7. From Diavolo to Sole

The cards from Devil to Sun are a bridge between Death and Eternal Glory, in space or time.

Spatially, the Star, Moon, and Sun suggest three of the concentric spheres around the earth in which the celestial bodies were thought to move. In the exposition of Francesco Piscina, writng about the cards in 1565, between the celestial bodies and our earth were two “means,” air and fire. Air is lower and filled with demoni, his reference to the card, similar to the demonio of the Tekely poem that began post one.[1] In medieval imagery, when the soul after death tries to rise to heaven, it faces their onslaught. An example is a so-called Triumph of Death in Pisa (detail at right), artist uncertain, 1330s, in which demons fly about trying to grab souls as they ascend.[2] 

In contrast, a ca. 1465 fresco by Domenico di Michelino in Florence’s cathedral shows demons with similar horns leading the damned into hell (above left, detail from lower left corner). In that sense, the sphere of the Devil (Diavolo) could also be considered subterranean. Dante’s imaginal journey took him through hell before going upward, with Satan himself at the bottom, feeding on sinners. Such a Satan, a face on its belly and a sinner in its mouth, is depicted in the Bolognini Chapel of the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, done around 1410 (above right). The Devil of the early Bolognese card is similar (above middle). 

In the medieval conception of the cosmos, the next ring around the earth was that of Fire, which Piscina observed corresponds to the card’s name as he knew it, Fuoco. Lightning, coming from this sphere, hits towers before other structures. For Dante, Purgatory was a tower-like mountain with a ring of fire on top, as the fresco illustrates, and above it the planets and stars, whose orbits around the earth served Dante’s placement of Paradise (at right, center for Purgatory and top for the planets; the detail shown earlier is at lower left).

Some versions of the cards have scenes suggesting the End Times described in the Book of Revelation, which the Church taught was foreshadowed in biblical narratives of destruction, such as that of the flocks and house of Job’s sons (Job 1:16, 1:18).[3] Balls of fire and hail are depicted in the "Cloisters Apocalypse" (middle right), similar to what is on the “Cary Sheet” card (near right) of around 1500.[4] The early Bolognese card (far right) likewise suggests more than fire: one of the men falls backward, as though from an earthquake of the End Times (Fig. 7, top left; Fig. 8, bottom left).

In the midst of these terrors, in the Apocalypse narrative, appears “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Rev. 12:1, corresponding to the scene at right, from the "Cloisters Apocalypse"). From bottom to top, the order in this verse is the same as in Dante and the medieval view of the cosmos: Moon below, then Sun, with Stars high. But if the moon is closest and the stars farthest from us in the medieval cosmos, why is the next card in the Tarot sequence the Star rather than the Moon? 

One explanation is Piscina’s: the cards are arranged in order of worthiness to man, because “things that appear at night appear much less worthy than of the day.”[5] Comparing the sun and the moon, it is a matter of the amount of light each one shines. If so, the moon is worthier than a star. This order of brightness is also easy for the players to remember. 

There may also be an allusion to Plato’s "Allegory of the Cave" (Republic 514A-521B). The early Bolognese card (Fig. 48a) shows a soul taken captive by a devil who will take him below the earth. The situation is similar to Plato’s allegorical account of this world of the senses, where the objects of our perceptions are like shadows seen on a cavern wall, which prisoners prevented from looking behind them mistake for reality. If they should overcome the shackles keeping them from turning around, they will be momentarily blinded by the light, as painful as the lightning of the Tower card, even though, in Plato’s allegory, it is merely a fire in the cave. Behind it, if they let their eyes adjust, they will be able to dimly make out the cave entrance, which grows in brightness as they approach it and go outside, first at night, looking at “the stars and the moon” (Republic 516b) and finally in the full light of the sun.

The sequence also brings to mind a biblical text (I Cor. 15:41-45) that speaks of the glory of the sun, the glory of the moon, the glory of the stars, and the glory of “the last Adam,” i.e., Christ at the second coming, the “glory of God,” of whom, in the Apocalypse, “the Lamb is the light thereof,” with no need of any other (Rev. 21:23). The order of the celestial bodies is that of the Tarot, if one counts down instead of up. 

