Re: The Lovers

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Hi Michael,

I really love the first one, engraved by Johan Sadeler, because it pictures the exact version of the legend that I know. The hard path of the Virtue, leading to beautiful mountains afar and the easy, lovely path of Vice, with a fog that hides where it leads.

I like the Hercules at the Crossroad of Girolamo di Benvenuto (1470–1525), just bellow, because it seems to me the closer to Noblet's. Look at the angel above, prepared to strike Hercules if he chooses wrongly. Even the position of Virtue, with his left hand on Hercules shoulder, and vice with her right arm crossing Hercules' seems close. Unfortunately, the clothes, or lack of them, don't match.

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Happy St. Stanislaus day,
What the heck was on the Tarot de Marseille original creator mind ?

The Triumph of Love

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Thou wilt have heard of one who would not yield
To a stepmother's passionate pursuit
And gained through flight escape from her entreaties:
And yet his chaste and rightful steadfastness
Brought him to death: for to such hatred turned
The love of Phaedra, terrible and malign.
Herself she slew, perchance avenging thus
Theseus, Hippolytus, and Ariadne,
Who, as thou know'st, sped, loving, to her death.
Blaming another, one condemns oneself:
For he who takes delight in fraudulence
May not lament if he too be deceived.
Behold then Theseus, captive, though so famed,
Led between sisters twain who both met death:
One set her love on him, he loved the other.

Petrarch: The Triumph of Love
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