Finding the Lion of St. Mark in any church in Italy is not unusual - but you would find it as part of the series of the four Evangels (or I suppose if the church were dedicated to St. Mark you could find the lion isolated). I do not maintain that the card shows Sforza as protector of Venice. It's ju...

Mikeh wrote, Phaeded wrote Sforza, to reiterate, would only hold Venice’s shield before 1452 ironically, as a lesson to Colleoni that Venice cannot be trusted. Surely Colleoni already knows that. This is even more recondite reasoning than what I supposed, which was that the Treaty of Lodi made Sfor...

You're right, Phaeded, I hadn't noticed the sun on the shield. On the card, as you showed it at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=906&p=13210&hilit=swords+King+PMB#p13211, the halo is not yellow; it blends in with the shield. Now it's yellow. I am perplexed. Still, I su...

Mikeh wrote: Actually, looking into it further, I am not convinced that the PMB King of Swords' shield has anything to do with Venice either… Wow. I can only assume you never noticed the lion’s halo and paw on the book on the PMB King of Swords’s shield, because there is absolutely no mistaking the...

Thanks. Do you have a precise relation between "7 gifts" and "7 sacred sciences" and "7 planets" and "7 artes"? What's your source? Dante's Convivio for the latter. But note that associatons between the planets in Convivio differs somewhat from that of the Pa...

Another question: Is there any other older document, in which allegory figures - best 7 virtues - are associated to the 7 planets as used in the Chaldean row? I’ll do you one better – a comparative example explicitly using Dante’s virtue/planets and exempli that just preceded the PMB: Juan de Mena’...

Mikeh wrote: Part of the terms of the Peace of Lodi was that each signatory power would protect the other against threats from without…So in a sense Sforza is the protector of Venice, and vice versa. The Lion on the PMB Fortitude card is being attacked by the man; if the Lion were Venice, that woul...

Largely driven by Dummett’s own findings, many of the debates I have encountered in regard to the meanings to specific trumps usually circles back to that trump’s neighboring trumps and thus its position in the sequence. I have argued that given the oldest decks are unnumbered and that there are at ...