This blog was originally written as a presentation to the International Playing Card Society meeting in Palermo, Sicily, in Sept. 2019. It was revised for this blog to include more information in its defense. In March, 2023 I made one update, in Part 2, about the changed presentaton of the Cary-Yale cards on the Beinecke Library website.
1. Introduction
How did the tarot deck come to be, and what did it first look like? I do not propose to have the answers. But I do have a hypothesis, using a combination of probable facts and plausible assumptions, expanding upon some remarks of playing card researchers Michael Dummett and Franco Pratesi. My aim is to connect the tarot trump sequence with the earliest known game thought to have had permanent trump cards, that described in a treatise by a secretary to Duke Filippo Visconti of Milan, dated sometime between 1412, when Filippo became duke, and its author’s funeral oration in 1425.
Gertrude Moakley had mentioned this treatise in 1966, referring to a one-paragraph account by Paul Durrieu in 1911; both thought it might be the first known indication of the game of triumphs,[1] the ludus triumphorum, known in Italian as trionfi. Durrieu had not mentioned an author, but Moakley was quick to tie the treatise to “Martiano Terdonensi,” i.e., “Marziano da Tortona.”
Then came Pratesi’s two-part article in 1989. [2] Durrieu had reported the deck’s 16 “figures,” listing for each a Greco-Roman god or demigod, grouped in four “orders”; Pratesi added many new details, including its four suits. Whether there was really any connection between this game and the game of trionfi, later tarocchi and the tarot, was unclear.
In the same issue of The Playing Card as part two of Pratesi’s report, Dummett contributed a short note, making three observations about Marziano’s game.[3] First, his god-cards might not have been the full-fledged trumps familiar to us from a later time, nor simply extensions of the four suits, but something in between. Second, perhaps the 16 trumps of Marziano’s deck had a parallel in the Visconti di Modrone deck of a later time, which might also have had 16 trumps, as suggested by its unusual feature of having 16 cards per regular suit. Third, Dummett said, Pratesi’s report gave new life to the idea, claimed on a 17th century painting in Bologna, that a certain Prince Fibbia there (dead in 1419, its inscription said[4]) was the tarot’s inventor. These will be my springboard.
Part I has three more sections. In section 2, elaborating on Dummett's early comments, I challenge two assumptions: that Marziano's deck was too early to have influenced the development of the tarot, and that it must have started out with all 22 special tarot subjects as opposed to fewer. In section 3 I discuss Marziano's game and in particular how its "four orders" of gods relate to its "four orders" of birds. In section 4 I discuss what I think are the three likeliest sources for a similar game with different subjects, resulting in a 14 or 16 card sequence. There follows a short summary, after which, in Part II, a separate post, I will try to show how the three characteristic orders would have developed from these subjects, when seen within the framework of Marziano's treatise.
2. Two dubious assumptions
To introduce some of the issues, I will start with the third of Dummett’s comments:
My original objection, in The Game of Tarot, was that Prince Fibbia was too early to have invented the game of tarocchini, as the inscription states. I have for long abandoned this view: if he had been the inventor of tarocchi in general, the word tarocchini, still in use for the only form of the game then known in Bologna (Minchiate excepted), might well have been employed in a XVII-century Bolognese inscription. It therefore already seemed to me possible, before Signor Pratesi's exciting discovery, that Prince Fibbia might really have been the inventor; but the evidence remains exceedingly flimsy.[5]
Here I am not concerned with Fibbia, who has been ably defended elsewhere,[6] but only with his time and place, 1419 Bologna. Dummett said this was not too early for this Fibbia to have invented the game. In 1996 Dummett, with his co-authors, reaffirmed this position: after mentioning 1442 Ferrara, the earliest triumph note then known, they added, “A lower bound for the date of the invention is harder to determine. It probably occurred around 1425; the earliest date with any claim to be plausible would be 1410.”[7] These dates put the tarot’s invention within Marziano’s time.
Why would they have picked a lower bound more than 30 years before any actual report of the game’s existence (then 1442[8])? It is standard practice: medieval historians regularly assume an “incubation period” (Inkubationszeit) of 15-20 years or more, in the normal case, for an innovation to be sufficiently noteworthy that it will be preserved in writing for historians to find.[9] For comparison, think of a fire that smolders for hours underneath a house before bursting into flames. It would not be surprising if there were no reports at the smoldering stage and an abundance later on.[10]
But might new evidence have made such a view obsolete by now? In 2009, Dummett put the invention of the game in “the late 1430s,” without further elaboration;[11] then Depaulis reported, in relation to the tarot, a notary’s 1440 diary entry recording the delivery of a trionfi a naibi made in Florence to the Lord of Rimini Sigismondo Malatesta.[12] For some reason, copies of this notary’s diary were made and preserved. The original is lost, but everything about the one copy containing the entry appears authentic.[13] But what follows? Florence was in a unique position at that time, with many notable personalities from around Italy there in the period 1438-1441, first for the Council of Florence, with its two ecclesiastical and two imperial chiefs (perhaps coincidental, perhaps not), and then the Battle of Anghiari; Malatesta probably received the deck as a reward for his victory. Noteworthy productions for noteworthy people make a game noteworthy. Also around that time, expensive manuscripts of Petrarch’s poem cycle by the same name, I Trionfi, started being made with illustrations of all six triumphs, most of them strikingly like their counterparts in surviving trionfi decks. In such august company, it is no surprise that the game of that name would have gained dramatically in noteworthiness.
