Re: The Chariot
Posted: 08 Feb 2020, 00:29
Hi everyone,
I'm new here, so please forgive me if I do something wrong, and let me know what I'm supposed to be doing...
I discovered this forum about ten days ago, and have since been eagerly reading vast reams of old posts. I've been fascinated by the early history of tarot since reading Michael Dummett's Game of Tarot more than 25 years ago, but haven't really paid much attention to it for the past two decades.
I was fascinated to learn from the older posts on this forum that the Chariot card represented Chastity. I'd always thought of it vaguely as just Triumph in general (which, in my defence, was probably how it was viewed by most people even in the fifteenth century, if the name "Lo Caro Triumphale" in the Sermones de Ludo Cum Aliis is any guide).
A few days ago, however, I read some new information, especially parts of a book by Gianni Guastella, Word of Mouth: Fame and its Personifications in Art and Literature from Ancient Rome to the Middle Ages (Oxford 2017), which made me think that most Chariot cards—even the earliest ones—should be interpreted not as Chastity, but as Fame.
I'll start by discussing the general iconography of the Petrarchan Triumph of Fame in the early 15th century, and then talk about how I think we should view the early development of the Chariot.
The only notable descriptive attribute of Fame in Petrarch's poem is her aspect of being like a "star" (un'amorosa stella) making the sky bright with light; this may be why she appears with a halo in at least one version? Otherwise Petrarch's poem isn't very helpful in depicting Fame; it's mainly just a procession of the great men of Rome, then heroes of Persia and Greece, then biblical figures, women of Antiquity, and philosophers.
The earliest representations of Fame in the Petrarchan illustrations feature wings on the female personification and/or wings on the trumpets that appear with her. Wings and trumpets remain important symbols of Fame throughout the 15th century and beyond (see, for example, Gustella p. 283).
Other elements used to depict Fame were taken from Boccaccio's description of Worldly Glory in his poem Amorosa Visione: her triumphal chariot drawn by horses (un carro ... grande e triunfal, [..] due cavalli .. traeano il carro) and the sword and golden globe held in her hands—sword in the right and the globe in the left (in man tenea una spada tagliente [..] nella man sinestra un pomo d'oro). The chariot and the sword, in particular, became very common in depictions of the Petrarchan Fame. (Guastella p. 286). The sword was viewed as a symbol of power and authority, and in some depictions the globe becomes an orb, likewise symbolizing rulership and authority.
Boccaccio's chariot was in turn inspired by ancient Roman triumphs and possibly by the procession of Beatrice in Dante's Purgatorio (see Dorothy C. Shorr, "Some Notes on the Iconography of Petrarch's Triumph of Fame", Art Bulletin 20:1, 1938).
In the Petrarchan illustrations in Italian works before about 1485, Fame is not usually depicted holding a trumpet, but rather is accompanied by others with trumpets. Her right hand is usually holding a sword, although Michael J. Hurst did find one image where her right hand is empty, and in the earlier illustrations for Petrarch's De Viris Illustribus, her right hand is distributing laurel wreaths (these images can all be found in Hurst's collection of Petrarchan Triumph illustrations). Her left hand most often holds the Boccaccian globe (Hurst's collection has two examples of this, from 1450 and "15th century") or the Cupido Gloriae, a small cupid figure usually colored red or white. Guastella (p. 289) argues persuasively that the latter is derived from a small figure of Victory being held in the hand of illustrious Romans in ancient Roman imagery, such as on coins. Some ultimately saw the sword and winged cupid as symbolizing "celebrity through arms and love" (e.g. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436516). Sometimes Fame holds a book in her left hand, and in rare cases a set of scales (Hurst's collection has several examples of that, all from after 1460). The scales indicate that the figure is being equated with Justice, which Guastella says was a misunderstanding; nevertheless, the sword in her other hand was always taken to represent judicial power (Guastella p. 286).
So, enough about Fame in general, let's look at the earliest Chariot cards.
The Cary-Yale Chariot card: This particular card can be identified with considerable certainty as representing Chastity, because of the shield she is holding and the Chariot's position in the standard sequence directly after the Love card (even though the standard sequence could not have entirely applied in the case of the CY). The pillars holding up her chariot's canopy could even perhaps be a subtle reference to the pillar mentioned in Petrarch's poem, which she is sometimes shown holding in illustrations of this Triumph. It is perhaps a little unusual for her to be on a triumphal chariot when the other Petrarchan Triumphs of Love, Death and Eternity are not, and the baton or wand is unusual too (usually she is shown holding a palm branch, an emblem of victory/triumph, salvation, and the zodiacal sign Virgo) but the standard iconography for the Petrarchan Triumphs had not yet become fully established at the time when the tarot deck is thought to have been invented (1430s or earlier). She is, at least, holding the wand in the same demure way that Chastity is often depicted holding her palm branch, with it leaning against her body.
