.... :-) .... so, nice, that we talked about this.

Huck wrote: 29 Aug 2023, 13:35 .... .... so, nice, that we talked about this.

Absolutely! It's good you remembered the discrepancy, and that I felt compelled for some reason to get to the bottom of it.

In so doing, I found the Cronaca malatestiana, which in many places is a good complement to Giusto Giusti for the same dates or period.

Notes 8 and 9 on the same page give important dates to remember in general: the engagement contract of Bianca Maria to Francesco Sforza on 23 February 1432, and the exact dates of her stay in Ferrara, 26 September 1440 to 5 April 1441. Generally in the accounts one reads the information is not so succinct.

The only thing in this episode that I remain unclear on is the date that Niccolò d'Este went to Milan, where he died on the night of 25-26 December, 1441. I seem to remember that Niccolò accompanied Bianca Maria back to Milan - which would not have been Milan itself, since I also understand that Filippo Maria did not want Bianca Maria in the city before her marriage, so perhaps it was only as far as Pavia, where her mother or chaperones could take over, or even all the way to Abbiategrasso. But I don't know the dates. Was Niccolò in Milan from April 1441 until his death?

The other interesting thing is that the chronicler knows Bianca Maria as the "donna del conte Francesco Sforza", making it clear that this was the common understanding of the situation, not the confused "Filippo Maria was playing games to make people think he had changed his mind on the engagement to Sforza, perhaps to offer her to Leonello" etc. that modern commentators always write about.

Ross wrote,

I remain a 22-trump subjects, A-order fundamentalist because of the evidence for the standard game in the first decade. By the end of 1451, it was played all over Tuscany, it was in the Marches, in Venice, in the Romagna, in Lombardy. The game was loose in the world, and adopting what were to become its traditional forms and play in those regions. The different trump orders prove that they didn't mess around with the number of the subjects, only their ordering in a few places.

These trump orders are ca. 1500 at best, except maybe for the Sermo de Ludo, a little before, but all are long after the period we are talking about, which is that before 1450 or at the outside 1460. Yes, these orders would have gone back as far as they could, more or less, owing to the conservatism of the players, perhaps limited to the previous regime change, if the new one or its soldiers or functionaries took an interest, toward which even the most conservative must bow. Otherwise, all that the different trump orders show is that the game was played differently in different places. We have no idea what might have been evened out in the meantime. That might have included a different number of trumps, with new ones inserted, different in different places, to produce a standardized set of subjects. Not only that, different games may have been played in the same place at the same time, most especially one with the theological virtues and one without. We have no idea how many additional cards were in Minchiate before 1526, when Francesco Berni wrote about the zodiac cards and made a pun on "minchiate". Minchiate is mentioned in 1466 (Pulci letter), 1477 (allowed games in Florence), and in 1506 (as Germini, in the inventory of a Florentine card-seller). See Pratesi, trans. at http://pratesitranslations.blogspot.com ... -laws.html, http://pratesitranslations.blogspot.com ... on-on.html). Meanwhile the ChVI and the Strambotto document trionfi in the same place, the ChVI even at around the same time as the Pulci letter. So the Cary-Yale might well be a proto-Minchiate, even if with fewer than 22 cards, if that is what it was then.

In my view parsimony applies to principles, not particular cases. In this case, the relevant category is "invention." New inventions, especially, have a multiplicity of variations at first, narrowed down over time to the most popular and/or most favored by the dominant producers. Think of the personal computer. Now, for the average consumer, there are two choices, Windows and Mac. In the 1980s, there were more. I remember being shown an Atari by a salesman. It had a perfectly adequate word-processing program. But its operating system and software were incompatible with others, so had I bought it I would have been left with something of extremely limited use. Standardization was needed, and IBM was dominant in business. So DOS survived, and also Apple, because of certain features in its operating system that DOS lacked but many people wanted. Apple had various products early on; they all dropped away except Mac. This is the simplification process that is typical of new inventions. It applies in other 15th century cases of new card games. Dummett once wrote, speculating that a rule would have existed in Marziano's game connecting suits with groups of gods:

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.
“A Comment on Marziano.” The Playing-Card 18:2,73-75, on p. 74.)

