Quote Huck:
Well, we don't have between 1441 and begin of 1450 evidence of a far spreading of Tarot cards ... all notes could depend on very few activities at the courts of Ferrara and Milan alone, surviving cards are only from Milan.
Quote Ross:
I take Sforza's request to look for the "finest quality" to be strong indirect evidence of lesser quality decks available "off the shelf" - he expected to receive them right away, not a special commission.
Florence permitted the game in 1450, so it is not only in Milan and Ferrara.
Huck: I said "begin of 1450" and then Sforza's letter of December 1450 still wasn't written.
Quote Huck:
We've more documents and more surviving cards from the 50's and 60's ... we've no sure evidence, that the lower market was reached by the Trionfi decks ... it looks as a very specific hobby of the high nobility.
Quote Ross:
Marcello's first deck was "not worthy of a Queen" - suggests popular, or even woodcut.
Marchione, much earlier, sold his for one-eigth the price of a commissioned deck, retail.
Huck: The Marchione deck still was expensive for a common purse. Well, you interprete it as deck of Bologna (as Marchione was from Bologna), and I interprete it as a second cheaper edition of the deck, that Sagramoro made in January 1442 was given to Marchione to sell it on the common market (on the base, that Sagramoro and Marchione had common trade connections).
The cheaper deck, which reportedly arrived in the hands of Marcello, might have come from this edition. We have no confirmation, that early Trionfi decks were good-selling objects in their beginning, indeed we have confirmations, that times were bad for playing cards productions with the rising influence of Pope Eugen, who was friendly with the Franciscans and the Franciscans were against playing cards (San Bernardino, St Capistranus) (confirmations are many stronger prohibitions in Florence, nearly no playing cards productions in Ferrara from 1444 - 1449).
Quote Huck:
Not all 22 motifs have evidence till 1470 .. the devil is still missing. Any sure evidence for the existence of the 4x14+22 deck structure is still missing.
Quote Ross:
The inferential evidence is strong.
The dating of the Steele Sermon is unknown. It could be from the 1450s (not the copy we have, but the original).
The earliest woodcut decks like Rosenwald and Met/Budapest Museum, are not securely datable, but could be from before 1470 - at the very least, well before 1486.
The Tower is present in the Charles VI, which certainly dates between 1450 and 1470.
It is *very* problematic to think that people just added this and that card, here and there, over decades, and that by the time popular decks were produced everybody had the same ones. It is much more likely a standard form achieved wide distribution early on.
Huck: The worth of the words "inferential evidence" depends on the given facts and made conclusions, alone it is rather empty.
Dating something on a "could be" before a given factual date is rather insecure ... indeed I recently I came over a specific situation in 1502, when some Savonarolian followers (who indeed persecuted playing cards and would have also persecuted Trionfi cards, as hey didn't have much respect for the habits of the nobility) had gathered in Mirandola at the court of Gianfrancesco Pico de Mirandola, who supported them (Mirandola is in the Ferrarese region and the piece of paper, on which the Sermones are written, is said to have been used in the region of Ferrara). On their side were also Franiscans of the region (the Sermones are said to have been in a codex with other Franciscan writings). The brothers of Gianfrancesco attacked him then on the base of his heresy and Gianfrancesco escaped to Germany, the Savonarolian followers were killed. Judging the different times of Italy in 15th century I know of no better opportunity to have this text written.
You wrote: "The earliest woodcut decks like Rosenwald and Met/Budapest Museum, are not securely datable, but could be from before 1470 - at the very least, well before 1486" ... what is your argumentation to this point?
It's true, that the Tower in the Charles VI is probably before 1470, at least I think so. It's also true, that we don't have a Tower in the Visconti-Sforza versions.
It's true, that we have had Trionfi events in Italy, and that these all attempted to be "individual events" ... as long as we had the condition, that Trionfi card production accompanied these Tionfi events, it has some logic, that the producers aimed at individual designs for their cards.
When these conditions changed and decks were manufactured with mass production techniques the situation changed and the trend was surely aiming at standardization, no doubt. Our discussion is about the point, at which time these mass productions started.
Quote Huck:
Instead of a note about the structure of the decks (4x14 + 22) we've till 1470 a "70 cards" note from Ferrara in 1457,
Quote Ross:
A solid fact, but susceptible to at least three different interpretations.
Given that I think the standard 22 subjects were already present, I am forced to suggest that it was a sloppy entry, not a detailed count on the part of the accountant.
Huck:
Well, it's surely a possibility, that the 70 cards note refered to a shortened deck. But 1457 is near to 1452 and the 14 Bembo cards should confirm, that this production, which belonged to the most expensive of its kind, didn't spare in matters of costs.
Quote Huck:
a description of the Michelino deck with totally 60 cards
Quote Ross:
We don't know how many pips each suit had. If two court cards were missing, it is not hard to imagine that pips were reduced too. On the other hand, it could be that "kings" stands for a common group of court cards,
probably 3, making a 68 card deck.
There's just no way to know.
Huck:
If 60 or 68, this wouldn't change much in the current debate. But there are reasons to assume, that the description simply described, what was fact in the deck.
Quote Huck:
(with a confirming note from 1449, that this was regarded as a "Trionfi deck"),
Quote Ross:
Again, that datum can be interpreted in a better way. Marcello made a generic comparison because the two decks had something in common - I think that can only be the "extra suit" of Gods and Heroes. Otherwise, they had nothing else in common and the comparison makes no sense.
Polismagna's statement is more appropriate for the "generic trionfi" argument, unless we can presume that classicized decks - like the Sola Busca - already existed in the late 1460s.
Huck:
We simply don't know, what the Trionfi cards looked like at this time. Were they similar to the Michelino deck, were they similar to the Cary-Yale (which, btw, contained between his 11 trumps 4 motif not common to the Tarot series)? Or were they totally different, unusual to our eyes as Boiardo poem or Sola Busca Tarocchi??
And yes, even Polismagna much later still could even identify them as Trionfi deck.
Quote Huck:
the appearance of the number 14 in a Ferrarese document in a not totally obvious context from 1.1.1441 and the fact, that the trumps of the Pierpont Morgan Bergamo deck were curiously painted by two different painters - one painted 14 special cards and the other six).
Also we've the confirming informations, that the Bembo cards might be regarded as a "complete deck", that the Cary-Yale Tarocchi might have been a 5x16-deck and that the 16 extant trumps in the Charles VI offer a complete Tarocchi-trump series.
Quote Ross:
I don't know about the confirming information that the Bembo cards are a complete deck - since two other cards are also missing. The other two decks demonstrate this even more - Cary Yale lacks 20% of its cards, Charles VI has only one suited card left. Why regard the trump series as complete?
Huck:
Maybe I made a bad word choice in English, but I see it as a confirmation, if it is possible to interprete a deck as a complete unique deck ... I only think of the trumps, not of the small arcana:
The 14 Bembo trumps are complete, as they are.
http://trionfi.com/0/f/07
The 11 Cary Yale trumps look as a complete composition, if you add 5 specific cards.
http://trionfi.com/0/c/2209/
The 16 Charles VI trumps look complete, as they are.
I refered to this in other threads, especially here ...
http://tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=91378&highlight=toscanelli