

mmfilesi wrote:

To be precise, they speak of "70 cards", which fits with a 5x14 deck. But it is possible, to interpret it as

Sorry, I meant this:

1441 [1st of January payment to Sagramoro for painting "14 figure"]:
E adi deto (1 gennaio) lire due, soldi cinque marchesani, contanti a Magistro Iacopo de Sagramoro depintore per XIIII figure depinte in carta de bambaxo et mandate a Madama Bianca da Milano per fare festa la scira de la Circumcisione de l'anno presente... L.II.V.

I would estimate it to at least 99:1

Sorry Huck, could explain why? I am very interested in your opinion on this matter.

so its more attackable,

The easy way to explain ...

mmfilesi wrote:

so its more attackable,

I understand, thanks. (Anyway, in the text are"figures", "bambaxo paper", "Christmas" (and we know Christmas its a good time to play cards > vd. the two letters of Francesco Sforza)... is easy to imagine 14 cards.

The easy way to explain ...

Great, thanks. Now I understand your argument.

*********

Another cuestion, why we should think of PMB 14 + 6 instead 16 + 6 or 14 + 8?

Assume, provisionally, 5x14 is true. Why they added 6 cards? We know a structure of 20 trionfi?

Its not more reasonable, they added 16 + 6 or 14 + 8 to fit the new structure, already fashion c.1470, of 22?

... is so far your question answered?

mmfilesi wrote: a) Why don't included the minchiate in this analysis? What date estimates for the deck with 41 triumphs?

b) Why don't included tarochino of Bologna in this analysis?

c) What date estimates for the Sermones de Ludo cum aliis?

It's easy to speculate, that Caesar played Trionfi cards with Cleopatra

The name Minchiate appears 1466, 1471, 1477 - without information about the structure.

The existence of a low-cost Trionfi deck with 22 special cards is a fiction around not enough facts - if something like this existed, it likely wouldn't have been called a "Trionfi deck" - cause "Trionfi" was possibly exclusively used for expensive productions.

ca. 1500, Franciscans near Ferrara.

mmfilesi wrote:

The existence of a low-cost Trionfi deck with 22 special cards is a fiction around not enough facts - if something like this existed, it likely wouldn't have been called a "Trionfi deck" - cause "Trionfi" was possibly exclusively used for expensive productions.

This dont know safely. In any case, we will accept your thesis is correct (I want to go elsewhere, not Bologna. Here for Bologna:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=334&start=20

c)

ca. 1500, Franciscans near Ferrara.

The sermon is intended for normal people, not the nobles. This means that, at least a few years earlier, was already known structure of 22 Tr. If we add Boiardo, 1487, its reasonable to think, arround 1485, the structure 22 is +/- standar. We agree on this?

We have:

c. 1425: Michelino: 16
c. 1441-1445: CY: 16
1441: 14 figure per Bianca Maria
c. 1451: PMB-Bembo: ¿14? ¿16? ¿22?
¿?: 6 added to Bembo
c. 1465: Fiorentina: 16 (in Huck's hypothesis).

First problem

If the original CY and Fiorentina decks have 16 tr., why didn't add them 6 cards when 22 becomes standar?

Well, maybe, at this time they don't play with this decks. But its strange.

Second problem

If PMB is 14 and added 6, in 20 years we have:

a) Decks of 14
b) Decks of 16
c) Decks of 20

And then, suddenly, all are unified in 22 for the type of Milan (C, Dummet).

This is very strange.

However, if we only have 16 tr. in Milan and then 22, its more easier. More logical. And it can explain:

- Why add 6 triumph? To adjust a deck of 16 with the new fashion deck of 22.
- Why have a tower in the Florentine deck's? because the original deck PMB Bembo had a Devil and the Tower.

Is not more logical?

Has this answered your skepticism?

Understanding this problem it becomes difficult to assume 22 elements for the Trionfi cards before 1482. And from 1482 till 1486 there is not much time. So the Boiardo Tarocchi poem might be the first...

mmfilesi wrote: PS. You know the original Celestina had 16 acts?

There are two versions of the play. One is called a Comedy and has 16 acts; the other is considered a Tragic Comedy and has 21 acts.