There have been other discoveries. There is one record of Florentine trionfi production in 1445, then more in the 1450s, and even more for the 1460s.[14] Besides showing the game’s increasing popularity, these documents only show that Florence was a major center for the production of arts and crafts; so were other places, if perhaps to a lesser extent. Also, there are a pair of arrests for playing the game in Florence in 1444; trionfi-playing wasn’t legalized there until 1450.[15]
There is also the negative result that nothing has yet been found before 1440, despite all the increased research. The Ferrara ruling family’s records show purchases of other types of decks in the 1420s and 1430s, notably imperatori,[16] but not trionfi. Court records in Florence show arrests for playing other games, including cards, but not trionfi, naibe a trionfi, or giocho di charte a trionfi, as opposed to naibi or giocho di charte.[17] In Milan there is a similar situation, but not with records, laws, or arrests. There, thanks to the sacking and burning of the ducal palace after Filippo’s death in 1447, we cannot expect many records. But we have two partial decks filled with Visconti insignia that are very likely from the 1440s – and again, still nothing before then.
However, there are many ways to explain these results. An increase in interest around 1438-1440 might have made the enforcers in Florence attentive to the distinction between naibi and trionfi, since what mattered was only that people were not playing a permitted game. It is worth recalling that the earliest reported name for the game wasn’t trionfi, but naibi a trionfi, in other words a type of naibi, i.e., cards. Also, the game might have been enjoyed in that period by a higher class of people, who were normally discreet, not reported by their neighbors, and of some standing. Also, the decks used, while not mass-produced, might not have been seen as prestige items worth saving – until associated with prestigious people. Records may or may not turn up as scholars examine more documents. If anything, the mention in Giusti’s diary, after more than one hundred years of nothing earlier than 1442,[18] suggests that most likely more will be discovered, even if it takes another hundred years. Another possibility is that the game started somewhere else besides the three places mentioned so far, somewhere it might not have been illegal and where records of the ruling family were destroyed as much as in Milan (after the 1506 flight of the Bentivoglio). So we come to Bologna.
It is true that Bernardino of Siena, in a famous 1423 Bologna sermon, reportedly condemned “playing cards and similar,” without mentioning triumphs. [19] That testifies to the healthy craft industry in Bologna but does not show either that the game did not exist there or that he did not mention it. In the early 1430s, when the sermon was probably edited from notes, translated into Latin, and disseminated by copyists, the game, if it existed, would not have been well known. As such, the editors may have decided that rather than giving the new game free publicity, they would merely say “and similar.” Whether he mentioned the game or not, it may have been of the type he did condemn, that of gambling games for adults; in that case the result might merely have been a decrease in sales and records of them. Another possibility, which holds for all four major centers of the tarot, is that it was primarily an educational game for children, who after all were the consumers specified in a purchase of 1442 Ferrara (from a Bolognese merchant).[20] Children’s games are more likely to go unnoticed than those for adults. In any case, as mentioned previously, new terms could take decades to get included in documents now available for study.
It is sometimes said that in the face of two hypotheses, the simpler should be chosen given the available evidence. But what facts count as evidence? There is more than just documented reports and extant cards, just as other evidence besides verbal reports and photos can suggest that a fire smoldered for hours before being detected. Likewise in the present case there are other relevant facts, in fact whole types of facts. One type is the kind that Dummett articulated: the existence of a similar game of the early period, that of Marziano for Duke Filippo Maria Visconti Milan, from the same time as the claim of a 17th century painting in Bologna. There were probably other games with cards resembling trumps at this time. The same duke in 1420 issued an edict barring games “if not in accord with the correct and ancient system,” to which he reportedly added, “throwing forth the figures and other signs according to such a sign and such a figure,“ i.e., following suit with an eye to winning the trick by the rank of the card played.[21] He was not likely referring to games that made Aces high and Tens low in two of the suits, because his own game of the gods did that, as we will see. A game called Karnöffel, whose first verified mention is in 1446 Augsburg but could reasonably be much earlier, fits the description, because it elevated certain low cards in one suit, by the luck of the draw, to trump-like status, four of them above all the kings.[22] There was also a game that might have been designed to get around such prohibitions. Called VIII Imperadori, it is recorded in 1423 Ferrara as purchased from Florence for a noblewoman.[23] The name suggests eight permanent trumps, as opposed to Karnöffel’s low cards made trumps. These are two games likely to have been similar to trionfi in Marziano’s time; his is just the one we know for sure.
So one dubious assumption is that the game had to have been invented within a few years of 1440, or whenever the first report proves to be. For a connection to Marziano, it need not even go back as far as 1412-1425. The cards for his game, with 16 god-cards with superior-tricking taking power than the rest, were reportedly painted by the famous Michelino da Besozzo, and the essential part of Marziano’s text is quite short, easy enough to copy or even to remember and pass on to others. Moreover, any predecessor games would not have gone away.
It is true that none of the games mentioned had as many cards with special powers as those of the tarot’s 22. That is a second dubious assumption, that there were always 22. The earliest confirmation of 22 is a game invented by Matteo Boiardo (1440-1494), which even with mostly different subjects looks inspired by our game.[24] There are hand-painted tarot decks that are earlier, but all of them have considerably fewer surviving triumphal cards, at most 16 (the so-called Charles VI). It may be granted that 22 to start with is prima facie the best hypothesis. But the prima facie case must be examined relative to other explanations. In the law, for example, if a person comes to the police station and identifies a person as the one who robbed him, that is prima facie good evidence. But if there was no line-up, and the person merely confirmed the police’s selection, a series of similar but false identifications elsewhere – or simple common sense - is enough to weaken the prima facie conclusion severely, even if it is not disproved, and even if there is no contrary evidence in the particular case, because of the suspect methodology.