The Pierpont-Morgan Bergamo Chariot card, on the other hand, has to be interpreted as representing Fame, with exactly the same high degree of certainty: Not only is she mounted on a triumphal chariot (and Fame was more strongly associated with triumphal processions than any other allegorical figure), but she also holds the Boccaccian golden globe in her left hand, upgraded here into a regal orb. In her other hand she holds a baton (or possibly scepter) which, like the more usual sword, was another symbol of governmental authority. On the Issy card (the next oldest Chariot card after CY and PMB) and in many later decks, the charioteer carries a sword in place of the baton, which identifies the figure unequivocally with Fame.
The wings on the horses on the PMB card, in my view, further support the identification with Fame: as noted above, wings are an extremely common attribute of Fame in late medieval illustrations, including the Petrarchan images. It's true that the wings of Fame normally appear on the female figure or on trumpets, but it seems entirely feasible that the artist might be inclined to put them on the horses (especially if the iconography of the card seemed too well established by this time to allow the addition of winged trumpets or wings on the figure). Personally, I find this explanation considerably more plausible than the hypothesis that the horses are a reference to the Phaedrus myth of Plato: there are no other Platonic references in the early tarot decks to my knowledge, and this one would be quite hard to recognize given that neither this card nor the deck as a whole contain any other Platonic or classical references. As Michael J. Hurst once observed, the standard trump cycle was all about medieval allegory, for which reason some sophisticated upper-class Italians felt the need to classicize it in variants like the Sola-Busca. So it would seem highly unusual to find a Platonic reference in it, especially a subtle one.
The PMB charioteer lacks the sword which was the attribute most commonly used in depictions of Fame at this time, but the sword was not always used: Several of the earlier images that M.J. Hurst collected don't have the sword (the 14th c. images of Vainglory show the figure with a laurel wreath instead, and the Pessellino one has her with the golden globe in her left hand and nothing in her right hand; the Del Chierico one is the only one with both orb and sword). I have not yet seen any other images of Fame that depict her with a baton or scepter, but we do have the joint portraits in the Uffizi of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and his wife Battista Sforza, in which they are both portrayed in allegorical triumphal processions: she is depicted as the Triumph of Chastity, and he is depicted in the manner of a Roman triumphator and holds a baton or scepter outstretched in a clear gesture of authority and control. He is accompanied by the four virtues, of whom Justice is the only one that is fully visible. At the time when the Urbino portraits were made—the years around 1470—it seems to have become fairly common to depict the Triumph of Fame by means of the figure of Justice seated on a triumphal chariot (see, for example, the images from 1465 and 1468 in Hurst's collection). That suggests that this allegorical portrait could be viewed as a Triumph of Fame, as does the inscription below it: “Illustrious he is born along in glorious triumph, the eternal fame of his virtues celebrates him as the equal of the greatest leaders, and fitting holder of the scepter.”
So while the baton is certainly not an immediately recognizable attribute of Fame, I think it can be argued that it is at least as appropriate in the hand of Fame on the PMB card as it is in the hand of Chastity on the CY card.
So we have an intriguing situation: The position of the Chariot card in the standard sequence suggests that it should be the Petrarchan Triumph of Chastity, and in our earliest surviving deck (the CY), that is what it does indeed seem to be. However, in nearly all of the surviving later decks where it seems to be intended as a Petrarchan Triumph (and not simply as a non-specific "carro triumphale"), it is depicted clearly as Fame, notably on the PMB and Issy cards.
One possible explanation is that the tarot deck did not originally contain Fame, and that an artist at some stage in the development of the deck misread the Chastity card and changed the shield into a circular object. Perhaps they were working from a card like the surviving CY card, where the shield is gold on a gold background, making its contours harder to discern. The confusion would have been enhanced if the shield also showed the same motif as one or more of the coins in the Coins suit, as it does on the CY card; certainly, many people in our own time have misinterpreted the golden shield on this card as being a coin (I think I did that myself when I first saw it). Later artists then read the resulting image as a representation of Fame and made further modifications to enhance that association, such as changing the baton to a sword.
