Re: Antonio Beccadelli (Panormita) Triumph of King Alfonso 1443
Posted: 29 Aug 2023, 13:35
.... :-) .... so, nice, that we talked about this.
Over 500 years of history in 78 cards
https://forum.tarothistory.com/
Absolutely! It's good you remembered the discrepancy, and that I felt compelled for some reason to get to the bottom of it.
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.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.
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.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.)
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.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.
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),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.
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.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.
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).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.
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: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 ...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 ...Polissena Sforza (1428 – June 1, 1449) .....
Between 1441 and April 1442, at the age of thirteen, she married Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini.
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.
[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.
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.
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
Ross Caldwell wrote: 28 Aug 2023, 09:45Phaeded 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.
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.