Games offer numerous counter-examples to the principle that the later form, even only considering its physical instruments, is the same as its beginning one. One need only to look at the history of chess: even if one particular form, with a certain number of pieces on a certain type of board has been standard for hundreds of years, that says nothing about chess in its formative period. Playing cards in northern Italy offer another example: because surviving Muslim and German decks lack Queens, they were probably an addition to a deck originally lacking them in Italy, too, even if there is no direct evidence. The principle that the later physical instruments of a game, if uniform in a particular region later, are the same as in an earlier period is contravened by the evidence.
There are also facts to account for having to do with the cards’ subjects and their order, even if the existing records only start around 1500. Why those subjects and not others, out of numerous possibilities, in the particular orders we find them, with only small variations, except for the virtues? And why are those three cards placed so variously in the order in the three main regions of the early tarocchi?[25] The preferences of game designers are part of it; but why would they have had such preferences? Deferring to designers’ whims and leaving it at that is like saying “God wills it,” certainly the simplest explanation. God, or the whim of a game-designer, is an explanation that will fit any result.
There remains the difficulty of explaining how it could be, if the game started out with significantly fewer special cards and then spread to different centers, it ended up with all the same subjects. I will get to that in section 4.
3. Marziano’s game
Dummett’s first comment concerns the extent to which Marziano’s god-cards were trumps. But let us first review Marziano’s words. The subjects of the 16 cards are “several most famous heroes, whose virtue, renowned for the greatness of their gifts, or mighty power, made gods.”[26] Thus the game, he tells the duke, will be both a diversion from serious activity and an elevating one, not only exercising the mind but also arousing one to virtue, because of the “fourfold order” that it contains.[27] Here is the end of the introduction and most of the next paragraph.
. . . Thus by observation of them [the heroes made gods], be ready to be aroused to virtue.
The first order is indeed of virtues: Jupiter, Apollo, Mercury, and Hercules.
The second of riches: Juno, Neptune, Mars, and Aeolis. The third of virginity
or continence. The fourth however is of pleasure: Venus, Bacchus, Ceres and
Cupid. Subordinated to those are four kinds of birds, being suited by
similarity. Thus to the order of virtues, the Eagle; of riches, the Phoenix; of
continence, the Turtledove; of pleasure, the Dove. And each one obeys
its own king. However the order of birds is that none of their types has right
over another, yet this arrangement they have alternately – Eagles and
Turtledoves the many command the few, that is to say it goes better for us when
many cultivate virtue and continence; but for Phoenices and Doves, the few rule
over the many. That is to say, the more there are of the followers of riches
and pleasures, the more they lead to the deterioration of our station. Every
one of the gods, however, will be above all the orders and the kings of the
orders. But the gods are held to this law among themselves: that who is first
designated below, he should lead all the others following in sequence.[28]
These relationships can be shown as follows, in today’s more usual way of numbering (the reverse of Marziano’s) and remembering that “Virtues,” etc., apply to the gods (indicated by the <); “Eagles,” etc., are then their “followers,” linked (hence the >) by similarity to an order of gods:
Deified heroes Orders of heroes Orders of birds
|
16 Jupiter |
12 Apollo |
8 Mercury |
4 Hercules |
<Virtues, linked by similarity to > |
Eagles: Kings, birds high to low |
|
15 Juno |
11 Neptune |
7 Mars |
3 Eolis |
<Riches, linked by similarity to > |
Phoenices: Kings, birds low to high |
|
14 Pallas |
10 Diana |
6 Vesta |
2 Daphne |
<Virginities, linked by similarity to > |
Turtledoves: Kings, birds high to low |
|
13 Venus |
9 Bacchus |
5 Ceres |
1 Cupid |
<Pleasures, linked by similarity to > |
Doves: Kings, birds low to high |
The unanswered question is, what role do the four “orders” play in the game? Once the order of trumps from 1 to 16 was memorized, It would seem that these “orders” could just be ignored. That is odd, given that Marziano presented this schema so prominently, even introducing it with “Consider this game, … with its fourfold order.”[29] Here is Dummett:
If they [the gods] were trumps, their assignment to the suits is pointless; if they were superior court cards, their ranking among themselves is pointless. Of the two hypotheses, Signor Pratesi's, that they were trumps in our sense, seems the more probable. But there are other possibilities: for instance, that, when a King or pip card was led, the trick could be won by a god only if it was of that suit, but that, when a god was led, it could be beaten by any higher god. If this seems complicated, we should remember that evolution sometimes goes in the direction of simplicity; we should recall also the complicated rules about the trump suit in Karnöffel. This hypothesis would make Marziano's game ancestral to Tarot, but at a considerable remove.[30]
Pratesi did not actually say that Marziano’s gods were trumps “in our sense,” but rather that they seemed to be both “triumphs” and “supercourts,” i.e., extensions of the four suits as well as “obeying their own rules.”[31] Dummett’s comment, however, takes the discussion further.
