Yes, I have to resist the word "floats," as anachronistic. They used various terms, perhaps the most common in the literature is "tableaux vivants," since living people were often upon them, not just machines or sculptures.
Not all of the trump subjects, though; I think the Traitor or Hanged Man was not something you'd see in a procession. It was something Italians, and particularly Florentines, would recognize as a shame painting, taken from the "street" or daily life, rather than from a figure in the parade.
I'm glad you like the little "Tractatus"! Please point out anything you notice that might improve it for a future edition. I already have quite a list. I'm very much at work on the scholarly edition, which will be considerably larger. The Latin text will be the same though, unless we get to see the manuscript in Vibo Valentia and it provides better readings here and there.
Re: The Chariot
62For Prudence as the Hanged Man, we have to include Imperiali, whoever he was, in the response to Lollio in c. 1550 Ferrara area.
He seems not to have been an occultist, nor someone who mistook upside down for right side up. He knew precisely what the card meant, the punishment of traitors, yet at that point in the sequence, between Death and the Old Man, we see only "Prudence". For a good discussion in the context of the poem, see Andrea Vitali at http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=124#.
My view is that Prudence probably was originally in the deck, with the mirror and snake. As such it was especially related to Time, needing to be managed by, i.e. triumphed over, ruled, by that virtue, so it needed to be put just above Time. But the powers that be thought that a lady looking in a mirror (behind her, i.e. considering the past as well as the future) and holding a snake was not as important to be in the deck as the shame painting. The Hanged Man vaguely relates to Prudence, but no more than some other cards. What was important in its placement was that it go just before Death, which is what rules the Hanged Man, and be in the deck as a reminder to card players not to be tempted by certain sources of cash or calculations about how to win big.
There are arguments in favor of several of the cards as Prudence. Perhaps that's why it isn't there: it relates to so many of the cards that it shouldn't be confined to one by itself. The point of prudence being the first was that it had to be employed in exercising the other cardinal virtues, to avoid excess and deficiency. Prudence is in relation to other things among the tarot figures, including taking counsel, i.e. the Pope and Popess, avoiding flim-flam artists, etc.
He seems not to have been an occultist, nor someone who mistook upside down for right side up. He knew precisely what the card meant, the punishment of traitors, yet at that point in the sequence, between Death and the Old Man, we see only "Prudence". For a good discussion in the context of the poem, see Andrea Vitali at http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=124#.
My view is that Prudence probably was originally in the deck, with the mirror and snake. As such it was especially related to Time, needing to be managed by, i.e. triumphed over, ruled, by that virtue, so it needed to be put just above Time. But the powers that be thought that a lady looking in a mirror (behind her, i.e. considering the past as well as the future) and holding a snake was not as important to be in the deck as the shame painting. The Hanged Man vaguely relates to Prudence, but no more than some other cards. What was important in its placement was that it go just before Death, which is what rules the Hanged Man, and be in the deck as a reminder to card players not to be tempted by certain sources of cash or calculations about how to win big.
There are arguments in favor of several of the cards as Prudence. Perhaps that's why it isn't there: it relates to so many of the cards that it shouldn't be confined to one by itself. The point of prudence being the first was that it had to be employed in exercising the other cardinal virtues, to avoid excess and deficiency. Prudence is in relation to other things among the tarot figures, including taking counsel, i.e. the Pope and Popess, avoiding flim-flam artists, etc.
Re: The Chariot
63Mike wrote:
In Minchiate the card "Fame" (card 40) was used to point to the own city, here to Florence with its dome...
... and here to Bologna (which also produced Minchiate) with its very high tower
World (card 39 in Minchiate) in the Minchiate stayed with a circular object like the "city shields" and accompaying 4 wings ...
... which in later versions turned to a globe.
Minchiate versions have a clear Prudentia (with snake and mirror).![Image](http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/decks07/d05114/d0511417.jpg)
We have 4 virtues (with octogonal halo) designed in the Charles VI, 3 are clearly recognizable as such, the fourth shows up as "missing Prudentia" with apple and scepter and standing on a city shield (not with mirror and snake), so "mistaken" as either "Fame" or "World".My view is that Prudence probably was originally in the deck, with the mirror and snake.
![Image](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/World_tarot_charles6.jpeg)
In Minchiate the card "Fame" (card 40) was used to point to the own city, here to Florence with its dome...
![Image](http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/decks07/d05113/d0511340.jpg)
... and here to Bologna (which also produced Minchiate) with its very high tower
![Image](http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/decks07/d05114/d0511440.jpg)
World (card 39 in Minchiate) in the Minchiate stayed with a circular object like the "city shields" and accompaying 4 wings ...
![Image](http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/decks07/d05114/d0511439.jpg)
... which in later versions turned to a globe.
![Image](http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/decks07/d05115/d0511539.jpg)
Minchiate versions have a clear Prudentia (with snake and mirror).
![Image](http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/decks07/d05114/d0511417.jpg)
Last edited by Huck on 27 Feb 2020, 00:00, edited 7 times in total.
Huck
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Re: The Chariot
64Ross wrote:
The Fete-Dieu festivities in Aix-des-Provence had figures on asses presenting condottiero Montefeltro and his wife. This was also clearly meant as a shame picture and it was proceeded as a tradition in long centuries. One has to assume, that in 1462 (assumed date of the start) René d'Anjou prolonged his conflict with Montefeltro as part of the approach to take Naples back.Not all of the trump subjects, though; I think the Traitor or Hanged Man was not something you'd see in a procession. It was something Italians, and particularly Florentines, would recognize as a shame painting, taken from the "street" or daily life, rather than from a figure in the parade.
Huck
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Re: The Chariot
65Huck wrote,
That does not prevent the A order World from being another card loosely associated with Prudence. It also does not prevent the Angel of the Last Judgment from being associated with, or reinterpreted as, Fama, in relation to a city. The early Angel cards do not have cities, they have graves. And in the early A order World cards, the circle on which the figure stands is surrounded by clouds.
