Ross Caldwell wrote: 21 Aug 2023, 16:14
Also on these "teeth", the gold leaf goes into the round punch below. The gold is clearly part of the marginal decoration, not the horse's teeth. In your second picture the lines are even more evidently a continuation of those above and below.
Fair enough, but the black line forming the outer demarcation of the left "tooth" that is clearly a brush stroke? There is no reason for it to be there and is missing on the other horse:
On another subject, you might be more interested to know that I have Marziano and Bruni working together in the same curial office in 1407-1408. Their signatures are side by side in some documents.
Wow. Would you mind snipping one, if the manuscripts in question are imaged on-line?
Marziano knowing any number of artists, most prominently Brunelleschi, and fellow humanists means it is possible the Michelino deck was known to Florentines and formed the impetus for the ur-tarot (Bruni clearly would not have seen those cards himself in Milan). It still doesn't get us to the emphasis on the virtues in the ur-tarot, which despite that series ubiquity in Florentine art, required someone obsessed with the virtues as a civic program IMO - which certainly qualifies Bruni.
I've always found it supremely odd that Mazriano has his player as a sort of Hercules at the Crossroads (to go back to an earlier mentor, Salutati), but names not a single virtue but merely a suit of virtues (in which we find Hercules), presumably allied with the suit of Virginities against the vice suits of Riches and Pleasures (I always think of the CY king of coins rejecting the offered coin when I think of Riches in this context). Not that this observation correlates with exactly how the game was played, but rather its mythic landscape. All of this harkens back to an earlier conception of the virtues, Prudentius's
Psychomachia and especially Barberino's
Documenta amore; the latter's arena or fortress of love:
Marziano's description of Cupid is practically an ekphrasis of the above:
throwing out golden arrows, with a slight and soft wound at first, he afflicts lovers ..makes sport of them, by infinite languors [weariness] of the soul.... He is distinguished by a very youthful face, since he mostly pursues that age. In flight, thereby marking the instability of lovers; girded with human hearts... [the "girded with hearts" is more visible in a different illumination in Barberino].
To paraphrase Marziano: one wearies of virtue but the game rouses one to virtuous toil via mytho-historic exempli, not meditation on the virtues themselves.
Your old translation:
Seeing that it is inevitable for virtuous toil to be weakened by fatigue, if the time be excessive, it might be asked whether it would be fitting for a man to find recreation from the weariness of virtue in some kind of game.... Certainly, since the virtue and reason of the honest man would consist in these moral actions, it follows that they are governed by right reason.... And it is even more pleasing where your keen intelligence would notice several most famous Heroes, renowned models of virtue, whose mighty greatness made gods, and ensured their remembrance by posterity. Thus by observation of them, be ready to be roused to virtue. The first order is indeed of virtues; it consists of: Jupiter, Apollo, Mercury and Hercules. The second of riches...the third of virginity or continence: ...The fourth however is of pleasure....
One is not being taught the individual virtues per se, Bruni's emphasis, but rather how one virtuously thrives in the arena of courtly love by emulating the renowned models. What Bruni took from Marziano, in my opinion, was the exempli - the virtues needed to be paired with human cognates (whether as positive examples or antitypes) in order to give concrete instruction, and not in a courtly setting but a republican one.