In the case of Trionfi, we don't know whether that word applied to one particular set of triumphs or a variety of them, analogous to "personal computer," which applied to a variety of products, all incompatible with each other. At some point there was a distinction between "tarocchi" and "minchiate." That corresponds to "Apple" vs. "DOS" and later to "Macintosh" vs. "Windows," with each having the ability to read the output of the other. Similarly, the player of one could play the other.

To be sure, the story might have been different. It is important not to become attached to any particular version without compelling evidence. As for why the trumps ended up more or less the same in different places, like Phaeded I attribute that to the domination of one particular place economically: it is comparable to IBM's dominance in business machines. I am not convinced that place was Milan. It might have been Florence, which appears to be the leading arts and crafts center, or Bologna, famous for its tarot cards by the time of the 1476 biography of St. Bernardino. Both would have exported to other cities. Or it was a tacit agreement among centers, with one taking the lead and the others following.

Ross wrote,

Bianca Maria's 14 images have nothing to do with it, and 70 card reference in Ferrara refers to some other configuration, like a deck shortened in the pips. Or it is simply a mistake on the scribe's part.

One problem is that Bianca Maria might take such a series of images as Leonello tacitly urging Bianca to emulate Laura to his and others' Petrarch - not something she'd likely appreciate. I know it's just a for instance. But the most plausible instance is tarocchi, surely the images of the hour, outside of wherever it was practiced first, especially given the Rimini-Ferrara connection. And Bianca may have already been familiar with a version of the game in Lombardy, for all we know.

On the second part of your sentence, I am open to the possibility of a 4x12 + 22 = 70. But I would be more open if we had any northern Italian examples of decks shortened to 12 in a regular suit at that time. In Spain, yes, and in Italy by the 16th century, yes, but in 1457 northern Italy? We have Bernardino's testimony for 14 in 1425, both in Bologna and Siena (quoted in an essay by Depaulis, "Breviari del Diavolo"; for the quotes, see Vitali's essay on Bernardino). 13 is possible, as we know that decks existed without queens, even if none are known of trionfi near that time and place (at least I can't think of any). 12 is something else. Like Phaeded, I think a scribal error is unlikely: there was a price attached (in different units of currency, in fact), which the number of cards would help justify.

The oldest 5-suit-decks, from which we know by document, are the 5x13-decks mentioned by Johannes of Rheinfelden in 1377.
5x14 is not very different from 5x13.
The idea to make one of the suits to a trump suit, is not very complicated. Such games are also known for decks with 4x13-structure. In Germany we have "Herzblättchen", a game for children, where kids learn the idea of trumping. "Hearts" is trump in this game.

Even if we would have a proven deck with (4x14)+22 in 1430, it still would be justified to assume an earlier deck with 5x14 or 5x13 inclusive a predefined trump row before that time.
We don't have a proven deck with (4x14)+22 in 1430, we have the Boiardo Tarocchi poem and we have the Sola-Busca Tarocchi as sure evidence. I personally think, that the Boiardo Tarocchi poem was arranged in 1487 and the Sola-Busca is dated to 1491. Both decks are rather different from the standard sequence.

This post to protest against Ross's dating of the early cards, not that that they could not be from when he says, but that the dating becomes more insecure the earlier the cards are. Similarities in composition are not a good guide to similarity in dating, because artists keep models and pass them on to their successors. Thus similarities between the Catania and ChVI cards do not mean that the Catania is within 5 years of the ChVI. Let's look at examples. We have the Rothschild Emperor. The Catania Emperor is not extant, but we can get a good idea of what it would have looked like from the Palermo Empress, which the experts say is part of the same deck as the other "Alessandro Sforza" cards.

So, from left to right, according to Ross ca. 1437, ca. 1450, ca. 1455. Well, if you say so. But surely there are other reasonable possibilities.

