New Pratesi note (now two) on the Cary-Yale
Posted: 04 Feb 2016, 01:03
As readers of this Forum might know, I have been translating some of Franco Pratesi's recent essays (or "notes") from Italian into English. Franco has a new one in Italian, dated Jan. 17, 2016, called "Elucubrazioni sui tarocchi Visconti di Modrone o Cary-Yale", i.e. "Ruminations on the Visconti di Modrone or Cary-Yale Tarot". Since the Cary-Yale is the oldest tarot deck preserved, including 11 of its triumphs, it has always been of great interest to tarot researchers. Franco's note--of 19 pages--deserves discussion here. Also, the is something he collaborated with me on, in part, and there are some lengthy quotes by me there. I have translated the rest. But first I need to give some background.
In 1989 an article by Franco (http://www.naibi.net/A/25-FIRSTARO-Z.pdf) brought the attention of the tarot history community to the earlier "game of the gods" designed by Marziano for Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, sometime before Marziano's death in 1425. In part, Franco's new note, on the Cary-Yale, connects the two decks in a hypothetical way. So I will start with a brief discussion of the deck Marziano designed for that game.
In Marziano's deck, 16 Greco-Roman "deified heroes"--i.e. gods and demigods, as described in various classical texts--arranged in a precise hierarchy could, when played in a trick, beat any card in the regular suits. At the same time all of them also belonged to the four regular suits, to which he gave the names of allegorical birds. They look like this:
Suit, Suit-sign_________ Gods, in order from most to least powerful
Virtues, eagle:__________1 Jupiter, 5 Apollo, 9 Mercury, 13 Hercules
Riches, phoenix:________2 Juno, 6 Neptun, 10 Mars, 14 Eolus
Virginities, turtledove:__3 Pallas, 7 Diana, 11 Vesta, 15 Daphne
Pleasures, dove:________4 Venus, 8, Bacchus, 12 Ceres, 16 Cupido
To the extent that there is a hierarchy of 16 superior cards, this deck resembles the tarot deck, although the cards, from their description, looked nothing like any early tarot cards.
This same Filippo Maria, Duke of Milan until his death in 1447, is thought to have also commissioned the earliest extant deck whose special cards are tarot subjects, the Cary-Yale. It is tempting to speculate on whether there is any connection between the two.
So we come to Franco's and my collaboration. Huck posted parts of a few new essays by Pratesi wrote about recently on early documents using the words "minchiate" and "germini" (the latter thought to be another word for the same game, or one very similar). Before recently, it was thought that minchiate, a tarot deck expanded to 97 cards, was a product of the mid 16th century. There was already a known but not entirely secure mention of minchiate in 1466, in a letter of Luigi Pulci to Lorenzo Il Magnifico, Also, Franco found references in 1473 ( The Playing-Card, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1990) pp. 7-17, L'As de Trefle, N. 52 (1993) pp. 9-10, both online at naibi.net), but because there was nothing between then and the mid-16th century it was perhaps a different game, which died out. Now. however, the gap is considerably narrowed. Franco found a reference in 1529 (The Playing-Card, Vol. 40, No. 3 (2012) pp. 179-197). Then Huck found one to germini in 1517 (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=780), and now Franco, again to germini, in 1506 (The Playing Card vol. 44 no. 1 (2015), pp. 61-71).
I translated Franco's essay on the "germini" reference and posted it here (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1074&p=16463&hilit=1517#p16459 and following). Soon Franco was emailing me about some of my guesses as to what certain 15th century terms meant. I corrected them. But one thing he said was that "carte a trionfi" in Florentine documents should not be translated as "triumph cards" but rather as "triumph-style cards". This puzzled me. What was the difference? He said that "triumph-style cards" meant cards done in the style of pictures with triumphal scenes or characters on them, for example the triumphs of Petrarch, or the cards described by Marziano (email of Dec. 20, 2015). Then would all "carte a trionfi" have been such cards? No, he insisted; it is 99% certain that only some of the cards were of such scenes. It is also only 99% certain that these were cards for use in card games; but such use is not part of the meaning of "carte a trionfi". He thought of an example. A "vaso a fiori" is, in Florentine speech, a vase with pictures of flowers on it. A "vaso di fiori" is a vase with flowers in it.