In support of Dummett’s solution is the very last sentence of the treatise. Marziano says of Cupid, “With a full bow, the wanton and wicked Cupid wanders through heaven and earth; whose arms, pestilent to gods and men, Jupiter himself was not able to escape.”[32] How could Cupid overpower Jupiter in the game, if Cupid was the lowest ranking god and Jupiter the highest? A rule such as Dummett’s would do it. If one did not have a card in the suit led, one had to lead a trump; if the only trump such a player had was Jupiter, they would have to play it and inevitably lose, if the suit led was anything but Eagles.
The problem is that players in that situation would not play a high trump if they could help it, because they would be sure to lose. Let us reformulate the rule: The highest card played in a trick, including trumps, wins, but priority goes to the highest trump that is an extension of the suit led. Thus, if a Dove is led, and someone puts down Jupiter, Cupid, being in the extension of Doves, could capture him, as long as no one played Venus, Bacchus, or Ceres. With this rule daring players might well play Jupiter, thinking they would thereby win the trick, only to be surprised by Cupid or some other card in the order of Pleasures. That rule would be more fun than the one Dummett proposed.
Ross Caldwell in an online post suggested a different way in which the “fourfold order” could be part of the game: in its scoring.[33] In the Bolognese tarocchino and minchiate, combinations of cards, both in the regular suits and the triumphs, play a major role.[34] In Marziano’s game the four moral categories could provide a similar source of combinations, and even suit cards, since each moral category is associated with a suit. As in the later games, combinations of any three could count, with more points for four and more. So a player would make a special effort to capture cards that count in combinations. In that way they would have to be kept in mind. Since this solution does not address the question of how Cupid could capture Jupiter, both solutions may be valid.
4. The same game but different subjects
Now the problem is how to get from Marziano’s game to the tarot subjects known later, in a way that uniquely identifies his game as a source, or as stemming from a common source.
I turn to Dummett’s comment about the
Cary-Yale (also called Visconti di Modrone), of which there are 11 surviving tarot subjects and enough suit cards to suggest that there were 16 cards per regular suit. He says:
We know, however, that the composition of the Visconti di Modrone pack did not conform to what later came to be standard: the hypothesis that it contained only sixteen trumps is accordingly a real possibility. If so, then the trump sequence was of the same length as each of the suits; and this would give a simple reason why sixteen was chosen as the number of trumps. This suggests the faint possibility that, in Marziano's pack, too, each suit had both male and female court figures for each of the three ranks, making a total of 16 + 64 = 80 cards altogether.[35]
What contributes to a solution here
is the “real possibility” that the Visconti deck had the same number of cards
in the trump suit as in the regular suits. I will take that suggestion a little
further. If Marziano’s deck and the Cary-Yale, probably done for the same Duke
of Milan twenty years later, both had 16 trumps, then perhaps what they had in
common was a 4x4 grid. But then what about
decks with 13 or 14 cards per suit? We know about 14 early on from a sermon
against gaming by Saint Bernardino in 1423 Bologna, where he reportedly mentioned
a king, a queen, a superior soldier and an inferior soldier.[36]
Assuming ten number cards, that would make 14 per suit, with 14 trumps.[37] That
number would explain the mysterious “14 figures” given in Ferrara to the young
Bianca Maria Visconti on New Years’ Day of 1441 and the 70 card triumph decks
made for the d’Este family in 1457.[38]
On the other hand, it would also leave two blank spaces in a 4x4 grid.
Another question arises: what would correspond to the four “orders” of gods in a grid with 14 or 16 subjects of the sort that would lead to the game later known as tarot? For an educational game that parents and children might play together, aimed to "arouse you to virtue," an obvious choice is rows defined by virtues. That is not a big jump from Marziano’s game, which already had rows for “virtues” and “virginities.” In the tarot we find three of the four so-called cardinal virtues. But the Cary-Yale has among its extant cards four out of the seven principal virtues, fortitude and the three theological virtues; so it probably had all seven, as Dummett reasoned in Game of Tarot.[39]
Correlations were in fact made between the four cardinal virtues and the standard four suits, for which two sources can be cited. First is Giangaleazzo Visconti’s 1404 funeral oration, lamenting:
O clear light, o mirror, o column, o sustenance, o confident sword, you kept our territory safe in the high places and on the plain![40]
Referents for these features can all be seen in the minchiate decks of later years. Mirrors, round like coins, are an attribute of Prudence (minchiate's card XVII). A surviving 16th century pack found in
Assisi actually has for its Maid of Coins a young woman looking into a
hand-mirror.[41]
Columns, straight like Batons, correspond to Fortitude, often depicted
as a lady holding a column (card VII). Sustenance suggests Cups and Temperance’s two
vessels (card VI). The Sword is that of Justice (card VIII).
Secondly, a book of games published in 1551 Bologna
proposed a “Game of the King” with four suits, each correlated with a cardinal
virtue: the suit of Mirrors with Prudence, Columns with Fortitude, Cups with
Temperance, and Swords with Justice; see below [42]
A four-by-something grid then would enable virtue cards so correlated to be
combined with other cards in the same row.
Since the Cary-Yale deck has among its surviving cards the three theological virtues, we cannot exclude that these might have been part of the original set. If so, 16 would be more appropriate for such a deck than 14, with the latter reserved for decks without them. I will expand on this point in Part 2. The theological virtues, however, do not readily correlate with the four suits.