It is a real possibility that Fame was not originally in the deck, perhaps due to the Petrarchan series not having become entirely canonical yet at the time of the tarot deck's invention. The trump images contain enough differences from Petrarch's descriptions of the Triumphs to make it seem that the deck's inventors were not adhering to their Petrarchan model assiduously.
On the other hand, the cards do have some strong similarities with the standard iconography of the Petrarchan Triumphs in the early 1440s, so it's a little hard to believe they would have left out an entire triumph. There are certain elements, such as the shield on the Chastity card and the depiction of the World (Eternity), which make it look as though the card designers were paying fairly close attention to Petrarch's verses. (The Last Judgement card may also be evidence of this, but that probably requires more discussion in another post.)
There is an alternative explanation, namely that the original sequence included both Chastity and Fame, and Chastity was removed at a later stage. They probably looked fairly similar: female figures on chariots holding objects of similar size, shape, and color. Perhaps at some stage, people felt a need to reduce the number of trumps (to improve gameplay) and so they eliminated one of these similar-looking figures (Chastity) and moved Fame into its position in the sequence. But why disrupt the order that players have memorized by moving Fame to a different position? Why not just leave Chastity where it is and remove Fame? In light of this difficulty, this explanation seems implausible.
There is a third possibility, and this is the one I find the most plausible:
Fame was included in the original deck along with all the other Triumphs—perhaps depicted in a relatively conventional way, with a sword instead of the baton/scepter—and may well have once been present in the CY deck in that form (one of the cards that has not survived), but was dropped relatively early in the development of the standard trump sequence. Its removal then allowed later artists to mistake Chastity for the absent Fame in the manner described above.
My personal hypothesis regarding the origin of the tarot deck is that it was originally invented in Milan in a form similar or identical to the Cary-Yale deck, then it made its way first to Ferrara and then to Florence. The Florentines developed it into the standard 78-card deck, which they eventually began to produce quite cheaply, causing their version of the deck to become a viral hit across Italy in the 1450s. Milan and Ferrara clung to their earlier versions of the deck and resisted this new version for a while but ultimately succumbed, and the PMB deck is an early Milanese version of the new standard 78-card deck from Florence. (This hypothesis is still very much a work in progress, so I won't go into any more detail about it yet.)
If one accepts that hypothesis, then the Fame card must have been removed not long after the game began to be played in Florence, followed by the Chastity card being misinterpreted and its design changed sometime in course of the 1440s. Reasons why this explanation appeals to me:
- It removes the difficulty of believing that the deck was originally designed with only five of the six Petrarchan Triumphs, or that Chastity could have been removed deliberately and Fame moved to a completely different position in the sequence to replace it.
- Call me a snob... but it seems easier to believe that the game players and card makers of Florence could have dropped Fame from the deck and mistaken Chastity for Fame, than to believe that the humanistically educated courtiers in Milan could have done so. Franco Pratesi has convinced me that tarot was being played by a fairly broad cross-section of Florentine society shortly after tarot's arrival in that city, so it may well have been less educated people who effectively made these decisions (one way or another).
- If Chastity was mistaken for Fame not too long after Fame was removed from the deck, the confusion might have been partly due to somebody still having the idea in their head that Fame was one of the card subjects.
Postscript:
There is one more alternative explanation that I can envisage, namely that Fame was conflated with Chastity on the Chariot card. This does not seem as plausible as the third possibility I mentioned above, for two reasons:
- The idea of conflating two of the Petrarchan Triumphs would surely have seemed wrong to anyone who cared about the significance of the Petrarchan motifs. And if you didn't care about them, why go to the trouble of conflating them? It would be so much simpler to just drop one.
- In the unlikely event that you did want to conflate the two, surely the result would show more obvious signs of your intent: You would include at least one unambiguous attribute of Chastity and one unambiguous attribute of Fame. Instead, we have the ambiguous wings on the PMB horses, which could be interpreted as belonging to either Fame or Chastity; the globe, which was not one of the most commonly used attributes of Fame and therefore not an unambiguous identifier of it; and the baton, which in this instance seems to have come from the original Chastity card but is in itself more likely to evoke an association with Fame, if anything, and the same goes for the triumphal chariot itself. Instead, you would expect to see a shield, pillar, or palm branch for Chastity, and a sword or trumpet for Fame. But even if you had them, the result would be a bizarre mish-mash.
