15th Century Italy: How confident are you?

Ross G Caldwell said:

When we consider the protectivist spirit that made the Venetians crack down on German cards, the fact that someone interested in cards did not know them as of 1440 while still in Italy (Isabelle), and the rise of Italian self-determination in the end of the Western Schism and that massive international event, the council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1443), which ended in Rome - i.e. the "triumphal" spirit of the times, especially the second half of the 1430s - I would hazard to guess, if it were possible to know, that Triumph Cards were invented around 1439, by someone who knew the Emperors Game (Emperor = Triumph), but wanted to make a native game that would be the final, greatest game of all - Italy's triumph, taking back the Church, bringing the world together (Council uniting Greeks and Latins (on paper at least) and all the other Churches (Copts, Ethiopians, Syrians, Indians)), crowning the Emperor - the triumph of right order over the misfortunes of the previous century. This is what I think triumph cards signifies and celebrates, and those were the events that occasioned its birth.

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This makes it sound like I'm saying the tarot is a political document or nationalist propaganda or something... I'm not!

I think those *conditions* nationally and internationally, were necessary for someone to think of a game like this, that's all. But the real important ingredient is the formal structure of the card-deck, and the traditions of moralizing on it and making new kinds of cards and games.

I don't think you can divorce the trump series from the 56 card pack; the trumps are rooted in the regular pack. For instance, why are there four "papi" (also called the Papessa, Empress etc.), and not just two?

I think the explanation is that the regular pack had four knaves, knights, queens and kings; what's higher than kings? Popes and Emperors! Just as the suits are unranked, I believe the original papi were unranked (as they still are in places). But why not four of each? Because the trumps are only one "suit", not two, so only one series, of four figures, divided equally in two, was needed for the allegory.

And the allegory is for the whole pack of figures, not just the trumps - it represents the game of chance (Bagatella) everybody plays (knaves to popes and emperors), and everyone is subject to Love and War, strives by Virtue, is overturned by chance, time, misfortune and death, but in the afterlife and the heavens lies the certainty of God's justice above all.

In any case, what I want to say is that the structure of the game, in relation to other card games and traditions of the time, is the overriding consideration when interpreting the trumps; but the social and political realities of the 1430s provide the best conditions for understanding all the aspects of the early game - the name "triumph", the time of the earliest records (1442), etc.

Rosanne said:

Wonderful to read your deductions Ross. I have a question. What did you mean in 1449 a 'Normal' Tarot deck? ~Rosanne

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I think the 78 card kind...

Marcello says he received it as gift "last year"; since he would have measured the year starting at Easter (Venetian custom), "last year" might mean early 1449 by our standards (late 1448 by his). It might have been a Christmas gift.

Marcello considers the deck not to be fine enough for royalty, so he tried to find someone to make a better copy. I think this might imply that it was either a printed deck, not painted, or that it was not gilded. But he got distracted when he found out that there was a priceless deck made for the former Duke, who had died about a year and half before (Visconti died 12/13 August, 1447).

He finally finds this deck and its book, and he says that he's sending both his earlier deck and Visconti's deck as well.

Isabelle was living in her Château in Saumur, near Angers. She was surrounded by relatives and her very young grandchildren, but she was getting ill and died there in 1453. But it seems very likely that there was an Italian tarot deck in France (geographically) as early as 1449.

Most people don't think it had any influence on subsequent developments. Depaulis suggests that it was massive Florentine immigration to Lyons in the wake of the reforms of Louis XI (starting in 1461), which made Lyons the card-making capital of Europe. I believe it is in these decades that we have to seek the roots of the tarot "de Marseille" tradition, which I will suggest returned to Italy in the wake of the French invasions starting in 1494, but particularly in 1499.

Rosanne said:

Wonderful to read your deductions Ross. I have a question. What did you mean in 1449 a 'Normal' Tarot deck? ~Rosanne

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Sorry, I think I might have misunderstood your question Roseanne.

Did you mean, what *kind* of deck it do I imagine it was? Like TdM, Bologna, or whatnot?

I would bet it was the "A" or Southern type, because besides the Visconti cards, these seem to be earliest (Charles VI, Catania, Este, etc.).

But since Marcello was near Milan, why not cards like the Visconti's? I think not, because I don't think Marcello would have said the cards as beautiful as Bembo's weren't worthy of royalty. They were - they were made for a Duchess (in my opinion - could have been for the Duke too). And they were "custom made", so not exactly the popular model.

I think the popular deck would have been something like the Bologna type, which we see in the Rothschild and Beaux-Arts sheet (Kaplan I, pp. 128-129 - there's a link somewhere to see it), but painted of course (I guess stencil techniques could have been in use then, but I imagine the black was printed and the colors added by hand).

I think the the Ferrara type tarocchi of the Met. Museum and Budapest sheets was invented a little later, and Marcello wouldn't have sent anything so crude to a Queen.

The TdM style I think was created in France, and only came back to Italy around 1500.

So in 1449, I think the "normal" tarot deck Marcello sent to Isabelle was probably a Southern type.