Re: Giovanni dal Ponte and Rothschild cards dating

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I overlooked another set of painted cards with the interlaced spiral border style, the set in the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino that was damaged in a conflagration of January, 1904. Thierry Depaulis wrote the most recent account of them, "Tarots et autres cartes du XVe siècle exposés en 1880 à Turin", The Playing Card, volume 46, number 3 (2018), pp. 120-133. https://www.academia.edu/41106047/_Taro ... %A0_Turin_

It is not easy to discern the border style in the black and white picture shown in Kaplan, Encyclopedia 1, p. 119, but it is fairly clear in Detlef Hoffmann, The Playing Card, (Edition Leipzig, 1973), Plates, figure 18:
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Hoffmann took this image from a book published in Rome in 1961, Antiche carte italiane da tarocchi, which Thierry reproduces.
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But the greatest clarity is shown in a series of black and white photographs taken for the exhibition in Turin in 1880, that is, before the fire. Thierry reproduces them on pages 124, 126, and 127. Here is the row with our Knight of Swords:
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On page 129, Thierry wonders about the provenance, recalling how Michael Dummett finally laid to rest the notion that these and other cards were made in Venice (which the catalogue of 1880/81 suggested), but finding nothing to suggest Milan, Ferrara, Florence, or Bologna. "Il est difficile d'assigner un centre particulier, mais le style ne paraît pas s'accorder avec celui des cartes milanaises ... ni avec le peu que l'on sait des tarots peints à Ferrare ... L'absence totale d'armoiries ou d'emblèmes ne permet pas d'identifier un commanditaire. Et la datation reste hasardeuse. La question reste donc ouverte."

I'd like to offer that with this very specific type of border, the cards must be Florentine.

They were thus probably made in the same time period and in the same group of workshops in (or near, in Giovanni dal Ponte's case) the Borgo Santi Apostoli of Florence that the Rothschild, Charles VI, Catania, and Palermo cards were made. They were done by a completely different artist than these other cards, though, so it will be exciting to see if he can be identified, now that we have a provenance and timeframe.

I would further suppose that the generic design on the knight's shield, like that of Giovanni's bearing no heraldry, suggests that these cards were made for retail sale, rather than by commission.

Note also that there is no evidence, besides luxury, that these cards were Trionfi. No trump or queen survives. Because there are 10s, they were a pack of at least 52 cards.

Re: Giovanni dal Ponte and Rothschild cards dating

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Ross Caldwell wrote: 06 May 2022, 16:07 I'm not convinced by any argumentation I've heard that Rothschild represents what Imperatori cards were.

Your argument appears to be that Imperatori were just like Trionfi, except with only eight of the standard trumps. But if that were so, why did the Este family have two different artists working on the two kinds of decks simultaneously? Sagramoro, then Gherardo da Vicenza and Don Messore, worked exclusively on Trionfi, and Piero Andrea di Bonsignore worked exclusively on Imperatori. Why not just tell Sagramoro to make only eight trumps this time? Or, more simply, just take out the unneeded 14 trumps from a Trionfi pack when they wanted to play Imperatori?
I'm seeing two basic questions here:
1. If the Trionfi deck contained the 8 Imperatori trumps plus 14 more trumps, why did the Este family buy two different decks, one for Trionfi and one for Imperatori, when they could have simply taken the unneeded 14 trumps from a Trionfi pack when they wanted to play Imperatori?
2. If the Trionfi and Imperatori decks were so similar (largely identical except for the trumps), why were Sagramoro, then Gherardo da Vicenza and Don Messore, working exclusively on Trionfi, instead of making both the Trionfi decks and the Imperatori cards as well?

My answers:

1. You'll recall that my "14+8" hypothesis argues that the Trionfi decks favored by the Ferrarese court until the late 1450s had only 14 trumps.
Therefore they would not have included the Imperatori trumps at all. In that case, it would not have been possible to make an Imperatori deck by removing the other trumps from the Trionfi deck.

Even if the Este were using Trionfi decks which did include the Imperatori trumps in their trump sequence, the latter may well have undergone some significant changes when they were incorporated into the Trionfi deck, either in the subjects they depicted, or at least in the designs of those subjects, so the Imperatori deck would still have been a unique and different thing.

But none of that is crucial to this particular discussion, because even if the Este family's Trionfi decks included exact copies of all the Imperatori cards, they are still likely to have had separate decks for each type of game.

Why? Because they could afford to. Consider for a moment what you are suggesting: Every time the players wanted to play a game other than Trionfi, they would have had to go through their Trionfi deck and find and remove every one of the trumps they don't need. Is it likely that the richest, most powerful people in Ferrara would have bothered to do that, when they could simply buy multiple decks which already had exactly the cards they needed for every possible game?

We know from various references in the 15th and 16th centuries that some people in Italy did take tarot and Minchiate decks apart in the way you describe, but it is a practice that one would expect to see mainly among cost-conscious players in the middle classes—those with enough money to afford a Trionfi deck, but not enough money to buy as many decks as they liked.[1] Anyone with the money to buy separate decks for each type of game would probably have done so. The Este court is likely to have had Trionfi decks, Imperatori decks, and also plain old 52-card and/or 56-card regular decks.

