Magic Moon wrote,
In most editions of Petrarch (although there are a few Florentine mss. otherwise), the triumph is known as that of Pudicizia, which means a gender-related sense of shame. It would be related to chastity for women, but probably different for men, I am not sure how. The clearest example of this triumph in the tarot is the Chariot card of the Visconti di Modrone, which has a female rider carrying a jousting shield. You can see its outline in black on the card, with notches on both sides, I think for a lance. Petrarch's poem describes her as blocking Cupid's arrows with a shield. It is also fairly clear that her journey after the victory would have been by carro, since it is rather long. Other Lombard Chariot cards with modestly dressed females might also qualify for this triumph, even if there are also suggestions of Fame: it would be fame for Pudicizia. (The Spanish "pudico" captures some of the meaning.)I have a difficulty with the Chastity trump. I think the Devil's position in the sequence is a good place for Chastity. I've thought that perhaps the High Priestess (in the Tarot) or Faith (in the Modrone) was Chastity and that she swapped places with the Devil, assuming she was initially placed next to the Pope, both coming from the Karnöffel deck. I conceived this theory a couple of years ago. However, I have no evidence for anything like that. And Chastity could be another card, perhaps the Chariot or one of the three usual virtues. Furthermore, the earliest evidence for a Devil in the Tarot doesn't seem to date before around 1480, so I doubt that the Devil existed early on alongside the Pope. There are some difficulties in understanding the generative evolution of the Tarot sequence starting from Petrarch and other topics, but Chastity is the one that has me stuck. Ultimately, I see reasons for you to remain hopeful and not sulk.
It seems to me that the Florentine tarot could have substituted Temperance and Fortitude for Pudicizia, at least in Petrarch's feminine sense, omitting Pudicizia itself as a redundancy. Pudicizia needs these virtues in her struggle with Cupid. Those virtues occur right where Chastity would be in the sequence, immediately after Love. Their Chariot riders are either male or of ambiguous gender - long hair is not definitive, as many males, especially young ones, in 15th-century Italy are shown with such hair. Whether worldly fame, or at least achievement, counts as masculine Pudicizia I do not know. Failure in one's chosen endeavors would certainly have been an occasion for shame.
The order of triumphs in Petrarch was fairly fixed. The only variation that I can think of is that one part, a fragment of Fame, I think, was seen in some manuscripts as another triumph. It was the occasion for another illustration.
Ross wrote,
No such order is attested, which for me does indeed blow the Petrarch-triumphs origin theory. The same artists who painted Petrarch's Trionfi also painted Triumph cards, and those who commissioned them would have known Petrarch's order, and those who designed the order would have known that Time is only defeated by Eternity, so it seems like a lot of ignorance has to be invoked to explain how Petrarch's "Time" could have fallen to below Death, if Petrarch's "Time" is what he originally represented.
The tarot is not obligated to follow Petrarch precisely. We are in a place bursting with creativity, in which every work of art can be its own thing, a creative misreading of what came before, as I think Harold Bloom taught. It is Petrarch put to a new use, in a new context.
Petrarch was writing from the standpoint of someone whose fame would outlast his death by many years. Not many people could say that. Filippo Maria Visconti could say that, which is why the Modrone probably had Fame after Death, and maybe also Time. But the Tarot in Florence - and wherever Florence had influence - was for ordinary people who looked for some minor recognition while they were still alive. It made sense for both Fame and Time to be before Death in the sequence, the Fame that can be enjoyed while one is still alive, and the Time of an individual life, not Petrarch's cosmic Time, whose main representative was the sun.
In the Modrone, I do not see why it is ruled out that Time would be between Fame (with her trumpet, above the World) and Judgment, standing for Eternity. In the first place, it cannot be assumed that Time would have been represented by an Old Man. He indeed (minus the hourglass) was a symbol of the most important aspect of Time, the deterioration it brings - but for Time itself, there was more the three heads of past present, and future, and the arc of the sun, of which its decreasing light was the part that concerned Petrarch. In the Trionfi, the sun was the most prominent image, and it was cosmic time rather than that of the indiidual life that was his theme. The earliest known Lombard sequence of Petrarch Trionfi illustrations shows Time as a young sun-god in a cart (Vatican Library Ms. Barb. Lat. 3943, f. 191r, at https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Barb.lat.3943/0336). It is true that the Sun is below the World (Fame) in the early orders (which I think in both the A and C regions had Angel high), but exchanges of cards with its next door neighbor are common in the early orders, even in the same region. The Star and the Moon are apt symbols of cosmic Time, too, although I am not convinced that those cards were in the Modrone, as it might have followed Marziano's 4x4 structure.