Fama was also shown with an octagonal halo, e.g. by Pesellino and Scheggia.We have 4 virtues (with octogonal halo) designed in the Charles VI, 3 are clearly recognizable as such, the fourth shows up as "missing Prudentia" with apple and scepter and standing on a city shield (not with mirror and snake), so "mistaken" as either "Fame" or "World".
![Image](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KQs3V1Sv1CY/XhZhbXrMMMI/AAAAAAAAOj8/-ijdPRxY6tkbXFFp4Iw1mH0o2P7F1dCSgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/05worldImages2.jpg)
Re: The Chariot
66For a connection with the Pudicitia figure of Petrarch's I Trionfi, there is also something that Phaeded reminds us of in another thread, viewtopic.php?t=1591&p=21672#p21672, namely the shield the lady holds on the Cary-Yale (CY) card:
It was Robert in 2008 who called attention to the "orb" that the CY Chariot lady holds, orum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=31, and JMD (Jean-Michael David) who identified it as a jousting shield. viewtopic.php?p=215#p215, similar to that held by the Empress in the same deck. Here I put them side by side with the details of the shield and staff. There is a thin red line that perhaps guided the artist as he was making the image. (Clicking on the image will make it bigger)
On the Empress such a shield may just represent "defense of the realm", or perhaps it derives further meaning from the one on the Chariot card. Married ladies as well as virginal brides have their Pudicitia.
On the Chariot card, it seems to me that the shield gets its place and meaning precisely from Petrarch's "Triumph of Pudicitia" and the psychomachia tradition on which it drew. That tradition put Pudicitia and Casita in the context of a pitched battle between virtues and vices, with each virtue paired with an opposing vice. Pudicitia or Castita was paired with Libido, the kind of love associated with Cupid (see e.g. Adolf Katzennelenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art, p. 2 for Pudicitia and 20 m/ 1 for Casitas). Thus Petrarch describes a similar battle between Pudicitia and Cupidinis (meaning precisely Libido) in his poem: "Never was there a fencer so adept / At turning blows aside.." and so on. He also describes her: "She wore, that day, a gown of white, and held / The shield that brought Medusa to her death." (http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_tr ... age=II.txt). The Visconti radiant dove is not the head of Medusa, so we cannot say that lady on the card is the goddess allotted that shield, the virgin Athena. But at least we have the white of purity on the horses. Although rather late, there is a Petrarch illustration with this feature, of 1489-1515 France (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Petr ... astity.jpg). Such an interpretation also fits the probable occasion for the card, as a commemoration of the wedding of Bianca Maria Visconti with Francesco Sforza. Pudicitia's chariot becomes chaste Bianca Maria's wedding carriage entering her dowry city of Cremona. I will try to say more on this question in response to Phaeded's interesting find of a medal of Caterina Sforza, at the link to which I began this post.
We don't know what the Chariot card looked like before the CY's, of course, and whether it was a male or a female on top. If a male, then it still can be Pudicitia, of the masculine variety. As to whether the card later became "Fama" with objects related to that concept on the card, or merely, as I tend to think, just "Triumph", which is what the chariot signified in the parades of ancient Rome and the Petrarch illustrations of the 15th century, is another question. Fame follows Victory, at least sometimes, until Time or Fortune erodes it, but if so it is the earthly kind, celebrated in the lifetime of the one triumphing, and not the eternal Fama in heaven that the A order cards proclaim.
There is quite a lot here, and I will restrict myself to the CY, in support, I think, of what Phaeded says about it.The Chariot’s meaning within the CY/PMB is itself not stable, as clearly the virginal bride on the CY Chariot holding Chastity’s jousting shield, emblazoned with the radiant dove impresa, becomes the established Duchess Bianca in the PMB, holding the orb of rulership and pulled by “two winged horses.”
It was Robert in 2008 who called attention to the "orb" that the CY Chariot lady holds, orum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=31, and JMD (Jean-Michael David) who identified it as a jousting shield. viewtopic.php?p=215#p215, similar to that held by the Empress in the same deck. Here I put them side by side with the details of the shield and staff. There is a thin red line that perhaps guided the artist as he was making the image. (Clicking on the image will make it bigger)
![Image](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l-oqQ5EuRME/XmGrDrAW56I/AAAAAAAAPJs/bQsk9nbVcAIbb-5kRLkTqM8COA3Hnh8fACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/CYdet1plusCharEmp.jpg)
On the Chariot card, it seems to me that the shield gets its place and meaning precisely from Petrarch's "Triumph of Pudicitia" and the psychomachia tradition on which it drew. That tradition put Pudicitia and Casita in the context of a pitched battle between virtues and vices, with each virtue paired with an opposing vice. Pudicitia or Castita was paired with Libido, the kind of love associated with Cupid (see e.g. Adolf Katzennelenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art, p. 2 for Pudicitia and 20 m/ 1 for Casitas). Thus Petrarch describes a similar battle between Pudicitia and Cupidinis (meaning precisely Libido) in his poem: "Never was there a fencer so adept / At turning blows aside.." and so on. He also describes her: "She wore, that day, a gown of white, and held / The shield that brought Medusa to her death." (http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_tr ... age=II.txt). The Visconti radiant dove is not the head of Medusa, so we cannot say that lady on the card is the goddess allotted that shield, the virgin Athena. But at least we have the white of purity on the horses. Although rather late, there is a Petrarch illustration with this feature, of 1489-1515 France (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Petr ... astity.jpg). Such an interpretation also fits the probable occasion for the card, as a commemoration of the wedding of Bianca Maria Visconti with Francesco Sforza. Pudicitia's chariot becomes chaste Bianca Maria's wedding carriage entering her dowry city of Cremona. I will try to say more on this question in response to Phaeded's interesting find of a medal of Caterina Sforza, at the link to which I began this post.