This explains why we find references in the Ferrarese court records from the 1420s to the 1450s (as related by Gherardo Ortalli and Adriano Franceschini in Ludica 2 (1996), pp. 170–205) to regular decks of cards (carte da zugare or carteselle/cartexelle), in the same period when the court was buying Trionfi decks and Imperatori decks. There are admittedly relatively few references to regular decks, but this does not mean the court was not buying or using them. Ortalli (p. 185) thought that by the 1450s, the court had stopped buying normal cards without trumps completely, but his observations elsewhere in the article (especially pp. 188-9) go against this assumption: First, he notes that the court records are far from exhaustive. They do not record every deck bought and used by the court, and the cheaper decks are the ones most likely to have gone unrecorded, because "we are more likely to find mention of special or more precious objects than everyday items" (p. 188). The few regular decks of cards mentioned in the records are priced at just a few soldi, vastly cheaper than the Trionfi decks, which were normally around 4 or 5 lire (the cheapest is 1 lira), and also several times cheaper than the Imperatori decks, which cost 12 to 18 soldi. Further, he argues that around 1450, the court was increasingly using printed playing cards, at least for the cheaper decks for Imperatori; it is therefore very likely that the court had switched to printed cards for their regular decks even earlier than that. Those printed decks would naturally have been cheaper than anything painted, and consequently very likely to be omitted from the surviving records.

In later years, we find references in Ferrara to ronfa cards and scartini cards. Ronfa was a game played with a deck of 48 cards; exactly what Scartini was is not known, but the word must refer to cards discarded from the deck, probably at the start of a game. There is a record from Venice in 1762 which describes two types of decks: carte con i Scartini, e senza Scartini = cards with the Scartini and cards without the Scartini (see L. Nadin Bassani, Le carte da gioco a Venezia: l'arte dei cartoleri (1400-1700), Venice: Centro Internazionale della Grafica, 1989, p. 76). So the Ferrarese scartini decks probably had more cards than the ronfa decks, and it is a reasonable assumption that the former had 52 or 56, and the latter had 48. Those 48 cards would have presumably been essentially identical to their counterparts in the 52- or 56-card deck. Yet people started buying ronfa decks. Why? Maybe they were mainly playing games like Ronfa that required only those 48 cards, but it seems fairly likely that some of them simply didn't want the annoyance of having to go through their 52-card decks to find the four cards they didn't need every time they wanted to play Ronfa.

The convenience of having a deck for each type of game would have outweighed the relatively minimal cost of buying the decks, for those who could easily afford it. This is especially true when you consider that the only type of deck that cost the Ferrarese court any significant amount of money was Trionfi. This leads me to my answer to the second question:

2. Why wasn't Sagramoro painting Imperatori decks as well as Trionfi decks? Because it would have been considered a waste of his valuable time.

Ortalli expressed the view (pp. 187 and 188) that the Imperatori decks must have been essentially the same as regular decks because they were similar in price, but this conclusion seems erroneous, for two reasons.

First, the Imperatori decks actually seem to have been considerably more expensive than most regular decks: 12 to 18 soldi, compared with just 3 to 5 soldi for the latter. The court also seems to have commissioned painted Imperatori decks (rather than printed ones) for several years after they stopped ordering painted regular decks, which reinforces the impression that the former were more highly valued, and not so readily entrusted to the printers.

Second, the price of decks at that time was evidently far more contingent on the quality of the decks, in terms of decoration and the materials used, than on the type of cards in the decks. In the 1420s, the court had paid roughly the same high prices for Imperatori decks that they were paying in the 1440s for Trionfi decks. But Trionfi appears to have eclipsed Imperatori in the court's esteem, so in the 1440s the court was only prepared to buy Imperatori decks for a fraction of what they had spent on them twenty years prior. The single most expensive deck mentioned by Ortalli is one purchased by Parisina in 1423 for 40 gold ducats (p. 180), and it is certainly very unlikely to have been a Trionfi deck. It could even have been a regular deck, just an exceptionally lavish one, made from extremely valuable materials.

That 40-ducat deck of 1423 was not made by Sagramoro. Indeed, all of the expensive decks bought by the Este court in the 1420s and 1430s seem to have been commissioned from someone other than him. On p. 179, Ortalli notes that Sagramoro was "called in for uncomplicated commissions" at that time, and thus we find him making ordinary decks of regular cards, and repairing the backs of old decks. But Ortalli goes on to say that "in time [..] he was to become one of the most highly rated court artists." And so, from the early 1440s onward, he was no longer given such lowly tasks, but instead received considerable sums for painting what must have been quite lavish cards for Trionfi. His former role of making the less expensive decks was now fulfilled by others, such as Piero Andrea di Bonsignore, who produced the Imperatori decks, until that job was downgraded even further and was performed by the printing press alone. Sagramoro's role was effectively reversed: before 1440 he was not trusted to make the more precious decks, but after 1440 he made no other kind, while other artisans moved into the role that he had occupied before.