We have little idea when the Rothschild Emperor was painted. All we know is after 1420. Dal Ponte's (1385-1437) main activity up to 1424 was painting cassoni and other minor productions (see Wikipedia). Moreover, the style of the Rothschild court cards has affinities with that of the "Moorish" cards of ca. 1420, probably produced in Germany for export to Catalonia and northern Italy (see Andy's Playing Cards). This is not to say that the tarot is that old; I have no idea. But it could be part of a "VIII Imperadori" deck, documented in 1423 Ferrara as being made in Florence then. Or one-trumper from some time before 1433, when della Torre was in Florence, as Ross hypothesizes.

As for the Catania (made in Florence), paper inside two of the cards (Empress, "Temperance") bear the date "1428". So most likely they were done after then. If done for Alessandro Sforza, his big military victory (followed by some unsuccessful ones, most notably a disaster in 1442) was in 1435. The style of having little figures at the bottom is quite archaic. We can't judge from that, admittedly, but after the sensation of Masacchio's Brancacci Chapel (1428), realism was becoming more fashionable. When little figures appear later, they are bigger and represented as children, as we see in the Visconti di Modrone and the Charles VI. Also, the ChVI seems to make more use of shading (and the slightly turned posture) to create the illusion of depth, another stylistic advance toward realism.

Moving on: If the paper for the Visconti di Modrone is 1439-1442, that does not mean that the cards are securely by 1442. Rag paper holds up well over time (unlike that from wood, a 19th-century innovation), and the uncertainties of production and transport of materials would recommend thinking ahead.

We cannot assume that the PMB was made in the late 1450s. The likeliest time for the deck to at least have been commissioned is when the Sforzas were waiting out the plague in Cremona, 1452. As a result, we cannot deduce anything about the composition of that deck from what is seen in a Florentine deck of c. 1460 (no reason to assume earlier). It is only clear that by around 1460 all the subjects of the later lists were present somewhere or other. As for when 22 became standard in at least the most popular form of the game everywhere, the Boiardo poem is some indication; it is likely to be an early work, so not much after 1460, but again, not securely so. The 1457 decks count, insecurely, against its being the only standard, at least in Ferrara, before then.

Well, I speak of the deck type with 5x14 and the deck type (4x14)+22. The probabilty, that the first 5x14 deck was closer to 1377 as the first deck with (4x14)+22 structure is very high, I would say.

We cannot assume that the PMB was made in the late 1450s. The likeliest time for the deck to at least have been commissioned is when the Sforzas were waiting out the plague in Cremona, 1452. As a result, we cannot deduce anything about the composition of that deck from what is seen in a Florentine deck of c. 1460 (no reason to assume earlier). It is only clear that by around 1460 all the subjects of the later lists were present somewhere or other. As for when 22 became standard in at least the most popular form of the game everywhere, the Boiardo poem is some indication; it is likely to be an early work, so not much after 1460, but again, not securely so. The 1457 decks count, insecurely, against its being the only standard, at least in Ferrara, before then.

The older PMB cards - with 14 trumps (PMB-1) - were given to c1452, the six other cards (PMB-2) are given to later times (occasionally even 1480s),

For the Boiardo Tarocchi poem we have, that the name Lucrezia appears in the context of the highest trump 21 and we have, that in January 1487 Ercole's daughter Lucrezia was married to Bologna and the Bentivoglio family.
Further we have the stylish element, that female figures in the poem dominate the male figures, a specific Ferrarese element, which is said to have developed after the Ferrarese war 1482-84. This fashion aimed to honour the brave behavior of Eleonora of Aragon during the war.
Further we have, that Boiardo's cousin Pico de Mirandola developed his opinions about the Jewish Kabbala mainly in 1486 and started his revolutionary attempts in December 1486. Jewish Kabbala has very specific relations to the number 22.
The argument, that the poem MUST BE a work of a young poet Boiardo I can't judge, I can imagine, that Boiardo wrote in a style which enjoyed a young couple. It was a marriage of young persons in January 1487.

