Ross Caldwell wrote: 19 Apr 2025, 16:27
In order to help identify the provenance of the sheet, even possibly the engraver, I noticed the stylized plants in the Hanged Man, Wheel of Fortune, Chariot, Lover, Sun, Moon, Star, and Fool. They are like the engraver's signature, so if you see them exactly like that in any other prints copy it and make a note of it.
This is a very good point.
But there are a few major errors in Ross's earlier post in this thread:
Ross Caldwell wrote: 19 Apr 2025, 10:50
a tarocchi appropriati poem about ladies of Pavia c. 1560-1570, generally attributed to Giambattista Susio
It has been known for some time that this poem is not by Susio. And it can be dated with a very high degree of certainty to 1535 to 1545, and was most likely composed for Epiphany 1539 or 1540, as I demonstrated almost four years ago:
viewtopic.php?p=24068#p24068
Those years are just a few years before Alciato wrote his
Parergon, so the Pavia poem thus provides further support for the assumption that Milanese tarot trumps were not numbered at this time (see also my post on the Castello Sforzesco cards:
viewtopic.php?p=27075#p27075) because it seems likely that tarot players in Pavia would have used the same general kind of cards as people in Milan at that time, yet the order in the Pavia poem is different to the one in Alciato's poem. The cards used in Pavia were probably not exactly the same as those used in Milan (the Pavian poem refers to Time, whereas Milanese cards at that time probably no longer depicted that trump as Time but rather as the lantern-carrying Hermit) but it nevertheless seems likely that if trumps were unnumbered in Milan, they would also have been unnumbered in Pavia.
Alciato also says that the order in his poem is the one "usually" (
fere) used by players, meaning that he was aware that some players used a different order. Franco Pratesi suggested he could have said this because he was well-travelled and had seen players using different orders in other cities (Bologna, Ferrara, Pavia, maybe even in France) but that can't be the reason, because players in most of those areas would
never have used the order in his poem: if Alciato had the entire world in mind, he would not have said that players usually use his order, as that would have been manifestly untrue. So he must have been referring to his local region only, maybe even just Milan itself. In other words, some people in his local area were not using the order he and his friends were using. This makes it very unlikely that the tarot trump cards in that area were numbered.
The Alciato poem itself is further evidence that Milanese trumps were unnumbered. As Franco Pratesi observed in the article in which he first brought the poem to our attention (
"Le tarot de Marseille: retour à Milan," L'As de Trèfle 47-48 (1992): 10-12), this poem looks like a mnemonic, designed to help players remember the order of the trumps. Obviously a mnemonic is only needed if the trump cards themselves are not numbered. (A mnemonic in Latin is admittedly a little unusual; perhaps it was a translation of an Italian poem, but it doesn't look like one. Perhaps it was a mnemonic used only by the highly educated players in Alciato's personal circle of acquaintances.)
As I said in my Castello Sforzesco post, the evidence strongly suggests that the Milanese resisted numbered trumps right up until the first half of the 18th century.
It's therefore quite likely that there was considerable variation in the trump orders used in Milan throughout the 16th century, so the order that Robert proposes here based on the Cary Sheet is not inconceivable. But nevertheless we obviously can't put much trust in the way the cards are laid out on a woodblock, especially a woodblock like this where the trumps are definitely not entirely arranged in the order that would have been used in play. It's clearly tempting to try to see a trump order in these woodblock layouts—I am continually astonished at how many people blithely assume that Fortitude must have been higher than the identically numbered Justice in the Rosenwald deck simply because it is in the "higher" position on the sheet, and even more astonished that some people assert that Time (XII) must be misnumbered because he is next to the trump numbered X—but there was really no practical imperative to arrange the trumps in their order of play on the woodblock, so we cannot expect cardmakers to have done so to any reliable degree.
The biggest problem with Robert's conjectured Cary order is that the Hanged Man-Hermit/Old Man-Death sequence. The only known order like that is the Sicilian order, and Sicily is too far away to be relevant here (we also don't even know what trump order the Sicilians used before the 18th century). All the other orders have the Old Man below the Hanged Man, and then Death. Moreover, except for the French decks, there are only two instances where anything else even interrupts that sequence of three (namely the orders used in Trento and Cesena in the first half of the 16th century). Otherwise it's always Old Man-Hanged Man-Death.
The Italian evidence shows that the C order existed there, but to my mind it does not prove that it originated there. The main reason for this is that French cards including Tarots were being imported into Piedmont already in 1505, and that France occupied Milan and its environs from 1499 to 1512, and again from 1515-1525.
