Iolon, here's my long overdue response to your post from two weeks ago:
Iolon wrote: 21 May 2022, 16:37
1. Why do you say the cardinal virtues don't have a fixed order. Since Plato this order did not change: Temperance, Force, Prudence and Justice.
Ross's response to you has already covered this issue pretty thoroughly now without me needing to add much (although I must point out, once again, that the Rosenwald sheet is not a good reference for the order of the virtues, because Justice and Fortitude are both numbered VIII, and the trumps were obviously not rigorously placed in their correct order on the sheet). As for Plato, he doesn't really seem to have
ranked the cardinal virtues. Even Justice was presented as being dependent on the other three, not superior to them. In any case, as I have already said, I think the mere fact of the variation in the ranking of the cardinals in the various tarot trump orders is itself sufficient evidence that there was no obvious, intuitive, generally accepted order for them.
2. You have to be extremely prudent to state that Florence and Milan had the same order of the highest trumps. In fact, we don't have a single clue about the order in the Visconti Sforza trumps, at least not what concerns the order during the time that Filippo Maria still lived.
My arguments in this regard form a hypothesis, not a statement of historical fact. That being said, we do have a couple of reasonably good clues to the ranking of the highest trumps in both the Visconti Sforza deck (the PMB) and the Visconti di Modrone deck (the CY). Ross has already
mentioned one of them in this thread, namely Thierry Depaulis' observations that five of the six replacement cards in the Visconti Sforza deck rank highly in the Type C order, that all of them except World have the same cliff-edge at the bottom that we also see on the Death card (which would be the next one down from the replacement cards in the order), and that it is likely that they were all lost together, along with the original Devil and Lightning cards. It is not hard to imagine this happening: In some 16th century tarot games, players appear to have scored points for assembling sets of cards from the tricks they won (such as the five lowest cards, the five highest cards, and so forth). This was a feature of the Minchiate game, for example. Perhaps a player had assembled all the cards from Temperance to World on the table in front of them, and then someone knocked a drink over, flooding the cards with wine... So this set of five lost cards makes it seem like World would have been the second-highest card in this deck. (I also think Depaulis was right about Temperance being above Death in the Visconti Sforza deck, meaning that its order would have been essentially Type C except for the top two. I don't think the additional replacement of Fortitude really undermines this much; it is quite conceivable that the Fortitude card could have suffered damage independently at some other moment.)
But there is also another point which I think confirms this ranking of the Visconti Sforza Judgment and World cards beyond doubt, and it greatly surprises me that no one seems to have ever pointed it out before: The Judgment card
has God on it. Many people in the 15th century thought it was blasphemous to depict a figure like God on a playing card at all (which is probably one reason why no other surviving card from this time does); imagine how much more blasphemous it would have seemed if He had been on a card that was
inferior to another card which only had a couple of little angels on it! This is simply inconceivable. The Visconti Sforza Judgment card, with God in His majesty in pride of place in top center, was unquestionably intended to be the highest card. Moreover, it seems likely that the designers put God on the card partly in order to emphasize its rank, because this ordering was probably a minority preference in Lombardy at the time; certainly we know that Lombardy eventually rejected this ordering in favor of the World as highest.
Things look very different in the Visconti di Modrone deck. Here, God is (as usual) not on the Judgment card, which has no prominent central figure at all. The World card, on the other hand, has a layout reminiscent of the Visconti Sforza Judgment card, with a prominent central figure in the top half, holding similarly shaped objects in a similar pose.
The two other cards of the top pair (Visconti Sforza World and Visconti di Modrone Judgment) likewise look broadly similar to each other: Both feature two small angels, without any main central figure. This again looks like a deliberate decision by the designers of the Visconti Sforza deck, imitating the layout of the second-highest card in the earlier Visconti decks for their World card, just as they imitated the layout of the formerly highest card for their Judgment card. In each case, the result is an extremely unusual design: Just as the Visconti Sforza Judgment card is only one to have God on it, so too the Visconti Sforza World card is the only one to lack a main central figure. All other early World cards have an allegorical female figure or an angelic figure centrally placed above the world.
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Visconti-Sforza World, Judgment
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Visconti di Mondrone Judgment, World
On the Visconti di Modrone World, the figure is admittedly not God. However, we can be very certain
[1] that the female figure was an allegorical personification of Eternity, the highest of Petrarch's Trionfi (with the landscape below representing the "new world" described in the poem), whereas the Last Judgment is merely an event described in the Eternity poem. This makes the World/Eternity card very likely to have been the highest ranked. This impression is strongly reinforced by the large crown in the center of the card, which inevitably suggests sovereignty, rulership, supreme power. All in all, this image strongly suggests that the card was the highest in the trump sequence, especially when contrasted with the Judgment card. And of course, this is also consistent with what became the standard trump order in Milan.
How do we explain the change in order from what looks like Type C in Visconti di Modrone to the C' of the Visconti Sforza, and then back again to Type C? I have already presented the basis for an explanation in my "14+8" posts in this thread, namely that Milan had the World as the highest ranked card from the beginning, when the Trionfi trump sequence was shorter and based more directly on Petrarch's poem cycle, and then Milan adopted a modified sequence created in Florence, where World had been demoted to second and Judgment promoted in its place. As I said in those posts, I think Milan ultimately rejected the change to the order of top two trumps, leading to the formation of the Type C order. But it is possible, or indeed quite likely, that a certain minority of people in Milan and Lombardy initially accepted the Florentine order in its entirety and hung on to the Florentine order for the top two for several years, before finally acquiescing to the majority. This minority apparently did not include Filippo Maria Visconti, but presumably did include Francesco Sforza (perhaps because he first learned to play tarot in Florence, or in the company of Sigismondo Malatesta?) and also the members of Bon family in Bergamo. In other words, for most people in Milan, the World was originally the top ranked trump, and for them that never changed; but for a while there was a minority who regarded the Judgment/Angel card as the top trump instead, before eventually adopting the same order as everyone else. (The rest of the trump sequence probably settled into the Type C order fairly early and was accepted by all, with only the top two remaining a bone of contention for some time; this is easy to imagine, because we know from other moments in tarot history that the highest trumps were typically the focus of more attention from the players than any others, and prompted more resistance to change in their ranking.)
I'll add here an incidental comment on the question of whether the copied PMB cards are forgeries or not, which was
raised in passing by Ross: According to the talk that Thierry Depaulis gave at the
Tarots Enluminées study day in March, the PMB copies probably are forgeries. There is apparently paint on some of them which dates from after 1875, and some were painted on parchment, which is otherwise unknown for Renaissance playing cards—not surprisingly, as its fragility and tendency to warp into a curve makes it completely impractical. I think he allowed the possibility that some of the copies
might still be genuine, but it didn't sound very likely, on the whole. It looks like he is going to revisit this topic at the Morgan study day this month, so you can hear all the details from him then.
(I still haven't received confirmation from the Morgan for that study day, by the way; should I be concerned? Have the rest of you received your confirmations yet?)
3. I strongly disagree with you that the 14 or even 22 trump structure developed in Milan. In 1441 the Duke of Ferrara gave 14 figures to Bianca Maria Visconti, most probable the trumps of a 70 cards Tarot deck and later that year the Visconti di Modrone with, what I believe, 16 trump cards. [...]
We must "agree to disagree" about that then.
[1] : More evidence for why we can be very certain of this will be presented in my upcoming essay.