We don't know what the Chariot card looked like before the CY's, of course, and whether it was a male or a female on top. If a male, then it still can be Pudicitia, of the masculine variety. As to whether the card later became "Fama" with objects related to that concept on the card, or merely, as I tend to think, just "Triumph", which is what the chariot signified in the parades of ancient Rome and the Petrarch illustrations of the 15th century, is another question. Fame follows Victory, at least sometimes, until Time or Fortune erodes it, but if so it is the earthly kind, celebrated in the lifetime of the one triumphing, and not the eternal Fama in heaven that the A order cards proclaim.
Re: The Chariot
67Finally replying to what Mike wrote almost two weeks ago—it took a while because I ended up covering a lot more ground than I expected...
I share your view that Petrarch's I Trionfi poems were central to the design of the ur-tarot. I'm currently inclined to think that the earliest proto-tarot deck probably had a set of 14 to 16 trumps mainly representing the Triumphs from Petrarch's poems along with the seven virtues. And like you, I also think in terms of plausibility. But we disagree on what is plausible.
I think the fundamental difference in our approaches is that you seem to be convinced that all players and card designers throughout the fifteenth century (and possibly beyond) continued to understand the tarot trump subjects in exactly the same way that the deck's original creators did. For instance, because you believe the tarot trumps were originally intended to include representations of Petrarch's Triumphs, you therefore conclude that the designers of all the decks in the decades that followed also designed the card images to represent the Triumphs, and that the tarot players also recognized the cards as such.
My view, on the other hand, is that the cards rapidly lost their association with the Petrarchan Triumphs. I think this is evident for two reasons especially:
Reason 1: The names the players gave to the cards, which are first documented by the Steele Sermon (Sermones de ludo cum aliis, ca. 1480) and which changed very little down the centuries after, from which we can safely conclude that they became established fairly early, when the standard tarot deck first became established across Italy (the 1450s). These names suggests that the players identified the trump cards by their allegorical meanings only in the case of a few very well known allegorical figures that would have been easily recognizable to a broad cross-section of society: Love, Death, Fortune, Fortitude, Temperance, Justice. They identified the other allegorical figures not by their allegorical meanings, but by particular details of the illustration: the Chariot, the Old Man/Hunchback/Hermit, the Hanged Man, the World, and the Angel. The Tower (which the Sermon calls the Lightning Bolt, la Sagitta) is a similar example: the name reflects not the subject originally intended, but rather only a prominent detail of its illustration on the card.
Moreover, while the players identified two of the Petrarchan cards correctly as Love and Death, it's highly unlikely that many of them actually associated either of those cards with Petrarch's Triumph poems, because they did not make that connection in the names they gave the cards originally intended to represent the other, more obscure Triumph figures of Pudicitia, Time, and Eternity.
Reason 2: The degree of variation in the figures depicted on the cards. All of the allegorical cards I just named always showed human or human-like figures, but the figures in most of the second group (Chariot, Old Man, World, and Angel) underwent a great deal of variation in their attributes and likely allegorical signification (if any) from one deck to another. The figures in the first group, on the other hand, always clearly depicted exactly the same allegorical subject.
From these two observations, we can conclude that it was only the first group of cards (Love, Death, Fortune, Fortitude, Temperance, Justice) where the allegorical significance of the figure was an essential identifying element of the card to the player. In the second group, it was an optional extra, not essential to the players.
Because it was not essential to the players, it was also not essential to the card designers. The makers of playing cards only cared about what the players cared about. So all the card makers had to do was ensure that every deck had cards showing what the players expected to see. The players needed to see Love, Death, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, so the card makers made cards depicting Love, Death, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. The players did not need to see Time, Eternity, Pudicitia, Prudence, or Fame. What they did need to see was an Old Man, a World, and a Chariot. So the card makers always made cards depicting an old man, a world, and a chariot. In depicting those images, they were free to use any typical iconographic attributes of time, eternity, pudicitia, fame, and anything else at all that took their fancy, but none of them were ever necessary.
So, as one would expect, the use of those attributes on those particular cards varied enormously over the decades and centuries. Sometimes the design of a Chariot card or a World card featured a Fame-like figure; usually it did not. Sometimes the design of the Old Man card included attributes of Time; often it did not. None of this mattered, because what mattered was only the Chariot and the World and the Old Man, not any allegorical meanings that may or may not have been present as well.
There was just no need for all decks at all times to contain a figure representing Fame or Pudicitia. So they didn't. Consequently, I don't feel compelled to try to find one in them. Mike, in your exploration of what is plausible regarding Fame, you left out what is probably the most plausible possibility of all, namely that Fame was not in the deck. If you are really interested in considering everything that is plausible, you certainly need to consider that (especially for the years after the establishment of the standard tarot deck around 1450). This possibility is much more plausible than the notion that Fame might have been intended to be represented by cards that look far more likely to represent something else entirely, such as the World, or Justice, or the Angel. No, I do not "want to argue that Fame is the Angel card" because it is obvious that the Angel card originally represented the Last Judgment, not Fame. Likewise, it is not really plausible to suggest that the celestial cards could be intended to represent Time, because we have no evidence to indicate they were ever interpreted as representing anything other than simply the Sun, Moon, and Star. And when they were added to the deck, we can safely assume there was already a perfectly good representation of Time present on another card.
This general difference in our approaches is also evident in how we explain the meaning of the mundus parvus name in the Steele Sermon. I agree that this name strongly suggests a connection between the World card and the Chariot card: the former was seen as the "big" World, the latter somehow as the "little" or "lesser" World. But because the name of the World card was not based on any allegorical meaning, I do not believe the name "little World" would have been based on allegorical meaning either. The World card was named for a prominent feature of the illustration, namely the "world," which appeared consistently on all the fifteenth-century cards as a landscape enclosed in a circular, globe-like frame (the CY card is the only slight exception, its frame being an arc rather than a circle). This was clearly regarded as the essential feature of the card. There is absolutely no reason to think that the choice of name had anything to do with any allegory, either of Fame or anything else. Like virtually all the cards in the deck, the card's name resulted simply from the players naming it after the most obvious thing they could see on it, which in most cases was not the allegorical meaning.
