Iolon: It seems to me that a switch from Angel high to World high in Lombardy and Ferrara is not hard to explain given Nathaniel's idea that there came to be two cards for Petrarch's Triumph of Eternity. If so, it can go either way, with the same things on the cards. It either represents the world as New Jerusalem, or our world guided by Eternity, depending on whether it is last or not. Neither idea is clear in the card per se; it takes its placement in the sequence to do that.
In the Charles VI world card, even if she is Prudence, that virtue can be seen as merely leading the faithful on the right path, not as a figure welcoming the soul into Paradise. She precisely fits the description of the guide in Boccaccio's
Amorosa Visione I.36-42 (Hollander trans.): "...her blonde head / adorned by a crown more splendid / and fair than the sun / her comely / clothing seemed to me to be of violet hue. / Smiling, she had in her right hand / a royal sceptre, enclosed in her left / she held up a beautiful golden apple." And that is at the beginning of the book, when the protagonist is finding worldly triumphs more attractive than what she offers. If the Charles VI is Florentine, the Angel was probably high. Yet it may have inspired the d'Este World card, where the markings look like 21 (
viewtopic.php?p=9317#p9317. There is nothing intrinsically "last" about either card, as long as all we see are allegorical figures and angels.
In the C region, it helps if someone puts the New Jerusalem on the card, of course. And later, Jesus in a vessica piscis.
People may also have interpreted the World card, when it was last, as good fortune in this world, which after all is more immediate than the next, and gives one more opportunity to do good. If the game is our choices in this world, and the score our fate in the next, the B and C World cards are good in both respects, the most powerful card and with high points.
It might help to look at the appropriati verses associated with this card in the A region versus B and C. Croce in 1602 Bologna says of the World card, which in his day was second highest, but looked much the same as it did in the Beaux Arts-Rothschild sheets (translation by Andrea and me):
. . . the world produces to us / every substance, such that from it derives / An immense goodness, which every soul vivifies
(. . . il mondo a noi produce / Ogni sostanza, tal da lei deriva / Un’immensa bontà, ch’ogn’ alma avviva.”) (
https://bub.unibo.it/it/bub-digitale/gi ... d=17_X_026)
That is this world, not the next.
Here is another, also Bolognese (translation by Andrea and me):
Angel (Angelo)___Contessa Ippolita Borgonzi Segri di Parma,
because very beautiful (perché bellissima)
World (Mondo)___Contessa Paola Fontana Salvioli,
because little, and of extraordinarily deformed seriousness (perché piccola, e di straordinaria deforme gravezza)
And (the same):
Angelo___Donduzzi____This is no trick (Non est dolus)
Mondo____Riccardi____Microcosm (Microcosmus)
In B we have (the same)
The World. (Il Mondo). – La S. Violante Trotta.
She will support [as walls do a roof] everything by her wisdom.
(Il tutto reggerà per sua sapienza.)
Justice (La Justicia). - La S. Ludovica Gigliolla
Justly she holds the scales, and heaven remembers.
(Giuste tien le bilance e 'l ciel rimira.)
The Angel (L’Agnolo) – La S. Diana Trotta.
For her beauty this one is made divine.
(Questa per sua beltà fatta è divina.)
Both the Angel and the World are associated with eternity (wisdom being eternal).
Folengo (translation by Ann Mullaney):
This woman has always used her Strength
Temperately, so that she makes a Joke
Of the World and of the Fate [i.e., Fortune] of the Stars too.
(Costei Tempratamente sua Fortezza / Usato ha sempre, tal che ‘l Mondo e ‘nsieme / La Sorte de le Stelle a Scherzo mena.)
Even though it is this world, she is focused on what is above it and not the world itself.
In C, to the ladies of Pavia (trans. Andrea and me):
To the consort of Signor Gentile beccaria. / The World / My mind is a world of every strange thought, / So it will be that many will tell me I’m proud, / Having for those who love me no thought.
To countess Paola becaria. / The Angel / The kindness that in your beautiful face shines / makes you look like a cherub sent /To the blind world from the eternal Leader.
(Il Mondo. Alla consorte del Sig. Gentile beccaria. / Mond' è mia mente d'ogni stran pensiero / Onde sia molti me diran superba / Non havend' a chi m'ama alchun pensiero.