... a version with 16 acts, a version with 21 acts and a version with 22 acts.

mmfilesi wrote: Yes, Ja, sí, oui... Reasoning seems unquestionable. I need answer in spanish:

Efectivamente, creo que tienes toda la razón. No se puede partir de documentos excepcionales para construir toda una tesis sobre la producción de cartas en Bologna. Las hipótesis hay que construirlas de forma piramidal: muchos datos que nos lleven a un punto, a la cúspide; y no a la inversa, con un solo dato, ir levantando una pirámide invertida...

Bologna (A) appears to have historical priority. This is not proof tarot was invented in Bologna, but it moves it away from Ferrara or Milan.

The argument is based on inferences from the earliest references to carte da trionfi in the Ferrara accounts. The earliest reference (Saturday Feb. 10 1442) mentions four suits and "all the figures" of 4 packs of carte da trionfi. This detail is never done again in any Ferrara reference, so it seems that the deck is new to the accountant, and by extension the court. Four decks also implies that a model is being copied; and the same record also mentions that two sets have green backs, and two red. This implies that the game already had known rules. It all goes to show that game had been in existence before this record for some amount of time. But how long?

From other records of the production of hand-painted decks, we know that an average amount of time for making one deck was about 10 days. Thus, the commission for the first four decks ever mentioned is likely to have been given in early January, 1442.

This date seems significant for the following reason: the SECOND earliest record of "carte da trionfi" occurs in the same Ferrara records on Saturday July 28, 1442. The pack costs about 1/8 of one of the earlier ones, and it is bought for two young boys (8 and 10) in the court by their servant. The important thing for me is that the servant buys it from a cloth merchant, Marchione Burdochio, who happens to be from Bologna.

Now when we go back to early January 1442, when the commission for the four expensive decks was given, which appear to be the first the court ever had, we find this same merchant selling silk cloth (taffeta) to the family on January 2. The taffeta is to be used by the artist Sagramoro, the artist of the first four packs, for banners and other decorations for the sepulchre of the recently deceased Marquis of Ferrara.

So, putting it all together, Marchione Burdochio sells the second deck, at a relatively cheap price; and he is involved closely with the artist of the first decks ever mentioned. Since taffeta was a speciality of Bologna, and wasn't made in Ferrara yet (not until the 1460s actually), Marchione must have been dealing Bolognese fabric. So, as a "merzaro", what we might call a "haberdasher", Marchione sold other things besides cloth. It seems reasonable to think he got these other things from Bologna as well. Since the deck was cheaper, but still had to be profitable, it seems likely that the deck would have already existed in some quantity where his source was. Most importantly, he is near the family and the artist when we suspect the earliest deck used a model was introduced to the family.

In other words, I think Marchione introduced "carte da trionfi" to the Este. And I think he got his decks from Bologna.

This conclusion effectively erases Ferrara from the running for me.

Milan is different, and more inferential, chiefly because the Ducal records that might supply as much detail as Ferrara were lost in 1447. So no help there.

The first record of the card game "Triumphum" in the environs of Milan comes from November 1449. The writer calls it "new" (so at least he has never seen it before) and considers it beautiful and intriguing enough to send as a present to a Queen.

But we know that the game was known earlier than that, indirectly.

The dating of the Cary-Yale is too difficult to rely on to establish chronology. It should have been made during Filippo Maria Visconti's lifetime, since it has his Ducats on the Denari suit. So before 1447. But that's the only ante quem we can safely state.

The fresco in the main hall of the Palazzo Borromeo shows people playing a card game that seems to be trionfi. This fresco is dated to about 1445. The Borromeo were bankers for the Visconti, so if it is a game of trionfi (I think so) we know it was known among the wealthy classes in Milan in the mid-40s.

We know also that Filippo Maria Visconti liked to play chess and cards, and was in general fascinated by intricate and complicated things. We know he was involved in the creation of something like a trionfi deck before 1425 (Marziano da Tortona, who designed the deck, died in early 1425). This deck had different birds representing the suits, and 16 gods in the role of "trumps" (they are not called trumps, but that is stated as their role - they beat all the other cards).

But could Filippo have designed the tarot? My impression, having studied him in depth, is no. He didn't like to have death mentioned in his presence; he didn't like clowns, fools or actors; he was serious. Perhaps most important, I found that his grandfather and father had officially banned the practice of shame painting in Milan, and I have found no indication that Filippo Maria ever used it or tolerated it. In fact he demanded that the Florentines erase theirs that they had made of Filippo's general Piccinino, when he negotiated a peace treaty with them. So given his respect for the traditions of his family, and his dislike of the shame painting, I think it is unlikely he would have put it in a deck of cards.