I'm new here, so please forgive me if I do something wrong, and let me know what I'm supposed to be doing...
I discovered this forum about ten days ago, and have since been eagerly reading vast reams of old posts. I've been fascinated by the early history of tarot since reading Michael Dummett's Game of Tarot more than 25 years ago, but haven't really paid much attention to it for the past two decades.
I was fascinated to learn from the older posts on this forum that the Chariot card represented Chastity. I'd always thought of it vaguely as just Triumph in general (which, in my defence, was probably how it was viewed by most people even in the fifteenth century, if the name "Lo Caro Triumphale" in the Sermones de Ludo Cum Aliis is any guide).
A few days ago, however, I read some new information, especially parts of a book by Gianni Guastella, Word of Mouth: Fame and its Personifications in Art and Literature from Ancient Rome to the Middle Ages (Oxford 2017), which made me think that most Chariot cards—even the earliest ones—should be interpreted not as Chastity, but as Fame.
I'll start by discussing the general iconography of the Petrarchan Triumph of Fame in the early 15th century, and then talk about how I think we should view the early development of the Chariot.
The only notable descriptive attribute of Fame in Petrarch's poem is her aspect of being like a "star" (un'amorosa stella) making the sky bright with light; this may be why she appears with a halo in at least one version? Otherwise Petrarch's poem isn't very helpful in depicting Fame; it's mainly just a procession of the great men of Rome, then heroes of Persia and Greece, then biblical figures, women of Antiquity, and philosophers.
The earliest representations of Fame in the Petrarchan illustrations feature wings on the female personification and/or wings on the trumpets that appear with her. Wings and trumpets remain important symbols of Fame throughout the 15th century and beyond (see, for example, Gustella p. 283).
Other elements used to depict Fame were taken from Boccaccio's description of Worldly Glory in his poem Amorosa Visione: her triumphal chariot drawn by horses (un carro ... grande e triunfal, [..] due cavalli .. traeano il carro) and the sword and golden globe held in her hands—sword in the right and the globe in the left (in man tenea una spada tagliente [..] nella man sinestra un pomo d'oro). The chariot and the sword, in particular, became very common in depictions of the Petrarchan Fame. (Guastella p. 286). The sword was viewed as a symbol of power and authority, and in some depictions the globe becomes an orb, likewise symbolizing rulership and authority.
Boccaccio's chariot was in turn inspired by ancient Roman triumphs and possibly by the procession of Beatrice in Dante's Purgatorio (see Dorothy C. Shorr, "Some Notes on the Iconography of Petrarch's Triumph of Fame", Art Bulletin 20:1, 1938).
In the Petrarchan illustrations in Italian works before about 1485, Fame is not usually depicted holding a trumpet, but rather is accompanied by others with trumpets. Her right hand is usually holding a sword, although Michael J. Hurst did find one image where her right hand is empty, and in the earlier illustrations for Petrarch's De Viris Illustribus, her right hand is distributing laurel wreaths (these images can all be found in Hurst's collection of Petrarchan Triumph illustrations). Her left hand most often holds the Boccaccian globe (Hurst's collection has two examples of this, from 1450 and "15th century") or the Cupido Gloriae, a small cupid figure usually colored red or white. Guastella (p. 289) argues persuasively that the latter is derived from a small figure of Victory being held in the hand of illustrious Romans in ancient Roman imagery, such as on coins. Some ultimately saw the sword and winged cupid as symbolizing "celebrity through arms and love" (e.g. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436516). Sometimes Fame holds a book in her left hand, and in rare cases a set of scales (Hurst's collection has several examples of that, all from after 1460). The scales indicate that the figure is being equated with Justice, which Guastella says was a misunderstanding; nevertheless, the sword in her other hand was always taken to represent judicial power (Guastella p. 286).
So, enough about Fame in general, let's look at the earliest Chariot cards.
The Cary-Yale Chariot card: This particular card can be identified with considerable certainty as representing Chastity, because of the shield she is holding and the Chariot's position in the standard sequence directly after the Love card (even though the standard sequence could not have entirely applied in the case of the CY). The pillars holding up her chariot's canopy could even perhaps be a subtle reference to the pillar mentioned in Petrarch's poem, which she is sometimes shown holding in illustrations of this Triumph. It is perhaps a little unusual for her to be on a triumphal chariot when the other Petrarchan Triumphs of Love, Death and Eternity are not, and the baton or wand is unusual too (usually she is shown holding a palm branch, an emblem of victory/triumph, salvation, and the zodiacal sign Virgo) but the standard iconography for the Petrarchan Triumphs had not yet become fully established at the time when the tarot deck is thought to have been invented (1430s or earlier). She is, at least, holding the wand in the same demure way that Chastity is often depicted holding her palm branch, with it leaning against her body.