If so, however, what are we to make of the scenes below the three celestial bodies on the cards? Are they mere decoration? If not, why those scenes? I propose that the order of the celestials might stem from that of three they replaced, the theological virtues, which in Minchiate, the version played in Florence, appeared just where the celestials are found in the Tarot, after the Tower, in the order Hope, Faith, Charity. While the most usual association to a star was to the Star of Bethlehem, that star also symbolized humanity's hope of a happy life after death. The early Bolognese Star card (below left) suggests precisely the three Wisemen or Magi: two of the three wear “Phrygian” caps, which the Renaissance probably knew from a variety of sources; it identified the wearer as from the East - Phrygia was in what is now central Turkey). Roman-era reliefs showed Mithras and his helpers in such caps (below left, from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/MithraReliefvert.jpg); a mosaic in the Basilica of St. Apollonaire in Ravenna (below right) similarly shows the three Wisemen wearing them (https://www.thebyzantinelegacy.com/apollinare-nuovo).

On the later Bolognese card (near right) the reference is less clear; it could be a pope crowning a young emperor, such as Charles V was at his coronation in 1521. The Minchiate card leaves no doubt. A man bears an elaborate chalice below a star, on a horse as though traveling. An anonymous Florentine poem of around 1530 in which street prostitutes were assigned to cards of Germini (another name for Minchiate)  refers explicitly to such an image as “the star of the magi in the east.” Likewise Bonifacio Vannozzi in 1747, speaking of the Minchiate card, observed, “There are likewise the Magi guided by the star.”[6] Finally, the two figures on the d'Este Tarot card of ca. 1473 (far right) look very much like they are using a star to orient their travel. All are traveling to the left, which was west on most maps then as now.[7]

In Bologna the corresponding image is a ca. 1410 fresco of The Star’s Appearance to the Magi in the Basilica of San Petronio (at right). In this regard, Tarot author Caitlin Matthews observes that the divinatory meaning given in the eighteenth-century Bologna cartomancy document is “gift.”[8] Likewise, she says, “The Star brings hope and new vision.”[9] 

While such images as da Modona's frescos in Bologna were common in northern Italy, it is noteworthy that this same artist, in the same Bolgnini Chapel, did a Satan and Hanged Men similar to the corresponding Bolognese cards as wellItaly. Da Modena’s images of hell in the Basilica of San Petronio include both the Devil and These in turn probably derived from those in Giotto’s Last Judgment (detail at right), done a century earlier in nearby Padua, although Giotto's hanging souls, unlike da Modena's, did not hang by one foot. In Bologna, moreover, coming out of the Basilica, one would have been struck by the tall towers in the vicinity, two tall ones only a couple of streets away and another smaller one on the opposite side of the square. One might wonder whether this geographical proximity might have suggested all four of the Hanged Man, Devil, Tower, and Star in their Bolognese expressions.

The Bolognese Moon card (near right) shows two men, one with an armillary sphere and the other holding up calipers to the moon. The armillary sphere (representing the heavens) was frequently associated with wisdom, as in Botticelli’s Augustine in his Study, ca. 1480, and also with time, as seen in illustrations of Petrarch’s Triumph of Time in the 1440s (far right, attributed to Apollonio di Giovanni in ca. 1442).[10] The two men seem to be measuring something, astrological or astronomical, in relation to the moon. In the heavens, the moon is their point of reference, just as their faith is the point of reference for believers in their approach to life. 

In short verses assigned to various ladies of Ferrara, each dedicated to one of the Tarot trumps, that for the Moon says: “She guides the weary helmsman [11] The same may be said for the “helmsman” of our soul, as the Faith and also the Virgin Mary, who in art was associated with the Moon (as Christ was to the Sun), for example in Hieronymus Bosch’s ca. 1500 Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos (near right).[12] Unlike Bosch’s saint, the men’s activity is not religious in nature, yet perhaps it is no less pious, reflecting the belief that the cosmos expresses how God has “ordered all things in measure, in number and in weight” (Wisdom of Solomon 11:21) and that this is shown in the orderly motion of the heavens, whose study can also tell us about the world under the moon, as we know most clearly from the correlation between its position and the tides. 

