Tarot History Forum

Ooops I answered 1 minut after Ross good answer.
Sorry.

But we are all Ok on this controversis.

YLM

Thanks to Ross and Yves... What a great post by Mr. O'Neill!

So what of what he said still stands? What can be added? Anything disproved?

Thanks Yves!

Yves Le Marseillais wrote:Marseilles is not mentioned in the original law of 1605, but by
1608 the cardmakers in Lyon petitioned to stop the new card industry in
Marseilles. The petition may have been effective since the industry was
officially reinstated by royal decree in 1631. So the earliest cards were
made between 1605 and 1608, and card-making became a major industry after
1631.

Now I can clearly see how Camoin has been instrumental on tracing the origin of the Marseille tarot back to 1608!


EE

EnriqueEnriquez wrote:Thanks Yves!

Yves Le Marseillais wrote:Marseilles is not mentioned in the original law of 1605, but by
1608 the cardmakers in Lyon petitioned to stop the new card industry in
Marseilles. The petition may have been effective since the industry was
officially reinstated by royal decree in 1631. So the earliest cards were
made between 1605 and 1608, and card-making became a major industry after
1631.

Now I can clearly see how Camoin has been instrumental on tracing the origin of the Marseille tarot back to 1608!


EE

Thanks Amigo,

But to be very clear one must says that CARDS where present and made in Marseille City.
To says "TAROT" Cards is a step that I would not make because it is not Scientificly prooved.

I am not a Scientific but I do like Scientific spirit and Facts are facts.

Philippe "Camoin" transformed Cards in Tarot Cards and this is not scientific practice from my point of view.

Even Masters make errors isn'it.... ? ;)

How poor humans we are

Salute,

YLM

robert wrote:Thanks to Ross and Yves... What a great post by Mr. O'Neill!

So what of what he said still stands? What can be added? Anything disproved?

Well let's see...

"The ancestral IT-1 pattern (Cary sheet) died out in Italy."

That's not a bad way of looking at it. But you know there isn't much that can be said about the Cary Sheet, except that it is old, older than any TdMs anyway, it is clearly related to the Tarot de Marseille style, and that it is probably Italian.

"The Piedmontese
deck was probably reintroduced from France ~1750."

I don't think this statement makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure when Piedmont separated from Savoy, but at least until 1714 Piedmont was a part of the Duchy of Savoy. Tarot cards are explicitly noted being imported from Avignon into Piedmont, specifically Pinerolo, a town south-west of Turin, in 1505. The development of the Piedmontese-Savoyan game, and the deck it is played with, is not very clear, but to talk about "~1750" really doesn't convey any meaning.

"The invention of the Tarot (trionfi, tarrochi) probably occurred in Italy
about 1420 (earliest mention is 1423 but that date is questionable)."

I'm not sure what he's thinking about for "1423" here, unless it is Marziano's Tractatus or Bernardino's (apocryphal) sermon in Bologna where he is supposed to have set up a bonfire of the vanities which included cards. A late hagiography (1472) says one bonfire included triumph cards (but is not talking specifically about Bologna in this context). The earlier biographies only speak of naibi.

"Between 1420 and 1500, there are 31 documents from Italy that mention the
Tarot plus hundreds of cards that have survived."

"1420" obviously is meaningless here - the bottom date for carta da trionfi is 1442. We know of about twice that many references now, between 1442 and 1500.

"By 1500, there were at
least 4 different designs in Italy (see the woodblock sheets in Kaplan).
The design in Milan (Cary Sheet Kaplan Vol 2, p 286) is the one that is
closest to the Tarot de Marseille. The Cary sheet cannot be dated precisely but it is
sometime between 1475-1550. The usual analysis (Dummett "The Game of
Tarot" 1980) is that a deck similar to the Cary sheet was carried back to
France after the conquest of Milan in the 1490's."

This is a good summary, except that for Pinerolo (close to Milan) to have needed 40 packs of tarots from Avignon in 1505 suggests that Avignon had a thriving tarot industry, which is difficult to imagine having arisen just between the end of 1499 and 1505 (Avignon wasn't French then either; it was owned and administered by the Papacy - there was probably a greater concentration of Italians there then anywhere else "in" France, but I don't know for sure what the demographics were). In other words, the game had to have been produced earlier in France, and not been just a result of Louis XII's successful invasion (1499) or Charles VIII's earlier unsuccessful one (1494 - and he did not go to Milan). Pinerolo's importation may also indirectly suggest that Milan's own industry was not so productive, at least not for exports.

"This is supported by the
first confirmed mention of Tarot (called Triumphe) in France - in Lorraine
1496. Prior to that there is no evidence that Tarot was known in France."

There is an earlier mention than that - 1482 (IIRC). I'll have to find it for you though, I don't know it off the top of my head.

However, Marcello sent a regular tarot to Isabelle of Lorraine in Saumur (near Angers) already in 1449, so tarot was technically "known" in France then. But the extent of the game in France is unknown in the second half of the 15th century. We can only guess that it was popular enough by the 1490s that Avignon actually made packs for export (Thierry is confident that the earliest French production of Tarots was in Lyon, although I can't cite his evidence for this offhand. Lyon was France's industrial capital though, and when making laws for governing Milan Louis XII explicitly cited Lyon as the model for Milan's economic laws).

"So the evidence indicates that an ancestor of the Tarot de Marseille was carried into
France in the 1490's - the number of cards, the order of the trumps, and
the general subjects were established - but not the specific Tarot de Marseille images and
symbols."