Moreover, even if Time was represented in the Modrone as an Old Man, nothing prevents it from being moved to before Death once Francesco Sforza, ally of Cosimo de' Medici, takes over. Yes, there is the conservatism of the players. But if players are soldiers, they move around, from A to C even, and have no respect for the rulers they overthrow. And the people obey; they had no love for the old man either. That is if they even heard of the game. Apart from Sforza's soldiers, it might have been confined to court circles anyway, people who could worry about how long after their death their fame would last.
Robert wrote,
You don't need a completely sensible order, just one that strings together a relatively small number of separate components, like a collage, or better - in the minds of the erudite, not the common people - a series of hieroglyphs, each with one or more component parts. Remember that they did not see hieroglyphs as essentially Egyptian, but any picture writing, especially sacred (hiero = sacred; glyph = carving).Otherwise, we're back to the same old question, without names or numbers, how was a player expected to learn the trumps, certainly, there must have been some sensible order that a player could easily learn and remember?
The name "Bagatella" is a double-entendre, "little thing" - so the least of the triumphs - and "sleight of hand performer" (from the little things he used). I can think of no other reason he is there. It is not a standard medieval image: I can't think of any pictorial examples before his appearance in the taro, but I am ready to be enlightened. And in the Visconti-Sforza/PMB, he does have the four suit signs, which he is above.
Then came the "papi", at the other extreme of the social order. If the "papi" were originally all equal, as in Bologna, there was no order to remember. Later, assuming that Florence had "equal papi" too, it would not be hard to remember Emperors above Empresses and Popes above both: that is how it was supposed to go in society. The only tricky one was the Popess. There would have been different narratives.
Then the first three Petrarchans: Love, Virtue (replacing Pudicizia), this-life Fame (Chariot). The virtues are in Aquinas's order, I presume, i.e. Justice high. Then in the middle, the Wheel, Fortuna in the middle, and its change of direction; it is another medieval triumphal figure, the main one of Boccaccio's Amorosa Visione. Then two figures close to Death, the Hanged Man closest, followed by Death itself.
The ones after Death follow a variety of more or less familiar narratives. Piscina had Demonio as in the sphere of air, then Fire in the sphere of fire, then three spheres of the cosmograph in order of their usefulness to man, in practice how much light they give us. These triumphs could also be seen as symbolic of the End Times: devils reigning, fire and hail raining, the moon as Mary and the sun as Jesus, born a second time at Rev. 13:1. Then eternal Fame and the Last Judgment. A more erudite humanist narrative might be Plato's Allegory of the Cave, going from darkness to light.
Fools are not part of the social order, hence outside the order. There is also the Fool for God, also stepping outside the cosmos.
It is not some familiar medieval hierarchy, and in fact is a hodgepodge, but it has its logic, if you think in terms of papi, virtues, and Petrarchans, with other things stuck in (in my opinion, as afterthoughts). The B and C orders are admittedly harder. I very much think their placements of the virtues need explaining, but that is another issue. Even for them, it is all a matter of constructing edifying mental narratives in which the cards fit. Justice rules love, for example, in the marriage contract being sealed by the two lovers' handshake. So these narratives are reinforced whenever you play the game. The narratives in Florence serve to get the game past the prohibitions that were erected against gambling games, in that they inculcate Christian morality. We cannot forget that the game was illegal in Florence until 1450. While that didn't stop many people from playing, a few did get arrested, and sales would increase if the game was legal. Also, it would have been a good game for children - as in who the 1442 purchases were for in Ferrara, aged 10 and 11. Then once the game is legal and engrained, with possibilities for complex strategy, the pretense can be dropped and numbers added, so that the educational aspect is largely lost.
Huck: for Fame, the young man on a horse behind Justice is important to mention, too, the one whose ambition is Fame through serving Justice. And I don't think the Chariot is a bridal journey, she is middle-aged and her horses have wings. But a middle-aged, i.e. 30-ish, matron has to have Pudicizia, too, avoiding shame even in how she dresses. In her case, not to have had children by then would be shameful. Wings and white: in Plato, the chariots of the gods (not all of whom were chaste) were drawn by winged white horses; wings also are attributes of Fame's accoutrements, i.e. the trumpet in the Visconti di Modrone.
Note: a few hours after posting, I modified the paragraph on Time in Petrarch slightly, recalling aspects I had forgotten at the time. My apologies.