The judgment that the poem by Boiardo is early was something someone else said, SteveM, I think. It made sense to me, but I actually don't know one way or the other. So I should say "may be as early as 1460" rather than "is likely to be as early as 1460."

Huck wrote,

Further we have, that Boiardo's cousin Pico de Mirandola developed his opinions about the Jewish Kabbala mainly in 1486 and started his revolutionary attempts in December 1486. Jewish Kabbala has very specific relations to the number 22.

I do not see anything in Pico's 900 Theses that even mentions the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet (a searchable version is on the internet, in English and Latin). There is one obscure passage (11>59) where according to Farmer (Syncretism in the West, which includes the text and Farmer's translation) he seems to assume 27, which includes the forms of five letters which are different at the ends of words. He does speak of the "32 paths of Wisdom" (28.26), which anyone familiar with the Sefer Yetzirah would know meant the 22 letters plus the 10 sefirot, but that is a big if. Pico also knows that God created the world in wisdom, in the immediately preceding thesis (28.25). Pico is more explicit about the ten sefirot plus the En Sof. They add up to 11, which is half of 22. That may be significant: God's energy coming down to man, and man's ascent to God. But that is both rather recondite and hard to fit to the individual cards, at least without some imagination.

The 22 letters are a good fit, however. That the Hebrew alphabet had 22 letters was well known apart from Pico, along with the correspondence 22 letters/22 books of the Hebrew Bible. Besides Jews themselves (for the number of letters), who were numerous in Italy then, Jerome and Hilary, both writing in Latin, talk about them and the 22 books. There was also Eusebius, printed in 1473 Mantua. For the links, see my post at viewtopic.php?p=23958#p23958.

I do think the 22 letters are of relevance to the 22 of the Tarot, for certain mystical traits articulated by Origen, in the Philocalia, a book of non-heretical selections edited by the early Church. Pico had put in a good word for Origen in his Thesis 4>29: "It is more rational to believe that Origen is saved, than to believe that he is damned," a statement which the commission investigating him said in 1487 was "rash and savoring of heresy." The only ms. of the Philocalia in the West had been brought to Italy by Bessarion sometime after 1437 (probably in the 1450s). Chapter 3 says the following:

As we are dealing with numbers, and every number has among real existences a certain significance, of which the Creator of the universe made full use as well in the general scheme as in the arrangement of the details, we must give good heed, and with the help of the Scriptures trace their meaning, and the meaning of each of them. Nor must we fail to observe that not without reason the canonical books are twenty-two, according to the Hebrew tradition, the same in number as the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. For as the twenty-two letters may be regarded as an introduction to the wisdom and the Divine doctrines given to men in those Characters, so the twenty-two inspired books are an alphabet of the wisdom of God and an introduction to the knowledge of realities.

There are two points of relevance here. One is that the Hebrew letters are the means by which God communicates his wisdom to humanity. The parallel to Tarot that occurs to me is that the 22 cards themselves embody divine wisdom, just as the 22 books of the Hebrew Bible do. The second point is that God made full use of the Hebrew letters "as well in the general scheme as in the arrangement of the details" in creating the "real existences" of which the world is made. Likewise, each hand of the game is a kind of world, divided among the players, and the 22 are the ones they need to pay the most attention to (as well as to the court cards).

I haven't been able to verify when this ms. arrived in Rome, where Bessarion would have made it, like the rest, available to scholars, but surely by 1460. He sent his collection to Venice in 1468. Under his sponsorship before then, copies were made of the more interesting texts and some translated into Latin. I would think that this passage would have been among them. Bessarion did do a translation of Origen's major extant work, the Contra Celsum, (Joseph Wilson Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third-Century Church, 1983 p. 255 (in archive.org), printed in 1481. Trigg says that his homilies and commentary on the Song of Songs had been printed twice, first in 1468, so among the earliest books printed in Italy - I presume in Latin. So he was of interest, at least.