What subjects might complement the four virtues that associate so well with the suits? Here we need to consider the
six universal life-concerns of Petrarch’s popular poem cycle Il Trionfi
(the same as the name of the game), which also happen to form a hierarchy. The
first concern, Love, is triumphed over by Pudicizia, which is triumphed
over by Death, then Fame, then Time, then Eternity.[43]
Two of the tarot subjects had the same names, Love and Death. Illustrations of Petrarch's subjects in
manuscripts and on wedding-chests used similar imagery for these themes (at right, Pesellino's Triumph of Time, c. 1450). The
same is true of another subject, Petrarch’s Time, shown as an old man with a
cane or crutches, sometimes with wings (Tempus fugit, Time flies) or an
hourglass (the two at left below, from the Visconti-Sforza and Charles VI decks; some sources even called the
card Time.[44] Fourth, a card of an angel calling souls to judgment suggests the Triumph of
Eternity, in that it announces the end and vanquishing of Time, as Petrarch says in his poem.
The presence of four Petrarchans encourages us to look for
the other two, Pudicizia (Castità in some manuscripts) and Fama.
Pudicizia goes beyond chastity, involving also modesty in dress and
behavior and anything else compromising sexual purity. Since Petrarch includes
married heroines such as Penelope and Lucretia, marital duties would appear to
be allowed. Fama is celebrity and renown but also notoriety.[45]
Since it involves being known, it can survive a person’s Death in others’ remembrance,
if not the full ravages of Time.
In the earliest known deck, the Cary-Yale (also known as the
Visconti di Modrone), the Chariot rider is a woman holding a jousting shield (as does the Empress, at right above);[46]
likewise, Petrarch’s Pudicizia holds a shield by which to fend off Love’s
blows (“Triumph of Pudicizia” lines 118-119).
In that deck the World
card has a lady on top holding a winged trumpet in one hand and a crown in the
other, looking down from above at a this-worldly scene of a knight in a
landscape of castles, a plain, and ships at sea. One of the attributes of Fama,
a feminine personification, was in fact just such a trumpet, which spreads the
news of a person’s Fame. Many illustrations of the Triumph of Fame (sometimes called Gloria, Glory, include such
trumpets, such as the illustration below left, the central portion of an illumination from a c. 1380 manuscript of Petrarch's De Viris Illustribus (Of Illustrious Men). (Note: here I am showing only parts of artworks; for the rest, all are readily available online, as are the decks the cards come from.) On the card, the scene below the lady, centering on the knight, contributes to this
identification: if she is Fama, the knight below is a man gifted by her.
But the jousting shield identifying the CY Chariot card with Pudicizia does
not carry over to the Chariot card of most other early decks. In the “Issy” Chariot card (below left), a
female rider holds a sword in one hand and a golden orb in the other, fitting precisely
Boccaccio’s personification of “the Glory of worldly folk” in his Amorosa
Visione (VI: 65-72, trans. Hollander et al):
she sat on a triumphal chariot, . . . held in her hand a shining sword, . . . in her left hand a golden apple. . . . Over the lady . . . was a verse written . . . "I am the Glory of the Worldly folk."
(“sovra triunfal carro si sedea, . . . ‘n man tenea una lucente spada, . . . teneva nella man sinestra un pomo d’or . . . Era sovra costei, . . . un verso scritto . . . "Io son la Gloria del popol mondano.")
It is now the this-worldly Fama that Petrarc
h saw capable of lasting beyond the lifetime of one who attained it; all that is missing to clinch the identification is the trumpet, but illustrations of Petrarch frequently omitted that attribute. As female, the figure could also represent a lady famed for her Pudicizia (as opposed to Pudicizia herself). The same could be said for the Visconti-Sforza version of around the same time and place (at right), although her orb is similar enough to the earlier shield that she could be either virtue, and she has the scepter rather than a sword. All three cards are thought to be of Lombard origin; if so, the lady might well be Bianca Maria Visconti, daughter of Duke Filippo and, by virtue of her husband's military prowess, the next duchess of Milan. It is possible that the same reference applies to the lady on the Cary-Yale, if the deck, as many think, commemorates her wedding to Francesco Sforza.
Both the orb and the sword feature in many Petrarch illustrations of Fama,
e.g., a birth tray by Lo Scheggia, c. 1449, near left
(probably for the birth
of Lorenzo), and a wedding chest by Pesellino, c. 1450, far left (both readily found on
the internet, as are these cards).
The “Catania” deck’s charioteer (2nd from left below), holding his or her golden orb, is androgynous, but other Chariots have clearly male riders. As such, they would not be Fama herself, but one blessed by Fama. On the “Charles VI” (far left below) a man holds a halberd and wears a type of hat seen on depictions of leaders. In the Rosenwald sheet, the orb divides into three parts, one for each continent; since its holder is crowned, it might suggest, with some hyperbole, the lands he rules, or the extent of his fame; again he is in a victory parade. The Chariot on a c. 1500 uncut sheet of cards strikingly like that of Bologna later (Beaux Arts Sheet, 3rd from left) has plumed horses, so also on parade, and the man’s helmet has wings identifying him as a follower of Mars, i.e., a warrior.[47]
What then of the World card in these decks (all early, but after the Cary-Yale)? In the Charles VI (the left image at right), we see a lady
standing on top of a large orb suggesting
the world, with hills and castles, holding a small orb and a baton, like some Charioteers. Her polygonal halo simply suggests that it is an allegorical figure. There is a similar halo on Pesellino's Fama (2nd above, left). In the same deck, it is also seen on the three virtue cards, so she could also be meant as the missing virtue Prudence. Except for the specification of the polygonal halo, the figure on the Charles VI precisely fits that of the protagonist's guide in Boccaccio's Amorosa Visione (I:36-42, trans. Hollander et al): . . . her blonde head
adorned by a crown more splendid
and fair than the sun, her comely
clothing seemed to me to be of violet hue.
