I have just finished an excellent book by Bridget Ann Henisch called The Medieval Calendar Year. I have been thinking about this Cary Yale Sheet.
Could it not be a sheet of trial patterns that were the stock and trade of Calendar, Psalter, Book of Hours, Almanac producers? The cards that we now call Tarot of Marseille, were collections of the most favoured patterns? Patterns were what we call Templates now and answers the uniformity that we see throughout all the cards. In a way patterns were like enlargements of parts of a whole scene. Pattern books, provided emblem design, then some emblems became patterns in themselves. An example would be The Pentecost Lamb and banner; or various swords, crowns, Bishop hats, staffs and much more. This way, paintings of the seasons would have a recognisable pattern. I have seen so many Peasant Farmer miniatures of the sowing that took place in April- there seems to be a standard configuration for say April.
Henisch says in her book right at the start...
When a medieval artist was told to illustrate a calendar, he knew exactly what he was expected to provide. It made no difference whether he was working in wood or in stone, tracing the design for a stained-glass window, or brushing gold onto a sheet of vellum. He reached into his store of patterns and pulled out not twelve scenes, or emblems, one for each month of the year, but twenty-four. One illustration showed a characteristic occupation for the month, and the other displayed the month’s dominant zodiac sign. The artist then proceeded to group his pictures in any number of configurations, of which the simplest and most straightforward was the matched pair. A manuscript that offers a crude and cheerful representation of July, with a man cutting wheat in one compartment, and Leo the Lion flourishing his tail among the stars next door.
This seems to me to be logical place to find the origins of Tarot and to logically date the Cary- Yale sheet. I can well appreciate that the printers (and the carvers of woodblocks) would have some seriously popular images, that could have been grouped together as a group of images for Tarot. The Aquarius painting from the Book of Hours in the above post- looks very like the pattern of the Star card, right down to what some say might be fish and are really the swirling fleur de Lis around it the odd shapes behind the figure on the card could well be the badly cut towers and hills, that appear in the painting. If you look carefully on the painting in the Book of Hours, you will see the figure is on a jutting out grassed wharf? like a platform. On the Cary- Yale sheet the Star figure is definitely kneeling on a platform as well. It makes me wonder- who is is getting inspiration from whom. I think it is from a book of commonly used patterns. ~Rosanne