I cannot see how Pico's Theses would have had anything to do with the decision to choose 22. But the current of thought in which he was part and of which his Theses are symptomatic may well have, within the previous two or three decades.

Huck wrote: 29 Aug 2023, 03:18 I don't think. that Polissena married at the same date [as Bianca]. I had searched also for the date of the wedding and didn't find the solution, I remember.

English wiki has ...

Polissena Sforza (1428 – June 1, 1449) .....
Between 1441 and April 1442, at the age of thirteen, she married Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini.

13 is rather young. According a genealogy she had a son Galeotto Malatesta † 1442, likely from this it was caculated, that she must have been married at least in April 1442. This shall have been Polissena once ...

At footnote 7 of .... https://archive.org/details/p2rerumital ... 4/mode/2up .... the date "3 September 1441" is noted in the context of Polissena, as if somebody had waited, that the death of Ginevra had passed more than 1 year. This might be seen as a confirmation, that Ginevra indeed died 3 September 1440.

Minor point here on the wedding date of Malatesta to Polissena Sforza, but the incontestable source is Giusti, who is by Malatesta's side at this point, so we can at least pinpoint near or on 12 August 1441:

[1441] Sabato a dì 12 d’agosto in Rimino andai a visitare el signore messer Gismondo, che era in que’ dì tornato di Lombardia e aveva tolto per moglie la figliuola del magnifico conte Francesco Sforza. [Fece buona accoglienza e gran dimestichezza].
Saturday the 12th of August in Rimini I went to visit the his Lord Gismondo, who had returned from Lombardy at that date and had taken the daughter of the magnificent Count Francesco Sforza as his wife. [He was warmly received and very familiar.

Either Malatesta got married in Lombardy (why? Sforza didn't even have Cremona yet until after his wedding that fall and was based in Ancona) or in Rimini, but the time period is certain - just before or on 12 August 1441.

I don't dispute 3 September 1440 for Ginerva's death but that just puts Ferrarese being notified via courier, traveling to and likely stay a while in Rimini for funeral arrangements, just as Malatesta is receiving the Florentine trionfi outside Forli (which he is besieging with help from the Lega).

What is odd is Giusti never mentions Ginerva's death nor Sforza's own wedding, just the peace (of Cavriana) the latter is orchestrating, that hits Giusti in the purse - the abridged entries that bracket Sforza's wedding:
16 October Alessandro Sforza da Cotignola (clearly as his brother's ambassador) came to Rimini came to negotiate the peace between Messer Sigismondo and the Count of Urbino.
18 October - Alessandro Sforza moved on to Urbino to finalize the agreement. (precursory to the larger peace of Cavriana)
22 October (still in Rimini) news that Malatesta lost San Leo to Urbino's men.
[[24 Oct. Sforza wedding (a 3 or 4 day affair) - NO mention]]
12 November "from Rimini [so back in Florence] asked by one of his clients (Gregorio) to get a condotte with the pope or Genoa.
16 November [and now the kicker]: " in Florence I received a letter from Agnolo, who informed me that an agreement had been made between sir Messer Sigismondo Pandolfo de' Malatesti and the Count of Urbino and that he had to surrender from the Count of Urbino all the castles that we had taken from his, and Casteldelci and Sanatello, which seemed to me bad news; but it had to be done this way because so wanted the magnificent Count Francesco Sforza.
22 November "news came in Florence that the Magnificent Count Francesco made peace between the Lega and the Duke of Milan. He made great celebratory fires, music and other magnificence." Th Peace of Cavriana/Cremona had been concluded on 20 November 1441.

The CY drops around this time. The fall out for Giusti is that Malatesta loses some properties back to Urbino that should have benefitted Giusti in some way, even if just the collecting of spoils as at Bibbiena (and the pope must have been involved in some way here), but Malatesta is made part of the peace via Sforza's daughter, but the bigger impact of the peace was between Milan and Venice

Ross Caldwell wrote: 28 Aug 2023, 17:10 The first documentary evidence is Giusto Giusti. He says “naibi a trionfi.” He does not describe the deck. From “naibi” I infer that Florentines knew the game by this name already; naibi has only one meaning, “playing cards.” From his lack of description I infer that he felt he had no need to, because what it meant was well-known enough. The game is known in both Florence and Rimini-Malatesta territory now.