The Pierpont-Morgan Bergamo Chariot card, on the other hand, has to be interpreted as representing Fame, with exactly the same high degree of certainty: Not only is she mounted on a triumphal chariot (and Fame was more strongly associated with triumphal processions than any other allegorical figure), but she also holds the Boccaccian golden globe in her left hand, upgraded here into a regal orb. In her other hand she holds a baton (or possibly scepter) which, like the more usual sword, was another symbol of governmental authority. On the Issy card (the next oldest Chariot card after CY and PMB) and in many later decks, the charioteer carries a sword in place of the baton, which identifies the figure unequivocally with Fame.
The wings on the horses on the PMB card, in my view, further support the identification with Fame: as noted above, wings are an extremely common attribute of Fame in late medieval illustrations, including the Petrarchan images. It's true that the wings of Fame normally appear on the female figure or on trumpets, but it seems entirely feasible that the artist might be inclined to put them on the horses (especially if the iconography of the card seemed too well established by this time to allow the addition of winged trumpets or wings on the figure). Personally, I find this explanation considerably more plausible than the hypothesis that the horses are a reference to the Phaedrus myth of Plato: there are no other Platonic references in the early tarot decks to my knowledge, and this one would be quite hard to recognize given that neither this card nor the deck as a whole contain any other Platonic or classical references. As Michael J. Hurst once observed, the standard trump cycle was all about medieval allegory, for which reason some sophisticated upper-class Italians felt the need to classicize it in variants like the Sola-Busca. So it would seem highly unusual to find a Platonic reference in it, especially a subtle one.
The PMB charioteer lacks the sword which was the attribute most commonly used in depictions of Fame at this time, but the sword was not always used: Several of the earlier images that M.J. Hurst collected don't have the sword (the 14th c. images of Vainglory show the figure with a laurel wreath instead, and the Pessellino one has her with the golden globe in her left hand and nothing in her right hand; the Del Chierico one is the only one with both orb and sword). I have not yet seen any other images of Fame that depict her with a baton or scepter, but we do have the joint portraits in the Uffizi of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and his wife Battista Sforza, in which they are both portrayed in allegorical triumphal processions: she is depicted as the Triumph of Chastity, and he is depicted in the manner of a Roman triumphator and holds a baton or scepter outstretched in a clear gesture of authority and control. He is accompanied by the four virtues, of whom Justice is the only one that is fully visible. At the time when the Urbino portraits were made—the years around 1470—it seems to have become fairly common to depict the Triumph of Fame by means of the figure of Justice seated on a triumphal chariot (see, for example, the images from 1465 and 1468 in Hurst's collection). That suggests that this allegorical portrait could be viewed as a Triumph of Fame, as does the inscription below it: “Illustrious he is born along in glorious triumph, the eternal fame of his virtues celebrates him as the equal of the greatest leaders, and fitting holder of the scepter.”
So while the baton is certainly not an immediately recognizable attribute of Fame, I think it can be argued that it is at least as appropriate in the hand of Fame on the PMB card as it is in the hand of Chastity on the CY card.
So we have an intriguing situation: The position of the Chariot card in the standard sequence suggests that it should be the Petrarchan Triumph of Chastity, and in our earliest surviving deck (the CY), that is what it does indeed seem to be. However, in nearly all of the surviving later decks where it seems to be intended as a Petrarchan Triumph (and not simply as a non-specific "carro triumphale"), it is depicted clearly as Fame, notably on the PMB and Issy cards.
One possible explanation is that the tarot deck did not originally contain Fame, and that an artist at some stage in the development of the deck misread the Chastity card and changed the shield into a circular object. Perhaps they were working from a card like the surviving CY card, where the shield is gold on a gold background, making its contours harder to discern. The confusion would have been enhanced if the shield also showed the same motif as one or more of the coins in the Coins suit, as it does on the CY card; certainly, many people in our own time have misinterpreted the golden shield on this card as being a coin (I think I did that myself when I first saw it). Later artists then read the resulting image as a representation of Fame and made further modifications to enhance that association, such as changing the baton to a sword.