So, it could still have been invented in Milan or around it, independently of the Visconti, but there is no direct evidence of it, and it was known earlier in Ferrara and it seems, Bologna.

If it was known earlier in Bologna, Milan could have known of the game through either Bologna or Ferrara quite easily, since Visconti relations with Ferrara were intimate, and Visconti actually was Lord of Bologna from May 1438 to June 1443, again through his general Piccinino and the latter's son.

There is no record that the Ferrarese ever used the shame painting, but the Bolognese certainly did. They and the Florentines were the two biggest practitioners of it. In any case, the earliest mention of triumph cards in Bologna is 1459, when a pack is recovered from a thief. Interestingly, a German "master" says that they are his; it seems the German is a cardmaker, which might imply that he made the cards in Bologna (there were many cardmakers in Bologna, and lots of Germans too).

So much for historical data and inferences.

The other side of my argument is from the internal evidence of the rules. In particular, the unlikely rule of the four equal-ranked "Papi", and its existence in Piedmont and Savoy, and the fact that in Piedmont and Savoy the game ranks the Angel (Judgement) card highest, even though they use packs of cards with the Tarot de Marseille order (importing all their cards from France). The fact that they stuck to these rules implies they knew the game from a long time before. And since they were already importing French cards (or at least Avignon cards) since 1505, it seems those rules must have been in place before then.

But we don't know anything about the 15th century Milanese game, we only have some cards, and we're not sure how they're ranked. Dummett and everybody following him assumes (not unreasonably) that it must be the same ranking that is attested from 1543 onward, the "C" order, Lombardy and Tarot de Marseille.

But games suffer both internal and external changes. Internal ones are usually slower, but external ones are applied by force. It happened in Bologna in 1725 when the Papal legate demanded the Papi be changed to Mori. All the old molds were altered or destroyed, on threat of imprisonment and fine. It happened in Sicily in (forget date - 1680s?) when the ruler demanded that the Devil be changed to a Ship, and a few other things (Papessa was already gone from the mother deck of Sicily by then).

My belief then is that an external change happened to the Lombardy-Milanese game around 1500. This was the French occupation, in which I propose that the Milanese market was flooded with the French form of the game, being massively produced, for export, just then in Lyon, Avignon and other places. This games was know as "tarocs" and in Italian became "tarocchi", and is first noted in 1505 in Avignon and Ferrara. I think the Milanese game became "tarocchi" then, in 1499 or 1500, and the style of game changed then.

The important thing in this argument is the force of the external change, and the fact that the French influence was restricted to Milan, and did not affect any other place directly.

My hypothesis is then that the original game spread from Bologna outwards, southwards to Florence and north and westwards to Ferrara, Milan, Savoy, and probably even France, in a few years, maybe a decade or so. The French cardmakers adapted the game the most, since they were the least familiar with its imagery and rules; the same game roughly prevailed in northern Italy until the French invasion, first a short one in 1494 and then a long occupation from 1499-1525. The invasion allowed a huge influx of cards from France into Milan, and destroyed the local makers, who adopted the French model.

This is then why the C order is different from the A (and why the A prevails in Piedmont and Savoy, in the rules, although the cards are French).

The B order is different story, but it all ties in. The problem came with numbering the cards, which the French first did. My thinking is that the C order was invented when numbering the cards in Avignon or Lyon (Depaulis favours Lyon, I Avignon), as follows -

In the old order, from Bologna, if the cards are numbered from Bagatto to Death, Death is number 14. This is because all three virtues are below the Wheel (The Bolognese were the last to number their cards, not until around 1800). So when the French makers numbered them, they had a problem. Their solution seems to have been to split the virtues up, and elevate Temperance above death. So you have a series of 3 x 7, like the A order, but Death can still be *numbered* 13. The World-Angel switch seems to me to have been a French innovation as well.

This pack was a big influence in northern Italy in the wake of the French invansion. The Bolognese and the south were not influenced, but Milan and Ferrara were. Ferrara started to number its cards also (Met. sheets etc.), but interpreted the series differently - they didn't see a 3 x 7 order, just a straight sequence. They weren't under the direct market pressure of the French cardmakers, like the Milanese were, so they could do what they liked. They split up the virtues and gave it a more theological order, in which the Angel is simply the Resurrection, while Justice becomes the last Judgement (I think). Then, I would interpret, a New World.

That's a very brief account of my thinking on these issues.