So if we want to know why the Chariot was being called "little World" at this time, the approach that makes most sense is to look for features of the illustration on the card at the time that resembled the illustration on the World card.
So, what might those cards have looked like to the writer of the Steele Sermon? It is thought to have been written in the Ferrara area sometime in the last few decades of the fifteenth century. The surviving cards thought to be from that region and roughly that time are the Issy Chariot (dated to 1450-1470), the deck that survives as printed sheets in the Met Museum and Budapest Museum of Fine Arts (dated to about 1480-1510), and the handpainted Este deck from the early sixteenth century.
Of these decks, only the Budapest/Met deck survives with both a Chariot card and a World card. Only the half of the chariot card survives:
It appears to show a cherub-like figure with wings, an orb at its feet, possibly holding something in its right hand but that side of the card has not survived. Two lesser figures accompany it, probably with a similar pair on the other side of the chariot, like those on the earlier Issy Chariot card.
Unfortunately, that Chariot card does not show much resemblance to the World card in the same deck: It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the deck familiar to the writer of the Sermon was a different one, probably somewhat earlier or later than the Budapest/Met deck. So, let's take a look at the Este cards, which don't include a Chariot but do include this World card:
.
This looks a lot more promising! If the little cherub on the Budapest/Met Chariot had a baton or scepter in its missing right hand, it would very closely resemble the much larger cherub on this card. So one could easily imagine a deck, maybe in use around 1500, in which the Chariot looked like that and the World looked like the Este card. That would be entirely sufficient to explain why the Chariot card was called "mundus parvus".
Please also note that if the Chariot cherub was holding a scepter, then neither that figure nor the Este World would resemble any standard image of Fame, as those images never usually featured a figure holding a scepter and orb, and never (to my knowledge) depicted the figure as a cherub. But since the allegorical meanings of the figures are not likely to be relevant to the name, that does not affect our explanation.
I can also see an alternative possibility, less likely but still plausible, namely that the Budapest/Met Chariot cherub had a sword in its right hand like the figure on the earlier Issy Chariot, and the World card in the deck known to the Sermon author looked something like it did in the late-fifteenth-century Rosenwald deck from Tuscany. This is plausible, as we know that cards used in Ferrara (including the Este deck mentioned above) were often made in Florence. Here's the Rosenwald World card:
This would again give us two angel figures with the same objects, with the one on the Chariot card again being physically smaller than the one on the World (as well as appearing on a "lesser" card). So that could also explain "mundus parvus" perfectly well, and again without needing to refer to any allegorical meanings. The fact that the World figure's sword at some point turned into a scepter in Ferrara (on the Este card) is not really a difficulty for this explanation, because swords becoming batons/scepters and vice versa is something that happened quite a lot in the Telephone-game process of tarot trump development (as in the example of the Issy Chariot itself, which must have been based on the baton-wielding figure seen on the PMB and CY Chariots).
Interestingly, in that case, both the World figure and the Chariot figure would show enough attributes of Fame (sword, orb, wings) to resemble some standard images of that allegory. So here I have to admit that I was wrong in one of my earlier posts above when I said that "the later Chariot cards no longer resemble any standard images of Fame," because if the Budapest/Met one was holding a sword, it would have done. However, these attributes were not consistent features on Chariot cards, and to my knowledge this is only instance where the Chariot figure has wings.
Another Chariot card where the figure looked plausibly like Fame can be found on the Beaux-Arts/Rothschild printed sheets from Bologna in the early sixteenth century, and that deck also shows a World figure that looks like Fame in almost exactly the same way: So it's quite possible that the "little World" name could have been in use for the Chariot in Bologna at that time as well. But again, it's important to remember that even if this deck's designers did intend one or both of these figures to be representations of Fame, that would have been of no great significance to the players, who did not identify the cards on that basis.
Please also note that while I don't think any cards in the later decks were ever usually understood by either the players or the card makers as representing Petrarch's Triumphs, this does NOT apply to the earliest decks. I believe that the cards made for the court of Filippo Maria Visconti, who was almost certainly responsible for the creation of the first tarot deck, would definitely have been understood to show representations of those Triumphs. I think this is quite evident in the surviving trumps of the Cary Yale deck, where the Chariot card shows a representation of Chastity/Pudicitia, and the World card shows a representation of the Triumph of Eternity. I personally think it is unlikely that this deck originally contained another card representing the Triumph of Fame which has since been lost, but that nonetheless is a real possibility.
However, by the time the other very early decks that survive to us were created—those not created for the court of Filippo Maria—these representations had already changed, and their original meanings were becoming lost or modified. As I described in my first post in this thread, the Chariot in the PMB seems to have no longer represented Chastity, but Fame instead, and the Issy Chariot also. The Chariots in the Charles VI deck and Catania deck didn't even represent Fame, but merely a triumphant ruler or warrior: The former shows a man weilding an axe, the latter shows a man with an orb and scepter. Neither image resembles the typical images of Chastity/Pudicitia or Fame seen at the time (the Catania charioteer with his orb and scepter somewhat resembles the awkwardly unconventional depiction of Fame on the PMB card, but the crucial wings of Fame have disappeared from the horses).
As for the World cards in these decks, the disappearance of the winged trumpet on the CY World card is a clear indication that the card designers did not see the Fame aspect of that card as being at all important, because they replaced the trumpet—the only definite attribute of Fame on the card—with a scepter or baton, as seen on both the Charles VI and Catania World cards. As a result, neither card can plausibly be said to represent Fame.