Smiling, she had in her right hand
a royal sceptre, enclosed in her left,
she held up a beautiful golden apple.
If so, she is not worldly fame, because in Boccaccio's allegory the guide urges the protagonist to shun worldly goals and follow the steep and narrow path "to the high place where your soul will be in glory" (I:68-69).
Here the Petrarch illustrations suggest a clue to the interpretation: their Triumphs of Eternity, such as Pesellino's of around 1450 (at left above), often very literally portray Christ and his angels standing above the arch of the world.[48] So if it is Fama, it is likely of an eternal kind, that of "Christ in Glory."
The Este (far left above) and Rosenwald (2nd from left) suggest a similar interpretation, except with only one figure, winged. The Este, in the context of Pesellino, suggests the Christ child; the Rosenwald angel is older and carries a sword, perhaps to use against those not entitled to a favorable verdict in the Last Judgment, the card following in the sequence.The c. 1500 Bolognese card (middle) is similar, except that the wings are on his helmet and his baton. From his similarity to the man on the corresponding Chariot card, he could be a man of both worldly and eternal fame. He could also be Mercury, messenger of the gods and guide of souls between worlds (at far right with Psyche, from a fresco by Raphael, 1520); there was also Orpheus and Eurydice); he plays a role somewhat analogous to Christ and the guide of the Amorosa Visione. The identification with Mercury is clearer in the Bolognese card of the 17th century (above, from the Della Torre Tarocchini, on Gallica).
We are left with something like but not all quite the same as Petrarch's six. Perhaps the game initially had all six Petrarchans, but later the card for Pudicizia was changed to represent worldly Fama, while the World card, formerly Fama, became associated with Eternity and its glory. Or it was the other way around, with the Cary-Yale an isolated attempt to include all six as distinct cards. Regarding the disappearance of Pudicizia, perhaps it was thought that the two virtues Temperance and Fortitude were enough, which in Florence and Bologna appeared where Petrarch had put Pudicizia, immediately after Love. Regarding the World card, Gloria is another word for Fama; it is just that it is now of a type not overcome by Time. In any case, Petrarch’s poems remains a pervasive influence.
In both the game and the poems the triumphs follow a definite order, even if the two are not precisely the same. The game puts Time (the Old Man) and usually (Worldly) Fame (the Chariot) before Death, whereas Petrarch had them after Death. But the tarot sequence does not have to duplicate Petrarch to be inspired by it. If one’s Fama is to survive one’s death, it has to be earned before death. Likewise, Time can be the time of an individual life, to be used well or badly, as well as Petrarch’s cosmic time, extending after that life. The Petrarch illustrations themselves shifted in that direction, going from a figure holding an armillary sphere representing the cosmos to one with the hourglass of human time.[49]
Below the Petrarchans and the virtues in the orders are the four dignitaries – called papi in Bologna, otherwise Empress, Emperor, Popess, and Pope. This group (and perhaps the very idea of trumps) may have been inspired by the game of VIII Imperadori already mentioned. Emperors are a natural extension of the existing suits into one of a higher order, where besides being the highest of their own suit, they have the ability to go outside their own kingdom to rule over cards of the other three.[50] In the tarot, we see a reduction to four, the same as the number of suits. If all the suits were equal, these dignitaries would be, too, as seen in Bologna and Piedmont.[51] Other places arranged them hierarchically, spiritual above secular and male over female in various orders. They may have all been equal originally even in those places. (An example of male-female equality is the Stuttgart hunting deck, c. 1430, which had female courts in two suits and male in the other two.) If so, that would explain why two such non-contiguous places as Bologna and Piedmont would have had the same rule. Other places soon arranged the two sets hierarchically, spiritual above secular and male over female in various orders. Since even emperors and popes are subject to the virtues and the Petrarchan life-concerns, the former belong below the latter.
Four virtues plus six Petrarchans plus four dignitaries yield 14, the same as the number of cards per suit. For the others, the orders themselves suggest that they were additions. The five from Devil to Sun are always found in exactly the same order everywhere, one after the other,[52] unlike the proposed 14, which vary in their placement (except for the Pope and Death, which are at natural divisions). This uniformity suggests that those five, or most of them, entered the sequence in most places during a time of peace and cooperation among Italian city-states, as opposed to one of isolation and individual self-assertion. The shift is marked by the Peace of Lodi in 1454, but it began earlier, with the friendship between Cosimo de’ Medici and Francesco Sforza. To this same spirit may be attributed the fact that the final 22 were the same everywhere (except at some point Florence, which dropped the Popess, if it ever had it), drawing together the contributions of different centers.
The Bagatella (Magician, also called Bagatello early on) and Fool are likewise not part of my three groups. They lack the allegorical stature to be above Kings like the others, and again, they are always in the same place in the lists, the Bagatella as lowest triumph and the Fool as a wild card. To these may be added the Hanged Man, also always in the same place, just before Death. Then there is the Wheel of Fortune. It is always just below the Old Man except in a few A orders where the Chariot, the variable card usually just below the Wheel, changes places with it. While not in Petrarch, it was a triumphator in Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione. It is not obviously either late or early.
