Re: The journey of the Judgement card through time

3
You say,
Once the 22 trump structure adopted by the Italian nobility, at least six cards are added to the Visconti Sforza deck to complete the structure, probably somewhere between 1475 and 1490. The Judgement card was part of this extension. This card has a lot of similarities in style with the Visconti di Modrone card, so it could very well be one of the last works of Bonifacio Bembo, who died in 1477.
The "six added cards" are Fortitude, Temperance, Star, Moon, Sun, and World, easily identified by their similarity of style with one another and dissimilarity from the rest. Additionally, if the Judgment card was part of the Visconti di Modrone, there is no reason not to think it would have been part of the Visconti-Sforza as originally painted.

I liked very much your choice of paintings of the Last Judgment, most of them showing Jesus standing on an orb, which you call an "orb of power." It seems to me to be more than that: it is the orb of the world. A couple of them are divided into three parts. These are the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, as in https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Petr ... orence.jpg. It seems to me that these can fruitfully be seen in relation to the World card, especially those of Ferrara, Bologna, and Minchiate. People familiar with the iconography of the paintings would have seen, as one interpretation of the figure standing on the globe of the world, that of the cosmocrater, world-ruler, either Jesus or, if female, an allegorical figure such as Sophia of the Old Testament or God's Providence.
cron