So just as with the Chariot card, neither the players nor the card makers felt the Fame aspect to be in any way important to the World card. Or to any other card, for that matter: Even in case of the Minchiate deck, in which the Angel card resembled Fame and at one stage even had the label "Fama" literally written on the bottom of the card, the players still did not call the card Fame, but identified it by terms like Angel or Trumpets. Evidently, even in that case, where it was at least sometimes understood to be present in the card's illustration, this allegorical meaning of the card was still not important. In this respect, the Minchiate Angel was exactly like the Chariot and World in every tarot deck after 1450.
.mikeh wrote: 25 Feb 2020, 02:10 I have not proved anything. All I am concerned with is plausibility. Fame is plausibly the World card, in all the various designs except perhaps the PMB, and the World card in those cards also has attributes of Fame. Even in the PMB, if "Fama" means "glory", it applies. But this is rather clearly not the ur-tarot's design, so it can be excluded. Eternity is plausibly the Angel card.
If you want to argue that Fame is the Angel card and Eternity the World card, well, that doesn't affect my main concern, the applicability of Petrarch to the ur-tarot.
I share your view that Petrarch's I Trionfi poems were central to the design of the ur-tarot. I'm currently inclined to think that the earliest proto-tarot deck probably had a set of 14 to 16 trumps mainly representing the Triumphs from Petrarch's poems along with the seven virtues. And like you, I also think in terms of plausibility. But we disagree on what is plausible.
I think the fundamental difference in our approaches is that you seem to be convinced that all players and card designers throughout the fifteenth century (and possibly beyond) continued to understand the tarot trump subjects in exactly the same way that the deck's original creators did. For instance, because you believe the tarot trumps were originally intended to include representations of Petrarch's Triumphs, you therefore conclude that the designers of all the decks in the decades that followed also designed the card images to represent the Triumphs, and that the tarot players also recognized the cards as such.
My view, on the other hand, is that the cards rapidly lost their association with the Petrarchan Triumphs. I think this is evident for two reasons especially:
Reason 1: The names the players gave to the cards, which are first documented by the Steele Sermon (Sermones de ludo cum aliis, ca. 1480) and which changed very little down the centuries after, from which we can safely conclude that they became established fairly early, when the standard tarot deck first became established across Italy (the 1450s). These names suggests that the players identified the trump cards by their allegorical meanings only in the case of a few very well known allegorical figures that would have been easily recognizable to a broad cross-section of society: Love, Death, Fortune, Fortitude, Temperance, Justice. They identified the other allegorical figures not by their allegorical meanings, but by particular details of the illustration: the Chariot, the Old Man/Hunchback/Hermit, the Hanged Man, the World, and the Angel. The Tower (which the Sermon calls the Lightning Bolt, la Sagitta) is a similar example: the name reflects not the subject originally intended, but rather only a prominent detail of its illustration on the card.
Moreover, while the players identified two of the Petrarchan cards correctly as Love and Death, it's highly unlikely that many of them actually associated either of those cards with Petrarch's Triumph poems, because they did not make that connection in the names they gave the cards originally intended to represent the other, more obscure Triumph figures of Pudicitia, Time, and Eternity.
Reason 2: The degree of variation in the figures depicted on the cards. All of the allegorical cards I just named always showed human or human-like figures, but the figures in most of the second group (Chariot, Old Man, World, and Angel) underwent a great deal of variation in their attributes and likely allegorical signification (if any) from one deck to another. The figures in the first group, on the other hand, always clearly depicted exactly the same allegorical subject.
From these two observations, we can conclude that it was only the first group of cards (Love, Death, Fortune, Fortitude, Temperance, Justice) where the allegorical significance of the figure was an essential identifying element of the card to the player. In the second group, it was an optional extra, not essential to the players.
Because it was not essential to the players, it was also not essential to the card designers. The makers of playing cards only cared about what the players cared about. So all the card makers had to do was ensure that every deck had cards showing what the players expected to see. The players needed to see Love, Death, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, so the card makers made cards depicting Love, Death, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. The players did not need to see Time, Eternity, Pudicitia, Prudence, or Fame. What they did need to see was an Old Man, a World, and a Chariot. So the card makers always made cards depicting an old man, a world, and a chariot. In depicting those images, they were free to use any typical iconographic attributes of time, eternity, pudicitia, fame, and anything else at all that took their fancy, but none of them were ever necessary.
So, as one would expect, the use of those attributes on those particular cards varied enormously over the decades and centuries. Sometimes the design of a Chariot card or a World card featured a Fame-like figure; usually it did not. Sometimes the design of the Old Man card included attributes of Time; often it did not. None of this mattered, because what mattered was only the Chariot and the World and the Old Man, not any allegorical meanings that may or may not have been present as well.
There was just no need for all decks at all times to contain a figure representing Fame or Pudicitia. So they didn't. Consequently, I don't feel compelled to try to find one in them. Mike, in your exploration of what is plausible regarding Fame, you left out what is probably the most plausible possibility of all, namely that Fame was not in the deck. If you are really interested in considering everything that is plausible, you certainly need to consider that (especially for the years after the establishment of the standard tarot deck around 1450). This possibility is much more plausible than the notion that Fame might have been intended to be represented by cards that look far more likely to represent something else entirely, such as the World, or Justice, or the Angel. No, I do not "want to argue that Fame is the Angel card" because it is obvious that the Angel card originally represented the Last Judgment, not Fame. Likewise, it is not really plausible to suggest that the celestial cards could be intended to represent Time, because we have no evidence to indicate they were ever interpreted as representing anything other than simply the Sun, Moon, and Star. And when they were added to the deck, we can safely assume there was already a perfectly good representation of Time present on another card.