It is a real possibility that Fame was not originally in the deck, perhaps due to the Petrarchan series not having become entirely canonical yet at the time of the tarot deck's invention. The trump images contain enough differences from Petrarch's descriptions of the Triumphs to make it seem that the deck's inventors were not adhering to their Petrarchan model assiduously.
On the other hand, the cards do have some strong similarities with the standard iconography of the Petrarchan Triumphs in the early 1440s, so it's a little hard to believe they would have left out an entire triumph. There are certain elements, such as the shield on the Chastity card and the depiction of the World (Eternity), which make it look as though the card designers were paying fairly close attention to Petrarch's verses. (The Last Judgement card may also be evidence of this, but that probably requires more discussion in another post.)
There is an alternative explanation, namely that the original sequence included both Chastity and Fame, and Chastity was removed at a later stage. They probably looked fairly similar: female figures on chariots holding objects of similar size, shape, and color. Perhaps at some stage, people felt a need to reduce the number of trumps (to improve gameplay) and so they eliminated one of these similar-looking figures (Chastity) and moved Fame into its position in the sequence. But why disrupt the order that players have memorized by moving Fame to a different position? Why not just leave Chastity where it is and remove Fame? In light of this difficulty, this explanation seems implausible.
There is a third possibility, and this is the one I find the most plausible:
Fame was included in the original deck along with all the other Triumphs—perhaps depicted in a relatively conventional way, with a sword instead of the baton/scepter—and may well have once been present in the CY deck in that form (one of the cards that has not survived), but was dropped relatively early in the development of the standard trump sequence. Its removal then allowed later artists to mistake Chastity for the absent Fame in the manner described above.
My personal hypothesis regarding the origin of the tarot deck is that it was originally invented in Milan in a form similar or identical to the Cary-Yale deck, then it made its way first to Ferrara and then to Florence. The Florentines developed it into the standard 78-card deck, which they eventually began to produce quite cheaply, causing their version of the deck to become a viral hit across Italy in the 1450s. Milan and Ferrara clung to their earlier versions of the deck and resisted this new version for a while but ultimately succumbed, and the PMB deck is an early Milanese version of the new standard 78-card deck from Florence. (This hypothesis is still very much a work in progress, so I won't go into any more detail about it yet.)
If one accepts that hypothesis, then the Fame card must have been removed not long after the game began to be played in Florence, followed by the Chastity card being misinterpreted and its design changed sometime in course of the 1440s. Reasons why this explanation appeals to me:
- It removes the difficulty of believing that the deck was originally designed with only five of the six Petrarchan Triumphs, or that Chastity could have been removed deliberately and Fame moved to a completely different position in the sequence to replace it.
- Call me a snob... but it seems easier to believe that the game players and card makers of Florence could have dropped Fame from the deck and mistaken Chastity for Fame, than to believe that the humanistically educated courtiers in Milan could have done so. Franco Pratesi has convinced me that tarot was being played by a fairly broad cross-section of Florentine society shortly after tarot's arrival in that city, so it may well have been less educated people who effectively made these decisions (one way or another).
- If Chastity was mistaken for Fame not too long after Fame was removed from the deck, the confusion might have been partly due to somebody still having the idea in their head that Fame was one of the card subjects.
Postscript:
There is one more alternative explanation that I can envisage, namely that Fame was conflated with Chastity on the Chariot card. This does not seem as plausible as the third possibility I mentioned above, for two reasons:
- The idea of conflating two of the Petrarchan Triumphs would surely have seemed wrong to anyone who cared about the significance of the Petrarchan motifs. And if you didn't care about them, why go to the trouble of conflating them? It would be so much simpler to just drop one.
- In the unlikely event that you did want to conflate the two, surely the result would show more obvious signs of your intent: You would include at least one unambiguous attribute of Chastity and one unambiguous attribute of Fame. Instead, we have the ambiguous wings on the PMB horses, which could be interpreted as belonging to either Fame or Chastity; the globe, which was not one of the most commonly used attributes of Fame and therefore not an unambiguous identifier of it; and the baton, which in this instance seems to have come from the original Chastity card but is in itself more likely to evoke an association with Fame, if anything, and the same goes for the triumphal chariot itself. Instead, you would expect to see a shield, pillar, or palm branch for Chastity, and a sword or trumpet for Fame. But even if you had them, the result would be a bizarre mish-mash.