In other words, the division of labor between these different cardmakers and workshops would have been simply due to their different levels of skill and ability, corresponding to the different levels of quality that the court wanted the different decks to have.

Moving on to your next post, Ross:
So, like a cartoonist who draws the same figures for years and decades unchanged, the playing card artists made them rapidly and formulaically. Like the cartoon figures, it is very hard to judge the date of composition from such a figure alone. These subjects are unlike carefully executed pieces. Unless some aspect or detail gives a clear indication of the date of a sketch, it could be almost any time in a definable period of an artist's style.
[..]
The Lombard cards like Issy-Warsaw and Bembos' are more like fine miniature paintings than the Florentine productions, and Longhi identified Bembo's hand in them nearly a century ago. This is probably due to the mass market nature of the Florentine cards, in contrast to the princely court tastes. Florentine figures are like cartoons compared to the Lombardy cards.
You are right that the Florentine cards were somewhat less finely executed than the Lombard ones. But while the manufacture of nearly all playing cards was to some extent formulaic, it seems a considerable distortion to say that the hand-painted Florentine cards of the mid-15th century were made "rapidly" like cartoons, even by comparison with the Bembo cards. I do not believe that the Florentine artists were churning out these costly gilded cards with such haste that it was impossible for their evolving style to be reflected in the work. If the art historians say that they can see such reflections in the style of the cards, I am quite prepared to accept their judgment. Further, I find that your presentation of the two Masolino frescos does not help your case, because there are obvious differences in style between those two paintings.
This is why I was happy that Ada Labriola allowed herself to imagine a date a decade later than the standard dating methods for Giovanni dal Ponte suggested. I think it was courageous, and I'll continue to stand up for her dating.
I really have to take issue with this, especially. I really don't think it's correct, or even particularly polite, to call it "her dating" now. In her article "Les tarots peints à Florence au XVe siècle" in the Tarots Enluminés catalog, she merely allowed the later dating as a possibility; then, in the presentation she wrote for the Tarots Enluminés study day in March, she had written a suggested date "around 1435-1440" (une date autour de 1435-1440 in the French translation printed in the programme, which you may have seen) but when she delivered her actual talk on the day, she changed this to just 1435, indicating the serious misgivings she increasingly had about this later dating. She made those misgivings more explicit in conversation with several of us, indicating that she felt an earlier date was much more likely. As you reported yourself in your earlier post in this thread, she appears to have made her misgivings clear to you too, explaining that she believes the cards to be from 1425–1430, but she "felt constrained" (as you put it) to come up with a later date for the Rothschild because she was told that, being a tarot deck, it was virtually impossible for it to be so early. "Courageous" is, I think, not at all a word Ada would use to describe her feeling of being constrained to come up with a date that went against her own professional judgment, and it is certainly not how she described it to me in March.

In summary, while you may by all means continue to "stand up" for that later dating if you wish, I imagine Ada would probably appreciate it if you stopped calling it "her dating." Did you check with her to see how she feels about that?

As I said, I'm personally inclined to continue to believe the judgment of the art historians on this matter, both because I trust their expertise (Ada's especially), but also because my own analysis from the perspective of playing-card history supports the earlier date for the Rothschild. There are elements in the Rothschild designs which seem quite archaic for Florence, elements that are entirely or almost entirely absent from all the other mid-15th century Florentine cards known to us, including those now in Turin. These include those gothic upper corners: Just because something slightly similar appears in a work from 1435 doesn't mean that they could not have been a feature of playing card design in northern Italy for many years before that, as very much appears to have been the case. As I tried to make clear in my post, those corner ornaments "look old" to me not because of their particular artistic style or form, but because something like them is found on early playing cards from several different parts of Italy, suggesting that they all descend from a even earlier common ancestor.

We know that the Florentine cardmakers were producing gilded luxury cards like this for at least half a century, from the early 1420s to the early 1470s. Do you not think it strange that most of the surviving examples (Rothschild, Catania/Palermo, Charles VI, and the Turin deck, with only the Este deck and the Louvre/Correr deck as exceptions) would all be from a period of "only a few years"? It's theoretically possible, but the probability of it actually happening is extremely low. It seems far more likely that all the art historians do know what they are talking about, that those borders remained roughly the same simply because of the typical conservatism of cardmaking, and that those decks are from various times throughout a period of three decades.

[1] : You now have me wondering if Step 2 of my 14+8 hypothesis—the addition of the Imperatori trumps to the Trionfi deck—might have occurred because some enterprising cardmaker had the idea of creating a single deck that could be used to play any of the games that were popular at the time, including both Trionfi and Imperatori... Admittedly, before the time when the Imperatori trumps were incorporated into the Trionfi game, such a deck would have required the players to remove some cards in order to play any game at all, but perhaps there would still have been a market for such a thing among the cost-conscious middle classes.