As I pointed out in
my post on that Castello Sforzesco thread, the Milanese may well have been importing French tarot cards in the early 16th century—they certainly seem to have been importing them by the end of that century—but they also very deliberately rejected the French trump order that those cards were numbered with, eliminating the visible trump numbers from the cards as much as they could.
Given that the Milanese were playing tarot from the 1440s onwards, such that the game was very well established there by the time of the French military occupations of the city, it seems extremely unlikely that they would ever have adopted a French trump order unless it appeared on the cards that they were using. Since they were carefully making sure that it did
not appear on those cards, we must conclude that the trump orders used by Alciato and the players in Pavia were home-grown developments. Therefore, the "Italian evidence" shows that the Type C order did indeed originate in Lombardy, sometime prior to 1540.
Whatever the case may be, Dummett's premise that the C order originated in Milan is the entire basis for his assertion that the Cary Sheet, an obvious ancestor or ancestral relation to Tarot de Marseille, is Milanese. There is no other basis for attributing it to Milan than Dummett's theory.
I agree that we cannot know exactly where the Cary Sheet was made based on current evidence. The dimensions of the cards, 98 x 57 mm, are very close to some of the early-16th century cards found in the Castello Sforzesco, namely the "classical deities" set (101 x 57 mm) and the 5 of Batons and Knight of Swords (102 x 58 mm). But the closest dimensional match is actually the
two cards in the BnF showing the Hermit and the Queen of Cups, measured at 98 x 58 mm. These two cards also show a stylistic affinity with those on the Cary Sheet, especially the queen, who wears exactly the same kind of crown with a short veil underneath it as Temperance and the Empress on the Cary Sheet, and her throne has the same general furniture style as those of the Cary Emperor, Empress, Justice and Popess. Thierry Depaulis is of the view that those two cards were made in France, probably in Lyon (see his "‘Trionfi alla franciosa finiti e non finiti’ – Le tarot en France avant 1500",
The Playing-Card 44 no. 4: 206-7) and I think he is right (and they incidentally constitute evidence that early French tarot trumps were indeed not numbered, at least for a brief while).
But the Cary Sheet really does not look French at all... In previous discussions here and on the Aeclectic forum, people have pointed out that the Devil has characteristics of the Krampus figure, which seems to have been best known in the region of the Alps and adjacent areas. So maybe the Cary Sheet is from western Switzerland, or the County of Burgundy (Franche-Comté, which only became part of France in 1678: maybe the Cary Sheet was the first "Tarot de Besançon")... or perhaps from Milan, which is not that far from the Alps either. Or somewhere else in Lombardy.
However, regardless of where exactly the sheet was made, its designs certainly appear to be firmly rooted in a Milanese iconographic tradition. The Cary cards show several features that are otherwise only known from the handpainted cards made for the Milanese court in the mid-15th century:
- Robert has already mentioned those fishtail inlets on the Moon and Star, which resemble the cliff edges on some of the Visconti-Sforza cards
- The lovers on the Love card look exactly like those on the Visconti di Modrone card but in less chaste proximity
- The only other Chariot cards where the chariot takes the form of a flat platform with a canopy are the Visconti-Sforza and Visconti di Modrone cards
- The objects hanging down from the shoulder of the Hanged Man, which later became his fingers on French and Belgian cards, are clearly derived from the tassels hanging from the shoulders (and also hips) of the Visconti-Sforza Hanged Man
- The Pope (holding the crosier) appears to be wearing a robe tied at the waist with a simple cord, like the Visconti-Sforza Popess
(my personal hypothesis regarding this Cary Pope is that it resulted from a confused process involving attempted censorship of the Popess card: I think somebody tried to turn the Popess into a Bishop, but then a later cardmaker somehow mistook that Bishop card for the Pope and copied it as such, while simultaneously using a totally separate design as the Popess)
There are also other, somewhat less striking commonalities and affinities too, such as the eagle shield on the Empress card (now also given to the Emperor too), the probable design of the Fool as a beggar rather than a musician/entertainer (otherwise seen only in the Visconti-Sforza deck), and the depiction of Fortitude with a lion as her attribute rather than a column. I think a strong argument can also be made that there is a genealogical relationship between the Sun, Moon and Star trio in the Visconti-Sforza deck, the Budapest deck, and the Cary Sheet. But in those cases the links to Milan are more debatable. The features in the list above, however, already provide a sufficiently clear connection to Milanese designs to regard the cards of the Cary Sheet as Milanese in terms of their design heritage, if not necessarily their specific place of manufacture.
In summary, there is quite strong evidence that both the designs of the most of the Tarot de Marseille trumps and also most of their numbered order are essentially Milanese/Lombard in origin.