This general difference in our approaches is also evident in how we explain the meaning of the mundus parvus name in the Steele Sermon. I agree that this name strongly suggests a connection between the World card and the Chariot card: the former was seen as the "big" World, the latter somehow as the "little" or "lesser" World. But because the name of the World card was not based on any allegorical meaning, I do not believe the name "little World" would have been based on allegorical meaning either. The World card was named for a prominent feature of the illustration, namely the "world," which appeared consistently on all the fifteenth-century cards as a landscape enclosed in a circular, globe-like frame (the CY card is the only slight exception, its frame being an arc rather than a circle). This was clearly regarded as the essential feature of the card. There is absolutely no reason to think that the choice of name had anything to do with any allegory, either of Fame or anything else. Like virtually all the cards in the deck, the card's name resulted simply from the players naming it after the most obvious thing they could see on it, which in most cases was not the allegorical meaning.
So if we want to know why the Chariot was being called "little World" at this time, the approach that makes most sense is to look for features of the illustration on the card at the time that resembled the illustration on the World card.
So, what might those cards have looked like to the writer of the Steele Sermon? It is thought to have been written in the Ferrara area sometime in the last few decades of the fifteenth century. The surviving cards thought to be from that region and roughly that time are the Issy Chariot (dated to 1450-1470), the deck that survives as printed sheets in the Met Museum and Budapest Museum of Fine Arts (dated to about 1480-1510), and the handpainted Este deck from the early sixteenth century.
Of these decks, only the Budapest/Met deck survives with both a Chariot card and a World card. Only the half of the chariot card survives:
It appears to show a cherub-like figure with wings, an orb at its feet, possibly holding something in its right hand but that side of the card has not survived. Two lesser figures accompany it, probably with a similar pair on the other side of the chariot, like those on the earlier Issy Chariot card.
Unfortunately, that Chariot card does not show much resemblance to the World card in the same deck: It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the deck familiar to the writer of the Sermon was a different one, probably somewhat earlier or later than the Budapest/Met deck. So, let's take a look at the Este cards, which don't include a Chariot but do include this World card:
![Image](http://cards.old.no/t/ercole-d-este/mondo.png)
This looks a lot more promising! If the little cherub on the Budapest/Met Chariot had a baton or scepter in its missing right hand, it would very closely resemble the much larger cherub on this card. So one could easily imagine a deck, maybe in use around 1500, in which the Chariot looked like that and the World looked like the Este card. That would be entirely sufficient to explain why the Chariot card was called "mundus parvus".
Please also note that if the Chariot cherub was holding a scepter, then neither that figure nor the Este World would resemble any standard image of Fame, as those images never usually featured a figure holding a scepter and orb, and never (to my knowledge) depicted the figure as a cherub. But since the allegorical meanings of the figures are not likely to be relevant to the name, that does not affect our explanation.
I can also see an alternative possibility, less likely but still plausible, namely that the Budapest/Met Chariot cherub had a sword in its right hand like the figure on the earlier Issy Chariot, and the World card in the deck known to the Sermon author looked something like it did in the late-fifteenth-century Rosenwald deck from Tuscany. This is plausible, as we know that cards used in Ferrara (including the Este deck mentioned above) were often made in Florence. Here's the Rosenwald World card:
This would again give us two angel figures with the same objects, with the one on the Chariot card again being physically smaller than the one on the World (as well as appearing on a "lesser" card). So that could also explain "mundus parvus" perfectly well, and again without needing to refer to any allegorical meanings. The fact that the World figure's sword at some point turned into a scepter in Ferrara (on the Este card) is not really a difficulty for this explanation, because swords becoming batons/scepters and vice versa is something that happened quite a lot in the Telephone-game process of tarot trump development (as in the example of the Issy Chariot itself, which must have been based on the baton-wielding figure seen on the PMB and CY Chariots).
Interestingly, in that case, both the World figure and the Chariot figure would show enough attributes of Fame (sword, orb, wings) to resemble some standard images of that allegory. So here I have to admit that I was wrong in one of my earlier posts above when I said that "the later Chariot cards no longer resemble any standard images of Fame," because if the Budapest/Met one was holding a sword, it would have done. However, these attributes were not consistent features on Chariot cards, and to my knowledge this is only instance where the Chariot figure has wings.
Another Chariot card where the figure looked plausibly like Fame can be found on the Beaux-Arts/Rothschild printed sheets from Bologna in the early sixteenth century, and that deck also shows a World figure that looks like Fame in almost exactly the same way: So it's quite possible that the "little World" name could have been in use for the Chariot in Bologna at that time as well. But again, it's important to remember that even if this deck's designers did intend one or both of these figures to be representations of Fame, that would have been of no great significance to the players, who did not identify the cards on that basis.
Please also note that while I don't think any cards in the later decks were ever usually understood by either the players or the card makers as representing Petrarch's Triumphs, this does NOT apply to the earliest decks. I believe that the cards made for the court of Filippo Maria Visconti, who was almost certainly responsible for the creation of the first tarot deck, would definitely have been understood to show representations of those Triumphs. I think this is quite evident in the surviving trumps of the Cary Yale deck, where the Chariot card shows a representation of Chastity/Pudicitia, and the World card shows a representation of the Triumph of Eternity. I personally think it is unlikely that this deck originally contained another card representing the Triumph of Fame which has since been lost, but that nonetheless is a real possibility.
However, by the time the other very early decks that survive to us were created—those not created for the court of Filippo Maria—these representations had already changed, and their original meanings were becoming lost or modified. As I described in my first post in this thread, the Chariot in the PMB seems to have no longer represented Chastity, but Fame instead, and the Issy Chariot also. The Chariots in the Charles VI deck and Catania deck didn't even represent Fame, but merely a triumphant ruler or warrior: The former shows a man weilding an axe, the latter shows a man with an orb and scepter. Neither image resembles the typical images of Chastity/Pudicitia or Fame seen at the time (the Catania charioteer with his orb and scepter somewhat resembles the awkwardly unconventional depiction of Fame on the PMB card, but the crucial wings of Fame have disappeared from the horses).