In English we have no such expression in three words or less for a vase with flowers on it. However we do have "checkered box" versus "box of checkers", with clearly different meanings, one referring to what is on the box and the other to what is in it. By that analogy, it seems to me, we could make up a term "flowered vase" meaning one with flowers on it. Another example is "deviled eggs", which means eggs part of which has spices added to part of it in a kind of paste: "deviled" is to suggest the spiciness of the result. Not all of the egg is "deviled", just the yoke. But the result is still a "deviled egg". On that model, "carte a trionfi" would mean, if we had the expression, "triumphed cards", i.e. cards of which at least some, and most likely only some, have been given triumphal scenes. They would not include only the triumphal cards, for which the term "carte trionfali" would have been appropriate.
So what were the antecedents of "carte a trionfi", an expression whose first documented use is 1440 Florence? Cards, to be sure, including playing cards, but also something else, triumphal scenes, such as those of Petrarch's poem I trionfi, or Marziano's cards. Later he added, in addition to these, "the same triumphal subjects that were used at the time for cassoni, deschi, and so on" (email of Jan. 1, 2016). An example that occurs to me is illustrations from Petrarch's De viris illustribus (Of illustrious men. He also once mentioned cards of saints.
This discussion reminded me of an old hypothesis of mine that I had not talked about in years. My idea was that the connection between Marziano's deck and the Cary-Yale was that both had 16 special cards that functioned both as the highest members of one of the four suits and as a hierarchy among themselves as far as which one, if two in different suits were played, won the trick. I had much difficulty getting this idea taken seriously as an hypothesis. The problem was that nobody believed that the Cary-Yale had such a structure. I gave them evidence, of a sort, but nobody thought it was credible.
Another part of my hypothesis was that the 16 cards included, as one part, the 6 triumphs of Petrarch's I Trionfi plus one more triumph. Fortune, which had been included by Boccaccio in his Amorose Visione. Fortune is missing from the surviving Cary-Yale triumphs, but does survive in another closely related deck, the Brera-Brambilla.
In Petrarch's poem, Love is triumphed over by Chastity, Chastity by Death, Death by Fame, Fame by Time, and Time by Eternity. To these are added, somewhere, Fortune, from Boccaccio. Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, and Eternity are, on my hypothesis, surviving cards in the Cary-Yale. Chastity is represented by the card later known as the Chariot, which the Cary-Yale depicts as a lady on a chariot. Fame is a scene with knights below and a lady on top along with two trumpets, instruments traditionally associated with Fame. Time we know from the PMB (and Charles VI), where it is represented by an old man with an hourglass. Another part of the 16 would be the four cardinal and three theological virtues of medieval Christianity, of which all three theologicals and one cardinal are in the surviving cards. Finally there are the the Emperor and Empress, which form another group, of separate derivation; we do not need to know what it was because they are in the preserved cards and there are no other cards to postulate from that source. The game of "VIII Emperors" is one possibility.
This part of what I presented to Franco is from Huck's "chess theory" of the Cary-Yale (http://trionfi.com/0/c/30/). As he wrote it in 2003, there could have been 16 triumphal cards that corresponded to the 16 chess pieces, the 7 virtues plus Love as the pawns, the Empress and Emperor corresponding to the chess King and Queen, the Judgment and World cards corresponding to the Rooks (called "towers" in Italian) because they had towers on them, and the Chariot and Death cards to the chess Knights (called "horses" in Italian), because they had horses on them. What corresponded to the chess Bishops wasn't clear, because those cards were missing. The Pope and the Popess were the possibility he suggested, an attractive suggestion because then each pair would have one male and one female representative, corresponding to "queen's side" and "king's side" in chess. However there are other possibilities. The difficulty is to assign Petrarch's Time to both a chess piece and a card. And there is also a 16th card to worry about, the one I assign to Fortune. I assign Time and Fortune to the bishops, on the grounds that both cards, in their earliest representations, have old men on them, and bishops were customarily senior church officials. My Cary-Yale reconstruction has no Pope or Popess.