The Minchiate Moon card (far right above) has a man engaged in an activity similar to that of the men on the Bolognese card, but who also leans his arm on a sundial, perhaps to use in the day;[13] Petrarch’s verses for the Triumph of Time, in fact, had the sun as their primary image.[14] Allegorically the Sun might also represent Christ again: in heaven, in the believer’s heart, and the light vanquishing the darkness. A popular example comparing Christ with the sun is Prudentius’s Hymnus Matutinus (Morning Hymn), which starts:

        Night, darkness, fog,
        indistinct and confused things of the world,
        the light penetrates, the sky clears;
        Christ is coming: begone!”[15]

Bosch used the comparison of Christ to the sun in his Haywain Triptych, also ca. 1500 (near right), showing him in a cloud where yellow light radiates from him. Christ was also the sol iustitiae [sun of justice] of Malachi 4:2, which Albrecht Dürer made the theme of an engraving in 1518 (far right).[16] In the context of the Apocalypse, the figure on the card becomes Christ in his second coming who defeats Satan and stands victorious, in readiness for the Last Judgment.

On the Bolognese Sun card, a woman with a distaff stretches a thin thread between her hands (far right). One association is to the Fate Clotho, whom Plutarch had associated with the sun.[17] Mythologically, she spins the thread of an individual’s life, the gift of life. On the card, Clotho’s function seems combined with that of her sister Lachesis, who measures the thread, which in the myth will be cut by Atropos. They are usually featured in illustrations of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death. One mid-fifteenth century example is in a Lombard manuscript of ca. 1440-1460, Vat. Barb. Lat. 3943, with Death over Laura as the fates sit below (above, near right); another is an early sixteenth-century tapestry with the body of Pudicizia/Chastity at their feet (near right).[18]

But on the Bolognese card, God’s charity, the gift of eternal life, shines above the Fates like the ever-generative sun on the trees in another version of the card of nearby Ferrara (far right).[19] Such charity, like the other theological virtues, must be practiced on earth if the believer is to enjoy God’s charity on Judgment Day.

Another association of the spinning woman on the card is to Eve after the expulsion from Eden. An illuminated Bible done for Borso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, in 1455-61 shows Eve spinning (at right above),[20] her lot after listening to the snake. With Adam also there, digging, the image was quite standard. Sometimes it represented the "active life" of the daytime, as opposed to the "contemplative life" of night (and the moon) when work is done. 

This interpretation is outside the context of the Petrarch framework so important to the genesis of the cards. But on another level, Eve is is merely the Judeo-Christian expression of a similar idea. Genesis 3:20 says, “Adam called the name of his wife Eve: because she was the mother of all the living (the Vulgate’s “vocavit Adam nomen uxoris suae Hava eo quod mater esset cunctorum viventium”). As such she has the life-giving power that Greco-Roman mythology reserved for the Fates and in particular Clotho, who spun the thread of life. In the Christian Neoplatonic framework of fifteenth-century Italy, the Sun card could then represent the arrival of the individual soul into our world of impermanence, out of paradise but not yet descended through the spheres to be born on earth - and also that moment in the soul’s return when it has reached the borderline of its incarnation in the eternal.

 For the final section, entitled "Summary," click on https://bologneseorder.blogspot.com/2023/09/1-two-literary-examples.html, or "older post" at the bottom right of this page.

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[1] Francesco Piscina, Discorso . . . sopra il ordine delle figure de Tarocchi, Monte Regale, Piedmont, 1565, in Ross Sinclair Caldwell, Thierry Depaulis, and Marco Ponzi, eds. and trans., con gli occhi et con l’intelletto: Explaining the Tarot in Sixteenth Century Italy (Lulu.com, 2019), these pp. in Google Books, pp. 20-21: “Poscia che etiamdio è stato opinione di molti, & ispitialmente de Platonici, che siano Demoni Spiriti che stanno como certo mezo fra Dii e gli’huomini.” (It has been the opinion of many, in particular the Platonists, that the Demons are spirits that are in the air & that they are somehow in the middle between gods and men.)

[2] http://ctl.w3.uvm.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/plague/item/1559 and elsewhere online

[3] >Pointed out in Andrea Vitali, “The Tower” (1986, revised trans. 2018), http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=128&lng=ENG.