As for the World cards in these decks, the disappearance of the winged trumpet on the CY World card is a clear indication that the card designers did not see the Fame aspect of that card as being at all important, because they replaced the trumpet—the only definite attribute of Fame on the card—with a scepter or baton, as seen on both the Charles VI and Catania World cards. As a result, neither card can plausibly be said to represent Fame.
So just as with the Chariot card, neither the players nor the card makers felt the Fame aspect to be in any way important to the World card. Or to any other card, for that matter: Even in case of the Minchiate deck, in which the Angel card resembled Fame and at one stage even had the label "Fama" literally written on the bottom of the card, the players still did not call the card Fame, but identified it by terms like Angel or Trumpets. Evidently, even in that case, where it was at least sometimes understood to be present in the card's illustration, this allegorical meaning of the card was still not important. In this respect, the Minchiate Angel was exactly like the Chariot and World in every tarot deck after 1450.
Re: The Chariot
68Nethanial wrote,
Nethaniel wrote,
When I was a kid, we liked to play a game called "Risk". There were territories market out on a world map on which you could put your armies and attack adjoining territories. Exactly the same game could have been played with different shapes linked by lines, but it is more fun when the shapes represented something big and important. Also we learned some geography, and perhaps got indoctrinated into believing the importance of geography in politics. It seems to me that kids those days were no different, but they didn't think in terms of world maps, but rather in terms of cosmographs, hierarchies, virtues, vices, etc.
So it is fun when the Devil captures the Pope, for example, or thinks he is until the lightning-struck tower captures him. That's more fun than a fifth suit with, say, different types of farm animals on them, plus numbers. And even that is more fun than cards with just a bunch of suit-signs on them. So we have cards with meanings, and also "use your imagination, but don't ignore the details". How much meaning depends on your education, maturity. How much you use your imagination depends on both respect for the image and the freedom to play with it. The nice thing is that there are various ways of allegoricizing even the same card, so it can teach and tell stories in different ways. I have a game board of Snakes and Ladders underneath my keyboard, another educational game: it teaches what gets you where you want to go (ladders) and what harms it (snakes). Educational but not allegorical, since the pictures are quite straightforward. For the educational function, we have to remember that the game was illegal in Florence until 1450, even if it was only selectively, or randomly, enforced. So the beneficial aspects of the game would have to be apparent to the city fathers. It is like marijuana that way. And of course the lessons can change with the times and the target consumers. So forget chastity if you are wanting to promote volunteering for the army instead. Although fame might be worth suggesting in such a case. Yes, flexibility, in the context of the times. Perhaps we don't disagree that much.
I liked your comparison of World and Chariot cards, at least the part about the wings and/or symbols of authority. Two problems: first, to explain "mundus parvus" you need to find a little world on the Chariot cards, not an angel or putto or Mercury. "Mundus" is the operative word. It's there on some Chariot cards: the globe in the guy's hand, divided into three parts, for Asia, Africa, and Europe (not on the Metropolitan card, however, where it would be nice to see, but perhaps it looked like the Rosenwald, as you suggest for the World; then there is no winged creature, but I don't think that matters). And indeed it is smaller than the world on the World card. Visually little, even if it is the same world being represented. So that problem is surmounted by your method.
Second, in explaining the term you need to consider the context in which the term was written: it was in a document by a preacher. Besides "mundus parvus" for a card that perhaps had no world in it (at least I don't see one on the Metropolitan card, nor anybody who could be holding a little globe), he said "that is, God the Father" for the World card. If there is no God the Father on the card, we are in the realm of allegory. The "big world" is that of God the Father, as opposed to the "little world" of the Charioteer, in other words the whole Cosmos. The term "mondo", like the Greek "Kosmos" and the Latin "mundus", was ambiguous between "universe" and "just this world we're on": there was a "macrocosm" and a "microcosm", both "cosms". God the Father's World is the cosmos, which in Plato meant the four elements, modified to five elements by Aristotle and the medievals (but the cards, when they show the elements, tend to follow Plato). At least that's the preacher's point in introducing the term "mundus parvus". Why, then, the angel? Well, there are various allegorical interpretations.
Finally, thanks for that marvelously big and clear version of the d'Este card; I have never seen it displayed that way before. Since I like details, I have to ask, just what is that the angel/putto have in his two hands? In the left, it looks like a mirror. That would of course link him up with Prudence. I have no idea what is in his right. An upside-down heart? So, balancing head and heart? I hope you are not prejudiced against discussing the allegory, just because it is a tiny detail, totally unnecessary for playing the game.
I plead "not guilty" to this charge of thinking that all creator's of tarot decks in the 15th century in exactly the way that the deck's original creators did. Certainly not. We need only look at the different designs on the Moon card, different allegories, sometimes (the Rosenwald) none at all. I am not convinced that there even was a Moon card originally. The allegory on the PMB World card is different from the allegory on the CY World card, etc. The allegory on the CY chariot is different from the allegory on the PMB Chariot and different from that on the Charles VI. They express different aspects of Pudicitia. The Issy and the Catania may have aspects of Fame, too. These later cards do not hold to Petrarch. But unlike you, I do not know where the tarot originated. It seems to me more likely to have been Florence or Bologna, although less than a year ago I would have agreed with you. So in the absence of knowledge I have to look at other possibilities and the cards that have come down from those places. If I find the same theme, related to Petrarch, well and good. If not, well, I can conclude nothing with any plausibility. Fortunately I do find the same theme in both, even though the figures on the cards are quite different.I think the fundamental difference in our approaches is that you seem to be convinced that all players and card designers throughout the fifteenth century (and possibly beyond) continued to understand the tarot trump subjects in exactly the same way that the deck's original creators did. For instance, because you believe the tarot trumps were originally intended to include representations of Petrarch's Triumphs, you therefore conclude that the designers of all the decks in the decades that followed also designed the card images to represent the Triumphs, and that the tarot players also recognized the cards as such.
My view, on the other hand, is that the cards rapidly lost their association with the Petrarchan Triumphs. ...