I had the idea from somewhere that Franco did not like Huck's "chess theory". But I thought maybe if the non-chess aspects, namely the "triumphs" of Petrarch/Boccaccio and the seven virtues, were put in a different context, namely that of four groups, from Marziano, Franco might be interested. So I referred Franco to one short section of an old blog of mine (originally 2008, partly rewritten 2012; it is at http://mtocy.blogspot.com/, with the relevant part the section "The Cary-Yale in Relation to Michelino and Petrarch's "Triumphs"); it connects Marziano's deck (which I called the Michelino, from the painter known to have done the work) with the Cary-Yale. He immediately started writing a new "note" (I'd call it an essay; it's 19 pages long). He showed me drafts and tables for my response. He didn't accept everything I said, and developed his own version based on minchiate (which I agree would be connected), but he did find my proposal stimulating and not something to be rejected. Franco works fast. He was done in a week.
In my next post I will present the first half of the essay, in my translation (with a little help from Franco); I will present the second half after that. The "note" is on naibi.net in Italian (except for a couple of pages by me), the second note of 2016, starting with the word "Cremona". For the Cary-Yale itself, see http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collec ... onti-tarot. First you click on "view all images", underneath the card displayed. Then when you get to a triumph, if you click on the image, you will see more information, including the part that interested me.
I am also going to put this translation on Aeclectic Tarot Forum, which has more activity these days than THF. I think participants there might be interested in Franco's "note". To avoid duplicate discussions, I advise people to wait until I have posted Franco's whole essay there--including the rest of my argument--and then put their comments on Aeclectic, although you can add a link here if you like. But if I have misrepresented Huck or Franco up to this point, I would certainly like a comment here before I post on Aeclectic. I know that somewhere on Trionfi.com Huck has a picture of the cards as chess pieces, which I couldn't find.
In 1989 an article by Franco (http://www.naibi.net/A/25-FIRSTARO-Z.pdf) brought the attention of the tarot history community to the earlier "game of the gods" designed by Marziano for Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, sometime before Marziano's death in 1425. In part, Franco's new note, on the Cary-Yale, connects the two decks in a hypothetical way. So I will start with a brief discussion of the deck Marziano designed for that game.
In Marziano's deck, 16 Greco-Roman "deified heroes"--i.e. gods and demigods, as described in various classical texts--arranged in a precise hierarchy could, when played in a trick, beat any card in the regular suits. At the same time all of them also belonged to the four regular suits, to which he gave the names of allegorical birds. They look like this:
Suit, Suit-sign_________ Gods, in order from most to least powerful
Virtues, eagle:__________1 Jupiter, 5 Apollo, 9 Mercury, 13 Hercules
Riches, phoenix:________2 Juno, 6 Neptun, 10 Mars, 14 Eolus
Virginities, turtledove:__3 Pallas, 7 Diana, 11 Vesta, 15 Daphne
Pleasures, dove:________4 Venus, 8, Bacchus, 12 Ceres, 16 Cupido
To the extent that there is a hierarchy of 16 superior cards, this deck resembles the tarot deck, although the cards, from their description, looked nothing like any early tarot cards.
This same Filippo Maria, Duke of Milan until his death in 1447, is thought to have also commissioned the earliest extant deck whose special cards are tarot subjects, the Cary-Yale. It is tempting to speculate on whether there is any connection between the two.