[4] The Cary Sheet is dated ca. 1500 and is “ITA sheet 3S” in the digital collections of the Beinecke Library, Yale University. The Cloisters Apocalypse is in the medieval section (called The Cloisters) of the Metropolitan Museum, New York; see fol. 20r at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/471869.

[5]“cose ch’appariscano la notte d’assai di meno dil giorno,” Piscina, Discorso (see above n. 1), pp. 22- 23 (Google Books snippet view); it is a matter of “utile e dignità” (utility and dignity).

[6] I Germini sopra quaranta meritrice della citta di Fiorenza, Danilo Romei, ed. and com. ("Nuovo Rinascimento," 2020), p. 40, at https://www.academia.edu/43623023/I_Germini_sopra_quaranta_meritrice_della_citt%C3%A0_di_Fiorenza_Edizione_e_commento_di_Danilo_Romei: “Quella che apparse a Magi in Oriente.” For Minchiate (probably the same game), Bonifatio Vannozzi, Della Suppellettile degli Avvertimenti Politici, Morali, et Christiani, Vol. 3 (Bologna: Heredi di Giovanni Rossi, 1613), p. 627, in Google Books: “Vi sono medesimamente i Magi guidati dalla stella.” For the full passage, in both Italian and English, see Andrea Vitali, “Ganellini seu Gallerini: The Game of Minchiate in Genoa, Rome and Palermo (XVII – XVIII c.)” (2011, trans. 2013), http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=310&lng=ENG.

[7]  The d'Este Tarot is held by the Beinecke library and viewable in its digital collection at https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2003006.

[8] Caitlin Matthews, Untold Tarot: The Lost Art of Reading Ancient Tarots (Atglen PA: Red Feather, 2018), p. 79. Cartomancy document: Franco Pratesi, “Tarot Bolonais et Cartomancie,” L’As de Trèfle 37 (May 1989), pp. 10-11, online at http://naibi.net.

[9] Matthews of n. 8.

[10] Botticelli’s 1480 painting is online in Wikimedia Commons. The “Triumph of Time” is in MS Strozzi 174, Laurentian Library, Florence, fol. 44r at http://www.artcodex.it/en/opere/petrarca/zoom/index.php?id=img19.

[11] “Trionphi de Tarocchi appropriati,” author unknown, in Giulio Bertoni, Poesie leggende costumanze del medio evo, Seconda edizione riveduta e accresciuta (Modena: Arnaldo Forni, 1927), put online by www.liberliber.it, also at http://www.tarock.info/bertoni.htm, the relevant passage only, p. 278: "Guida il stanco nocchier a pigliar porto."

[12] See, among others, Wikipedia’s entry on this work.

[13]Collection Peter Endebrock, http://www.endebrock.de/coll/pages/i31.html.

[14] “Triumph of Time” l. 2, at http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_trionfi.html.

[15]“Nox et tenebrae et nubila, / confusa mundi et turbida, / lux intrat, albescit polus: / Christus venit, discedite.” Trans. from literal Italian version online in Cattolici Romani, http://www.cattoliciromani.com/75-thesaurus-liturgiae/24044-inni-della-liturgia-horarum-1-proprium-de-tempore-amp-psalterium/?page=7: “Notte, tenebre, nebbia, cose indistinte e confuse del mondo, la luce penetra, il cielo si rischiara; viene Cristo: fuggite!”

[16] Images of both artworks are readily available on the internet.

[17] On the Genius of Socrates 591B. I owe this reference to Ross Caldwell at https://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=6999#p6999 (2010) and before him to Michael J. Hurst. In another work, On the face that appears in the orb of the moon, Plutarch assigned Clotho to the moon, as in the Viéville card in seventeenth-century France. In the Republic Plato had assigned Clotho to the planetary spheres, from the moon to Saturn, of which, in the cosmos as he understood it, the sun was in the middle.

[18] Ms. illustration: https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Barb.lat.3943/0336, at f. 170v. Tapestry: Victoria and Albert Museum, London, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O72702/the-three-fates-tapestry-unknown.

[19] Metropolitan Museum, New York, catalog number 26.101.5, said there of ca. 1500. Online at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/385140.

[20]Bibbia di Borso d’Este, Modena: Biblioteca Estense, MS Lat. 422-423, vol. 1, fol. 6v, done 1455-61. Online at https://edl.beniculturali.it/beu/850016178.