The second is Ferrara 10 February 1442. There are four decks, they are called “carte da trionfi.” The scribe describes it as the four suits and all the figures. In the many following records of carte da trionfi in these Este records, this description never occurs again. I infer from this information that 10 February 1442 was the first time the scribe had encountered the game, and wrote a little more than he had to because what it meant was new.

Interesting that you latch on to the generic name for cards, naibi, and not the novel term introduced in Florence (forget Ferrara for a moment). From trionfi we can infer the Florentines did not know this variant of cardplaying because it was new. And why did that particular name get attached to cards at that particular time? Newbigin has uploaded a newish paper trying to summarize Giusti in relationship to Anghiari and she ends up focusing on the St. John's parade (just as you always have done) and the associated palio (translated from the Italian):

It is no coincidence that two of these appointments [referencing the palio horse races in June culminating in St. John's] are also anniversaries of Florentine victories: that of Campaldino on the day of San Bernabà and that of Cascina on the day of San Vittore.
https://www.academia.edu/50057804/La_cr ... i_Anghiari

The horse races in June, especially St. John's, were for Florence to celebrate being victorious. So when the biggest victory that happens under the Medici regime since they took power in 1434 - jointly defeating both the greatest external enemy, the Visconti, and exiled internal enemies of the Albizzi faction - coincidently happens just days after the St. John procession, in June, wouldn't that naturally be the explanation for a novel game precisely named trionfi? Why else was that name, not naibi, especially appropriate for this game variant, at this time?

Back to Ferrara...

Given the Marquis of Ferrara's frequent and direct participation in the St. John palio races himself (which Newbigin is keen to point out; an example from Giusti: 1439 Mercordì a dì 24 di giugno fu la festa di San Giovanni. Ebbe el palio un corsieri del marchese di Ferrara). There is no way the court of Ferrara didn't know exactly what the new game in Florence was named after - either direct Florentine contacts or via Malatesta; admittedly probably the prior despite my introduction of the possibility of the latter. And the d'Este were allied with Visconti, Borso d-Este even being captured at the Battle of Soncino on June 14, 1440, just two weeks before Anghiari. You think the d'Este are going to adopt the name 'trionfi' for this new game when they knew exactly what it referred to - their own ignominy on the field of battle via participation in the same losing campaign that Florence was victorious in? Its only natural that trionfi suit get called generically 'images'. Precisely why only once is the name called by its proper name in Ferrara - neither naibi or carte being the differentiator, but TRIONFI, from the Florentine June month of triumph.

Phaeded

Ross Caldwell wrote: 28 Aug 2023, 09:45

Phaeded wrote: All we can say for certain is the court cards were expanded, not the trumps (with the PMB representing a modification/expansion of the ur-tarot, IMO). I provided an explanation multiple times for the CY court cards, but in short: the Florentine love trump in the ur-tarot must have matched the Florentine "CVI"'s Love trump with 3 couples (Florence would never feature a single couple implying a royal wedding); Milan changed the love card to matrimonial considerations of a single couple with a low bed in the background of the tent for the required consummation. The original idea of the three couples was retained however in each suit, three females that could pair with three males. There is no imaginary rule stating the trumps had to match the number of cards in a suit. The CY is indeed idiosyncratic, but largely due to that change and particular iconographic changes relating to the Chariot and "World" which necessarily needed to reflect Visconti Milan.

Ah, the six courts are an innovation, but the theological virtues aren't. A couple falling in love doesn't have to imply a royal wedding, or a wedding at all. That is quite an acrobatic theory, that Filippo Maria transferred the three couples of the Charles VI-like Ur-Love to the court cards when he changed the Love card to show a marriage. You give him lots of creativity, but not in the matter of the Three Theological virtues just being added to the standard trump sequence. I suppose you can pick and choose what you want.