So we come to Franco's and my collaboration. Huck posted parts of a few new essays by Pratesi wrote about recently on early documents using the words "minchiate" and "germini" (the latter thought to be another word for the same game, or one very similar). Before recently, it was thought that minchiate, a tarot deck expanded to 97 cards, was a product of the mid 16th century. There was already a known but not entirely secure mention of minchiate in 1466, in a letter of Luigi Pulci to Lorenzo Il Magnifico, Also, Franco found references in 1473 ( The Playing-Card, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1990) pp. 7-17, L'As de Trefle, N. 52 (1993) pp. 9-10, both online at naibi.net), but because there was nothing between then and the mid-16th century it was perhaps a different game, which died out. Now. however, the gap is considerably narrowed. Franco found a reference in 1529 (The Playing-Card, Vol. 40, No. 3 (2012) pp. 179-197). Then Huck found one to germini in 1517 (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=780), and now Franco, again to germini, in 1506 (The Playing Card vol. 44 no. 1 (2015), pp. 61-71).
I translated Franco's essay on the "germini" reference and posted it here (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1074&p=16463&hilit=1517#p16459 and following). Soon Franco was emailing me about some of my guesses as to what certain 15th century terms meant. I corrected them. But one thing he said was that "carte a trionfi" in Florentine documents should not be translated as "triumph cards" but rather as "triumph-style cards". This puzzled me. What was the difference? He said that "triumph-style cards" meant cards done in the style of pictures with triumphal scenes or characters on them, for example the triumphs of Petrarch, or the cards described by Marziano (email of Dec. 20, 2015). Then would all "carte a trionfi" have been such cards? No, he insisted; it is 99% certain that only some of the cards were of such scenes. It is also only 99% certain that these were cards for use in card games; but such use is not part of the meaning of "carte a trionfi". He thought of an example. A "vaso a fiori" is, in Florentine speech, a vase with pictures of flowers on it. A "vaso di fiori" is a vase with flowers in it.
In English we have no such expression in three words or less for a vase with flowers on it. However we do have "checkered box" versus "box of checkers", with clearly different meanings, one referring to what is on the box and the other to what is in it. By that analogy, it seems to me, we could make up a term "flowered vase" meaning one with flowers on it. Another example is "deviled eggs", which means eggs part of which has spices added to part of it in a kind of paste: "deviled" is to suggest the spiciness of the result. Not all of the egg is "deviled", just the yoke. But the result is still a "deviled egg". On that model, "carte a trionfi" would mean, if we had the expression, "triumphed cards", i.e. cards of which at least some, and most likely only some, have been given triumphal scenes. They would not include only the triumphal cards, for which the term "carte trionfali" would have been appropriate.
So what were the antecedents of "carte a trionfi", an expression whose first documented use is 1440 Florence? Cards, to be sure, including playing cards, but also something else, triumphal scenes, such as those of Petrarch's poem I trionfi, or Marziano's cards. Later he added, in addition to these, "the same triumphal subjects that were used at the time for cassoni, deschi, and so on" (email of Jan. 1, 2016). An example that occurs to me is illustrations from Petrarch's De viris illustribus (Of illustrious men. He also once mentioned cards of saints.
This discussion reminded me of an old hypothesis of mine that I had not talked about in years. My idea was that the connection between Marziano's deck and the Cary-Yale was that both had 16 special cards that functioned both as the highest members of one of the four suits and as a hierarchy among themselves as far as which one, if two in different suits were played, won the trick. I had much difficulty getting this idea taken seriously as an hypothesis. The problem was that nobody believed that the Cary-Yale had such a structure. I gave them evidence, of a sort, but nobody thought it was credible.
Another part of my hypothesis was that the 16 cards included, as one part, the 6 triumphs of Petrarch's I Trionfi plus one more triumph. Fortune, which had been included by Boccaccio in his Amorose Visione. Fortune is missing from the surviving Cary-Yale triumphs, but does survive in another closely related deck, the Brera-Brambilla.