The 14 (or perhaps 16, with the theologicals but minus the Popess) are, I am hypothesizing, a nucleus to which the others can be added. Here is what they look, in the four early centers of the Tarot. The four Imperatori or Papi are blue, the Petrarchans red, the virtues purple, and the "added cards" (my term) black:
Florence (ca. 1500): Bagatello, Popess (?), Empress, Emperor, Pope, Love, Temperance, Fortitude, Justice, Wheel, Chariot (or Chariot, Wheel), Old Man (Time), Hanged Man, Death, Devil, Tower, Star, Moon, Sun, World, Angel.
Bologna (late 1600s): Bagattino, four Papi (perhaps differentiated earlier), Love, Chariot, Temperance, Justice, Fortitude, Wheel, Old Man ("Time), Hanged Man, Death, Devil, Tower, Star, Moon, Sun, World, Angel.
Ferrara (Sermo de Ludo, c. 1480, Bertoni mid-1500s): Bagatella, Empress, Emperor, Popess (or Popess, Emperor), Pope, Temperance, Love, Chariot (or Chariot, Love), Fortitude, Wheel, Old Man (Time), Hanged Man, Death, Devil, Tower, Star, Moon, Sun, Angel, World.
Lombardy (Pavia, Alciato): Bagatello, Popess, Empress, Emperor, Pope, Love, Justice, Chariot, Fortitude (or Fortitude, Chariot) Wheel, Old Man, Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, Devil, Tower, Star, Moon, Sun, Angel, World.
In Florence and Bologna, Prudence would probably go with the other virtues. It is not clear where Prudence would go in Ferrara and Lombardy. Except for the virtues, the sequence is much the same everywhere, with very small variations: a few cards interchanging with the one next to it, and the order of the dignitaries before the Pope.
It is possible, I wish to emphasize, that the theological virtues were part of the sequence early on and then were dropped everywhere except in the 41 triumph version known as minchiate. In that case a 14 card version might have had, along with all seven virtues, the six Petrarchans plus the Wheel. My co-participants on Tarot History Forum, "Phaeded" and "Nathaniel," have proposed such an ur-tarot, agreeing on the seven virtues of the medieval Church but with different sources for the others.
In Nathaniel's case, the others are from Petrarch, but with a second Chariot card instead of the Wheel; see https://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2321. This way of getting 7 Petrarchans is not very appealing, as the two cards would look too much alike, in a game where quick identification is important. Moreover, there is no suggestion of two chariots in any of the surviving partial decks or later lists. If the 7th Petrarchan is imagined as the Wheel, or an Emperor, his proposal is more attractive. Then there would have been 4 "good" imperatori (the imperials and papals) and 4 "bad" ones (Fool, Bagatella, Hanged, Devil, Tower or Hanged Man - a nice way to imagine the predecessor game of VIII Imperadori (two for each suit), and a type of division also seen in the predecessor game of Karnöffel. However, the Imperials remain most natural to put above the kings, and thus the most natural candidates for the beginning of a trump suit, so that it is more likely that 1 to 4 of them would have been part of the original game. Then the other trumps of VIII Imperadori might well have been a source for four of those added later.
For Phaeded (https://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=16260#p16260), the original titles, besides those of the 7 virtues, derive from their mentions in Dante's Paradiso; they are essentially those cards that "Nathaniel" and I attribute to Petrarch, except for the World, which he sees as Prudence. The problem is that the words he picks from the Paradiso play no special role in the poem but are merely ten out of the thirty thousand or so words that appear. Since the imperials, Petrarchans, and Wheel are common medieval motifs, it is no surprise that they would be in the Paradiso. In contrast, Petrarch's succession of six named subjects more or less capture six of the main themes of his poem, with the seventh (the Wheel) as the main triumphator of Boccaccio's similar Amorosa Visione.
The part of this proposal about the seven virtues, however, seems to me on firmer ground - if 4, why not 7? - at least for the two places where the theological virtues did appear, namely Lombardy and Florence. In what follows, I will be taking it into account.
The question now is to see how the framework of a Marziano-style grid linked to suits can help to account for the variations seen in the orders and why cards would have been added.
Since the hypothesized additions are mostly not at one end or the other, one necessary assumption is that while players in a particular region might object to major changes in the order once it started being played in their city, they could tolerate new cards being inserted into that order or subtracted, if it served a purpose. (An example is minchiate, which is a tarot with a series of groups of cards inserted into it and one less.) Having the same cards in every region, even if their order varied in each region, would be just such a purpose, especially if the new cards also provided appealing images useful for education or contemplation. It would make the game part of building a shared identity and culture of Italians, promoting peace and cooperation while also preserving regional characteristics.
Notes:
[1] Moakley 1966, 46 and n. 10, 53, citing Durrieu 1911, 376-377, and Pier Candido Decembrio, Vita Filippi Mariae Vicecomitis mediolanensium ducis tertii vita, Cap. LXI, written 1447-1448. The relevant passage is online at http://trionfi.com/decembrio-filippo-maria-visconti. See also Caldwell and Ponzi 2019, 106.
[2] Pratesi 1989, 30.
[3] Dummett 1989.
[4] Dummett 1980, 66.
[5] Dummett 1989, 75.
[6] Vitali 2003-2017.
[7] Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett 1996, 27.
[8] See n. 18 below.
[9] Haas 2015, 97. Vitali, 2003-2017, cites two current eminent medievalists and a professor of scientific thought for “15-20 anni di ritardo” (a 15-20 year lag), even “20/25 e più anni addietro” (20/25 and more years earlier). His example is the invention of eyeglasses, which two independent testimonies, in Florence and Venice, put at least 15 years earlier.