L' Angelo. Alla contessa Paola becaria. / L'aria gentil che nel bel viso luce / vi fa parer un cherubin mandato / Nel mondo cieco da l'eterno Duce.)
Here it might seem that the World has nothing to do with Eternity. But Heaven is for us in the mind, and so are all the eternals, including Wisdom. Transience is outside the mind. So a world in the mind, made up of thoughts, is akin to the eternal, at least enough for a poem.
It remained awkward. So B died out, and C put Jesus on the card, surrounded by the evangelists. And in the end we don't know why it was one way in A and the other way in B and C, or if it was always that way. Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't. The only way I can think of that it matters has to do with explaining the Piedmont placement: if it had been Angel high in Lombardy early on, that would explain how it became Angel high in Piedmont. But what can we deduce about Lombardy from a deck made for Venice?
Added next day: well, if the PMB Angel card is a copy of the Lombard version, then perhaps it was last there, too. I don't know how strong that argument is, however.
Between Nathaniel and Huck (I am not sure about Iolon), I don't see why both of them can't be defending "the" 5x14 theory. 5x14 has more going for it than the PMB; if so, the PMB may be part of Huck's 5x14, but there can be other 5x14 theories where it doesn't matter, and part of our job, if we are serious about 5x14, is to set them alongside one another to see which has the most going for it, apart from being the one we like.
Some evidence for a 5x14 structure is from the B region, which includes Venice. The PMB might well have had only 14, because Venice is in that region (and the added cards from a different deck). Whether those particular 14 - the surviving 14 of the PMB - are the same as 14 at other times and places is another issue. In particular, if the 14 represent a virtueless version, as Huck maintains (it's not Justice, it's Fame for Justice), surely there were trionfi packs before then that did have virtue cards.
In fact the Bembo workshop might well, at near the time of the PMB, also have had versions with virtue cards, now lost, and with more trumps overall, destined elsewhere. The Bembo workshop surely made hand-painted decks for other customers, if the 1450 request by Malatesta specifically for ""quelle carte de Triumphi che se fanno a Cremona" is any indication. As Dummett argued in 2006, something that has not been quoted for a while (
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20067158):
From a letter of 1451 from Bianca Maria Visconti to her husband Francesco Sforza, asking him to send to Sigismondo Malatesta, lord of Rimini, a pack of Tarot cards of the kind made in Cremona, which he had asked for the previous autumn, we may infer that Cremona was especially renowned for hand-painted playing cards of this kind.39
________________
39. Gregory 1940 [Winifred Terni de Gregory, Bianca Maria Visconti, duchessa di Milano, Bergamo, 1940], p. 157, quotes this letter, asking the Duke to send to Sigismondo Malatesta a pack of "carte da trionfi de quelle fasse a Cremona", together with a straw hat, another speciality for which Cremona was famous. She quotes it again in Gregory 1958 [Winifred Terni de Gregory, Pittura artigiana lombarda del Rinascimento, Milan, 1958], p. 32, where the phrase is given slightly differently as "quelle carte da trionfi che se ne fanno a Cremona".
Moreover, some of these other decks, such as the one made for Malatesta, would not likely have had Venetian heraldics on them, even if they did have the "ducal" ones that Malatesta expected.
The authorship and purpose of the 6 cards in an obviously different style (as opposed to subtle differences suggesting different hands in the same workshop for others) remain an issue, and there is surely more to be said, including more about de' Russi.
Added next day (2nd of 2 additions): What does create a problem is if the 14 surviving trumps of the PMB are construed as somehow the original or standard 14, or close to it (e.g. instead of Fortitude as the one cardinal virtue, it was Justice). That presents a problem for anybody who supposes that more than one virtue was part of the ur-tarot. My view is that if the PMB 14 were complete, the 14 triumph game using these cards would have been a variation on an earlier one of 14 - or more likely, several, with slightly different cards at different places or times - perhaps a fad of the 1450s, and perhaps just in the B region, and that games with other cards, and/or more of them, including all 3 of the usual virtues and the World, were also played then, even in Ferrara. Or perhaps that 14 have survived is just coincidence. But I am open to other views.