This entirely depends on knowing what kinds of Tarots were being made in France in 1500, and knowing the date and provenance of the Cary Sheet. I don't know why the French production depends on this invasion scenario anyway. France and Italy were hardly dependent on war to facilitate cultural exchange. If the Cary Sheet is Milanese and is an ancestor of the Tarot de Marseille, the proto-Tarot de Marseille style could have been adopted by the French cardmakers at any time in the 15th century.

"Other variations of the Tarot continued to develop in Italy, but
NOT the Tarot de Marseille designs which died out in Italy. As Kaplan points out (II p
271) we really don't know whether the Sforza "World" card (late 16th or
17th century) was reintroduced to Milan from France. So we have no idea
whether the specific Tarot de Marseille designs was developed in Italy and the Sforza
"World" is the last example - or whether the ancestor design (Cary sheet)
died out earlier. There is a modern Piedmontese deck, but we are
reasonably certain tht it was reintroduced to Italy from France about ~1750."

I'm not sure what to make of this... okay, I guess.

"So it is quite consistent with the historical evidence to maintain that the
specific Tarot de Marseille designs are French in origin - but based on an Italian
ancestor that established the number, sequence, subject of the cards and
some aspects of the images."

Okay.

"The Tarot de Marseille designs are not imposed onto a 'tabula
rasa' The Italian cards are based on a complex Neoplatonic, Hermetic,
Alchemical, Numerological, Astrological, etc. symbolism. But how much of
that original 15th century Italian symbolism was adopted by the French is
debatable."

This is the crackpot part coming out. I don't think anyone has been able to prove Hermetic, Alchemical and Numerological symbolism in Tarot, "Neoplatonic" is too general a concept, and Platonic ideas were such a general part of the culture (as they are of ours) as well as of Christian doctrine, that it is unremarkable to find allusions to them (although I don't think things like the "two horses" of the Chariot are actually Platonic ideas); Astrological is also unremarkable, and is also indistinguishable from astronomical. They are not esoteric in this context, in other words.

Ross

Well,
I've to move this to the top for actual reasons.

... In a thread at Aeclectic I developed the following line of thinking

17th century is the time of the Marseille Tarot. It seems to have started in Paris and all what we know, the French king or his relevant minister had no problem with it. Indeed, around this time Marseille was not under control, France having a major political conflict, which went longer than 10 years

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fronde

Marseille was taken around 1660 ...

Here is an interesting fort in Marseilles, which was build ca. 1660.

Wikipedia wrote:Fort Saint-Jean is a fortification in Marseille, built in 1660 by Louis XIV at the entrance to the Old Port. Fort Saint-Nicolas was constructed at the same time on the opposite side of the harbour. Commenting on their construction, Louis XIV said, "We noticed that the inhabitants of Marseille were extremely fond of nice fortresses. We wanted to have our own at the entrance to this great port." In fact, the two new forts were built in response to a local uprising against the governor, rather than for the defence of the city: their cannons pointed inwards towards the town, not outwards towards the sea.

.... and the situation settled, the king Louis XVI finally became rather successful. He was rather fond of playing cards and gambling.

The first Tarot de Marseille (in the sense, that it really was "from Marseille") is recorded for 1672, at least according Camoin, who spend a lot of energy on it:

http://en.camoin.com/tarot/-Tarot-Nicol ... r-en-.html

The Tarot of Nicolas Conver engraved in 1760 was considered for a long time to be the oldest Tarot de Marseille made in Marseilles. But in 2001 I demonstrated that there was another deck, the Tarot de Marseille deck manufactured by François Chosson, which was older and which went back to 1672, nearly one century before Conver. The deck of Chosson was preserved in a Swiss museum, in Soleure, and nobody knew its origin. It is thanks to the documents of my grandparents that I was able to verify that François Chosson formed part of a dynasty of Master cardmakers of Marseilles.

Camoin notes something about "1608" in his text, which is explained in a thread in another forum ... [that's here in this thread]


Then we have following:

http://www.wopc.co.uk/france/index.html

As early as 1613, Louis XIII decreed that cardmakers should place their name on the knave of clubs. In 1701 a further law was passed in France laying down fixed designs for the playing cards from each of the nine regions, so that stereotyped playing cards from each region were produced which could be identified by the authorities. This tended to result in lower quality cards, with the standard falling all the time, as revenues became the most important criterion.

So it seems, that with the law of 1701, still under the reign of Louis XIV, it was made possible, that ALSO a sort of stereotyped Tarot de Marseilles developed in France.
That would have surely not happened, if Louis had a specific hate on this deck.

But Louis had something against the Huguenots ... [well, this refers to the recent argumentation, that Tarot and especially the Tarot de Marseilles might have anything to do with the 13th century Cathars]

Huguenots were in 17th century mainly distributed in the region, where also the Cathars had been. If one assumes a hidden historical prolongation of the disappeared 13th century Cathars, then it would be logical to see them in the Huguenots.
200.000 of them left the country, forced by a king, who apparently had a lot of sense for cards and surely no bias against the Tarot de Marseille.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huguenot

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~wgger ... notwar.htm

This map is taken from the 16th century Huguenot wars, but the distribution likely was somehow similar in late 17th.

*********

An interesting detail ... the deciding man in France from 1643-1661 had been cardinal Mazarin, minister of the state, who had been grown up in Italy (so definitely knew Italian playing cards) and who reportedly had a strong favor for card playing and gambling (like Louis XIV). Already Louis XIII. was known for card playing.
The first known deck with stronger similarities to the Marseille-Typus is estimated for 1650 in Paris ... that's Mazarin's time and it is his location.