[10] For a contrary view, see Caldwell 2007.
[11] Dummett and McLeod, 2009, Introduction.
[12]; Depaulis 2013a, 17-18 and n. 6, citing Noreida Newbigin, ed., “I ‘Giornati’ de ser Giusto Giusti,” Letteratura Italiana Antica III (2002), 66.
[13] Pratesi 2012a.
[14] 1445: Pratesi 2012b. For the 1450s and 1460s, Pratesi 2012a, Esch and Esch, 2013.
[15] Laws: Pratesi 1990. Arrests: Pratesi 2015; both men were arrested at the same time and place.
[16] Spelled Imperadori, 1423: Franceschini 1993, lines 137ff under “i,” cited by Caldwell, http://trionfi.com/imperatori-cards-ferrara-1423; spelled Imperatori, 1434: Pratesi 1995, 7.
[17] Pratesi 1990, 2012a, 2012b, 2015.
[18] Vitali, 2004-2016, n. 6, citing personal communication from Ross Caldwell, that the 1442 record was first reported by Giuseppi Bertoni in 1904 (“Nuovi tarocchi versificati,” in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana vol. 43, 57, n. 5 ).
[19] Bernardini Senensis, 1950: “carticellae et consimilia,” cited in Vitali 2009, who dates the editing to 1430-1436.
[21] “Nel 1420 vietò qualsiasi giuoco delle carte, quando non fosse secondo il retto e antico sistema,” in F. Malaguzzi Valeri, La corte di Ludovico il Moro I (Milano: Hoepli, 1913-1917), 268; adding “iactando foras figuras et alia signa pro tali signo et tali figura,” according to Caldwell at https://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=5187#p5187.
[22] For 1446: Schreiber, 1937, 46. For the other details, Dummett 1980, 188. Schreiber also alleged a 1426 document, but that has proven currently unverifiable.
[23]See here n. 18.
[24] For more information see http://trionfi.com/0/h/.
[25] For the main orders and regions, see Dummett 1980, 399-401; region A updated, Depaulis 2007, 41-43; region C updated, Depaulis 2013b, 113-114.
[26] Caldwell and Ponzi 2019, 22-23 (with the Latin).
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid., 22-25 (with the Latin).
[29] Ibid., 22-23 (with the Latin).
[30] Dummett 1989, 74.
[31] Pratesi 1989, 35.
[32] Caldwell and Ponzi 2019, 92-93 (with the Latin).
[33] http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=20655#p20655 (22 Jan., 2019).
[34] E.g., Pedini, c. 1746, on Sequenze and Cricche (or Pariglie).
[35] Dummett 1989, 75.
[37] As suggested by Decker 1974, Vitali 1995, Berry 1987 and 2004, and, with the most documentation, Teikemeier, 2004.
[38] http://trionfi.com/0/e/00b/, http://trionfi.com/0/e/16/. For another set of 14, in the 1450s, see here the end of section 7.
[39] Dummett 1980, 78.
[40] Moakley 1966, 41 n. 1, citing Archivio storico lombardo, anno xviii, 792: “O chiara luce, o specchio, o colonna, o sostegno, o franca spada, che la nostra contrada mantenevi sicura in monte e in piano!”
[41] Pratesi 2016a, 3, fig. 1 (reproduction of J. Berry, “Found - and Lost?”, Playing Card World 79 [1995], 26-27).
[42] Ibid., citing Ringhieri 1551, 132.
[43] This source for the cards has been advocated by many: Moakley 1966, 45-48; Shephard 1985, Pratesi 1998, etc.
[44] In the tarot: Folengo, 1527, trans. Mullaney, 143; Pomeran, 1534, n.p; in minchiate, Depaulis 2007, 43. The Bolognese sheets and minchiate figures have wings; the Charles VI, “Alessandro Sforza,” and Visconti-Sforza have the hourglass. For comparable Petrarch illustrations, see Cohen 2000.
[45] For more details, see the entries for both terms at http://gdli.it.
[46] Observed by Jean-Michel David at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=215#p215 (April 9, 2008). The cards of this deck (search “Visconti Tarot”) are viewable on the website of the Beinecke Library of Yale University.
[47] On the wings, see Ross Caldwell at https://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=4294#p4294 (Sept. 5, 2009). For the cards of Bologna, my references are the two sheets now held by the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts and the Rothschild Collection at the Louvre, both in Paris, and for the cards not on these sheets, the “Dalla Torre” Tarocchino held by the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and online at Gallica. The “Charles VI” is also at Gallica, while the Rosenwald is on the website of the National Gallery in Washington.
[48] Pesellino’s wedding chest, c. 1450, is an example. On this point I want to thank “Nathaniel” on Tarot History Forum.
[49] Cohen 2000, 126. Compare especially her fig. 2 and fig. 8.
[50] Suggested by Pratesi 2016b.
[51] Pedini, c. 1746, Cap. V: “Ne Papi non v'è ordine“ (In Papi, there is no order); Piscina 1565, 16-17: “Non è adesso maraviglia che giocando l'Imperatore di minore dignità & authorità de i Papi alcune volte gli vinca e pigli…” (Now you do not have to be surprised that when playing the Emperor, of a lesser authority and dignity than the Popes, sometimes he wins and takes them).
[52] The order is invariably Devil, Tower, Star, Moon, Sun, after which the order varies, either World and then Angel or vice versa. See the tables in Dummett 1980, 399-401.
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