Nethaniel wrote,
Unlike you I have no crystal ball telling me what players did and did not care about, or even if they all cared about the same thing, or whether there was also a question of what they were supposed to care about, according to their parents and educators. Medieval Christianity was full of allegories. And so is the Renaissance. What is David and Goliath but an allegory for resistance to an apparently stronger foe? Wedding chests and birth trays had allegorical themes. Etc. Also, the card makers did manage to put an attribute of Time in with the Old Man, until they decided to change the allegory. The allegories varied depending on what was in it. "Old Man", "World" and "Chariot" are titles that reduce to a common denominator different allegories that played with common elements. That is permissible but not all there is. It's not just a Charioteer, but many charioteers, with differences and similarities. Not just visual similarities, but allegorical ones, too.Because it was not essential to the players, it was also not essential to the card designers. The makers of playing cards only cared about what the players cared about. So all the card makers had to do was ensure that every deck had cards showing what the players expected to see. The players needed to see Love, Death, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, so the card makers made cards depicting Love, Death, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. The players did not need to see Time, Eternity, Pudicitia, Prudence, or Fame. What they did need to see was an Old Man, a World, and a Chariot. So the card makers always made cards depicting an old man, a world, and a chariot. In depicting those images, they were free to use any typical iconographic attributes of time, eternity, pudicitia, fame, and anything else at all that took their fancy, but none of them were ever necessary.
When I was a kid, we liked to play a game called "Risk". There were territories market out on a world map on which you could put your armies and attack adjoining territories. Exactly the same game could have been played with different shapes linked by lines, but it is more fun when the shapes represented something big and important. Also we learned some geography, and perhaps got indoctrinated into believing the importance of geography in politics. It seems to me that kids those days were no different, but they didn't think in terms of world maps, but rather in terms of cosmographs, hierarchies, virtues, vices, etc.
So it is fun when the Devil captures the Pope, for example, or thinks he is until the lightning-struck tower captures him. That's more fun than a fifth suit with, say, different types of farm animals on them, plus numbers. And even that is more fun than cards with just a bunch of suit-signs on them. So we have cards with meanings, and also "use your imagination, but don't ignore the details". How much meaning depends on your education, maturity. How much you use your imagination depends on both respect for the image and the freedom to play with it. The nice thing is that there are various ways of allegoricizing even the same card, so it can teach and tell stories in different ways. I have a game board of Snakes and Ladders underneath my keyboard, another educational game: it teaches what gets you where you want to go (ladders) and what harms it (snakes). Educational but not allegorical, since the pictures are quite straightforward. For the educational function, we have to remember that the game was illegal in Florence until 1450, even if it was only selectively, or randomly, enforced. So the beneficial aspects of the game would have to be apparent to the city fathers. It is like marijuana that way. And of course the lessons can change with the times and the target consumers. So forget chastity if you are wanting to promote volunteering for the army instead. Although fame might be worth suggesting in such a case. Yes, flexibility, in the context of the times. Perhaps we don't disagree that much.
I liked your comparison of World and Chariot cards, at least the part about the wings and/or symbols of authority. Two problems: first, to explain "mundus parvus" you need to find a little world on the Chariot cards, not an angel or putto or Mercury. "Mundus" is the operative word. It's there on some Chariot cards: the globe in the guy's hand, divided into three parts, for Asia, Africa, and Europe (not on the Metropolitan card, however, where it would be nice to see, but perhaps it looked like the Rosenwald, as you suggest for the World; then there is no winged creature, but I don't think that matters). And indeed it is smaller than the world on the World card. Visually little, even if it is the same world being represented. So that problem is surmounted by your method.
Second, in explaining the term you need to consider the context in which the term was written: it was in a document by a preacher. Besides "mundus parvus" for a card that perhaps had no world in it (at least I don't see one on the Metropolitan card, nor anybody who could be holding a little globe), he said "that is, God the Father" for the World card. If there is no God the Father on the card, we are in the realm of allegory. The "big world" is that of God the Father, as opposed to the "little world" of the Charioteer, in other words the whole Cosmos. The term "mondo", like the Greek "Kosmos" and the Latin "mundus", was ambiguous between "universe" and "just this world we're on": there was a "macrocosm" and a "microcosm", both "cosms". God the Father's World is the cosmos, which in Plato meant the four elements, modified to five elements by Aristotle and the medievals (but the cards, when they show the elements, tend to follow Plato). At least that's the preacher's point in introducing the term "mundus parvus". Why, then, the angel? Well, there are various allegorical interpretations.
Finally, thanks for that marvelously big and clear version of the d'Este card; I have never seen it displayed that way before. Since I like details, I have to ask, just what is that the angel/putto have in his two hands? In the left, it looks like a mirror. That would of course link him up with Prudence. I have no idea what is in his right. An upside-down heart? So, balancing head and heart? I hope you are not prejudiced against discussing the allegory, just because it is a tiny detail, totally unnecessary for playing the game.
Last edited by mikeh on 08 Mar 2020, 10:40, edited 1 time in total.
Re: The Chariot
69I think it is an apple with a cross above it, it's not a mirror. One can see the cross against the eagle background, though it can be overlooked easily. An apple with cross appears at other world pictures.mikeh wrote: 08 Mar 2020, 05:27 Finally, thanks for that marvelously big and clear version of the d'Este card; I have never seen it displayed that way before. Since I like details, I have to ask, just what is that the angel/putto have in his two hands? In the left, it looks like a mirror. That would of course link him up with Prudence. I have no idea what is in his right. An upside-down heart? So, balancing head and heart? I hope you are not prejudiced against discussing the allegory, just because it is a tiny detail, totally unnecessary for playing the game.
Huck
http://trionfi.com
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Re: The Chariot
70I meant the other side, the angel's left. The cross with an apple (upside down)? is in his right.
Last edited by mikeh on 08 Mar 2020, 12:38, edited 3 times in total.