In Petrarch's poem, Love is triumphed over by Chastity, Chastity by Death, Death by Fame, Fame by Time, and Time by Eternity. To these are added, somewhere, Fortune, from Boccaccio. Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, and Eternity are, on my hypothesis, surviving cards in the Cary-Yale. Chastity is represented by the card later known as the Chariot, which the Cary-Yale depicts as a lady on a chariot. Fame is a scene with knights below and a lady on top along with two trumpets, instruments traditionally associated with Fame. Time we know from the PMB (and Charles VI), where it is represented by an old man with an hourglass. Another part of the 16 would be the four cardinal and three theological virtues of medieval Christianity, of which all three theologicals and one cardinal are in the surviving cards. Finally there are the the Emperor and Empress, which form another group, of separate derivation; we do not need to know what it was because they are in the preserved cards and there are no other cards to postulate from that source. The game of "VIII Emperors" is one possibility.
This part of what I presented to Franco is from Huck's "chess theory" of the Cary-Yale (http://trionfi.com/0/c/30/). As he wrote it in 2003, there could have been 16 triumphal cards that corresponded to the 16 chess pieces, the 7 virtues plus Love as the pawns, the Empress and Emperor corresponding to the chess King and Queen, the Judgment and World cards corresponding to the Rooks (called "towers" in Italian) because they had towers on them, and the Chariot and Death cards to the chess Knights (called "horses" in Italian), because they had horses on them. What corresponded to the chess Bishops wasn't clear, because those cards were missing. The Pope and the Popess were the possibility he suggested, an attractive suggestion because then each pair would have one male and one female representative, corresponding to "queen's side" and "king's side" in chess. However there are other possibilities. The difficulty is to assign Petrarch's Time to both a chess piece and a card. And there is also a 16th card to worry about, the one I assign to Fortune. I assign Time and Fortune to the bishops, on the grounds that both cards, in their earliest representations, have old men on them, and bishops were customarily senior church officials. My Cary-Yale reconstruction has no Pope or Popess.
I had the idea from somewhere that Franco did not like Huck's "chess theory". But I thought maybe if the non-chess aspects, namely the "triumphs" of Petrarch/Boccaccio and the seven virtues, were put in a different context, namely that of four groups, from Marziano, Franco might be interested. So I referred Franco to one short section of an old blog of mine (originally 2008, partly rewritten 2012; it is at http://mtocy.blogspot.com/, with the relevant part the section "The Cary-Yale in Relation to Michelino and Petrarch's "Triumphs"); it connects Marziano's deck (which I called the Michelino, from the painter known to have done the work) with the Cary-Yale. He immediately started writing a new "note" (I'd call it an essay; it's 19 pages long). He showed me drafts and tables for my response. He didn't accept everything I said, and developed his own version based on minchiate (which I agree would be connected), but he did find my proposal stimulating and not something to be rejected. Franco works fast. He was done in a week.
In my next post I will present the first half of the essay, in my translation (with a little help from Franco); I will present the second half after that. The "note" is on naibi.net in Italian (except for a couple of pages by me), the second note of 2016, starting with the word "Cremona". For the Cary-Yale itself, see http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collec ... onti-tarot. First you click on "view all images", underneath the card displayed. Then when you get to a triumph, if you click on the image, you will see more information, including the part that interested me.
I am also going to put this translation on Aeclectic Tarot Forum, which has more activity these days than THF. I think participants there might be interested in Franco's "note". To avoid duplicate discussions, I advise people to wait until I have posted Franco's whole essay there--including the rest of my argument--and then put their comments on Aeclectic, although you can add a link here if you like. But if I have misrepresented Huck or Franco up to this point, I would certainly like a comment here before I post on Aeclectic. I know that somewhere on Trionfi.com Huck has a picture of the cards as chess pieces, which I couldn't find.