Visconti did not invent making the suits male and female - his Württemberg relatives did via the Stuttgart deck: 2 suits of 3 males, 2 suits of 3 females; (deck somewhat matching the CY, which has 3 males and 3 females per suit, vs the 3 males or 3 females). Filippo's court merely adapted that notion with the the advent of the ur-tarot, the Florentine love card being compatible.

But again, in my theory the Theological virtues are not added to anything - they are original to the Florentine ur-tarot. They get replaced in the PMB: Charity by the Pope, Hope by the antitype of hopelessness of the Hanged Man (precedent is Giotto), and Faith by Ecclesia/'Popess'. By a sheer coincidence, none of these cards 'survives' in the CY....because they never existed there.

But let's get back to your opening central point of this thread's subject; you wrote:

What is important to me is that some of the same people, or at least the same sort of people, I believe, who invented the game of Triumphs, also designed the Florentine part of Alfonso's triumph, and perhaps the overall plan of it. So we may look for insights into how they conceived the triumph-idea for the context of the game's symbolic triumphal procession, by comparison with the triumph they designed for Alfonso's through Naples, since the latter is "speaking" in the various accounts, and we have no such speaking-explanation for carte da trionfi.

And what the Florentines speak of, just some 3 years after the ur-tarot, are SEVEN CANONICAL VIRTUES. I bring that up and instead you want to discuss Petrarch's 14 sub-virtues of Chastity which exist in artistic form nowhere. If you don't want to discuss the canonical virtues at Naples - what lesson is there to be learned from the Florentine contribution to Alfonso's triumph - Caesar???

Closer to home, on their cassoni the same Florentine artisans feature plenty of classical triumphal processions (spoils, trophies, generals, etc.) but they also feature all seven virtues on cassoni (again, dal Ponte, et. al).

You might have at least countered that Justice is featured in Alfonso's triumph, while I've made a lot of hay out of Prudence being elevated (especially by Bruni) in Florence. Of course I'm going to say that's the Neapolitan inflection, in deference to Alfonso's needs as a king. But when we do find an abbreviated form of the virtues on a cassone, specifically in connection with the triumphal proceedings of St. John's (see my Newbigin post above this one and her St. John's description translation at the bottom of this post), and all three theological virtues are present, guess which of the cardinals stands in for the rest of them?

Giovanni Francesco Toscani, panel of a cassone preserved in the Bargello Museum showing the procession of the Palii banners before the race before the St. John's baptistery (also where the conquered cities had to make their annual contributions to Florence - the location reeks of Florentine triumphal connotations). At each of the four corners, starting lower left and clockwise: praying Hope, Faith with chalice and cross, Charity with nursing child, and Prudence with mirror:


And why, pray tell, would the Theologicals get dropped with Pope Eugene living in the city since 1434? Makes zero sense.

Finally Goro Dati's description of the St. John's procession, roughly contemporary (c. 1420) to the cassone above:

Close by, around the ringhiera of
the Palazzo Vecchio, there are a
hundred processional banners or
more, on their poles, fastened with
iron rings: and the first are those
of the major cities that pay tribute
to the Commune, such as Pisa,
Arezzo, Pistoia, Volterra, Cortona,
Lucignano, Castiglione Aretino,
and the lords of Poppi [revolted at Anghiari but defeated] and Piombino,
who are subject to the
Commune; and they are made of
velvet lined with fur or with silk
brocade, or else the rest are all
velvet or some other precious
cloth or taffeta edged with silk:
and they are marvellous to behold.
...
Then follow the processional
banners described above, carried
each one by a man on a horse
(some caparisoned in silk, some
not), each called by name: and
they go to make their offering at
the church [baptistery] of San Giovanni. And
these processional banners are
offered as the tribute of the cities
acquired by the Commune of
Florence and of their subject cities
from some time back

https://italian-renaissance-theatre.syd ... ovanni.pdf