6. Mondo and Angelo, with apologies to Diavolo to Sole

After Death, the next five cards in Bologna are Devil, Lightning, Star, Moon, and Sun. These five are in the same order in all the early centers of the Tarot. Nowhere else in the various orders is there anything close to such uniformity among them, and it calls for an explanation. Mine is that they were added (except possibly one or two) during a period of standardization, when the Tarot subjects, then slightly different in different regions, were made uniform. While other cards could remain where they were in the orders of the different regions, these five, inserted while standardization was being achieved, would be in the same order everywhere. Such a time is marked by the Treaty of Lodi in 1454, initially signed by Florence, Milan, and Venice, in which the other states soon joined, setting a mood of cooperation rather than conflict. It was also a time of increased association among residents of different regions; in that case, players from different cities could use decks brought with them. Standardization could have been achieved by agreement of those in control of such matters, or simply been a matter of “survival of the most popular” among competing decks.

It should also be noted that nowhere in the early Tarot do any of the three celestial bodies coexist with any of the three theological virtues in the surviving cards of one deck, except the expanded series of Minchiate which has a full set of both. In particular, in the earliest surviving deck, the Cary-Yale, made for the Visconti rulers of Milan in the 1440s, has all three theological virtues but no celestials,[1] while the next surviving decks with any sizable number of trumps, the Visconti-Sforza and Charles VI, have no surviving theologicals. In Minchiate, moreover, the theologicals appear in the order precisely where the celestials appear in the Tarot, immediately after Devil and Lightning. This suggests that the celestials may have been meant as alternatives to the theologicals, in a kind of rival deck.

If the five cards from Devil to Sun were missing, and the card in the Hanged Man’s twelfth position was originally Prudence, moreover, Ferrara’s B order (with Justice between Angel and World) would exhibit the same pattern after Prudence as before, namely a virtue every third card after the Pope: 6 Temperance, 7 Love or Chariot, 8 Chariot or Love, 9 Fortitude, 10 Wheel, 11 Old Man, 12 Prudence (changed to Hanged Man), 13 Death, 14 Angel, 15 Justice, 16 World.[2]

If the Hanged Man was twelfth, there would have been in such an early deck at least four cards after it, for sixteen in all. This is two more than the seventy-card Tarot deck documented in 1457 Ferrara[3] would predict, if it was five suits of fourteen cards each. But perhaps before the Hanged Man was added there were fourteen. The Fool and the Bagatella, like the Hanged Man, do not prima facie fit the august, higher-then-kings company of the virtues, papi, and dominating life-concerns of Petrarch (perhaps supplemented by Fortune, another such concern).  If so, the game with such a deck  may have coexisted for a time with later forms of the deck and even incorporated those three cards and others, while removing the same number of the old.[4]

The rival deck, with the theological virtues, might have also had fourteen trumps: seven virtues, six themes taken from Petrarch, and one more card, a Wheel of Fortune or perhaps an Emperor. But the evidence of the Cary-Yale deck suggests sixteen: a Wheel, seen in the Brera-Brambilla deck done in the same style (but with fourteen cards per regular suit), and both an Emperor and an Empress.

It is true that the seventy cards in 1557 might just have been a deck with twenty-two triumphs and forty-eight suit cards. But such decks are not known in Italy until well into the sixteenth century. Already in 1425, Queens were part of regular decks in Bologna, and ten number cards standard everywhere except perhaps Spain. Ferrara did have contact with Spain via marriages with the house of Aragon in Naples (1444, 1473). This might eventually have brought shortened decks to northern Italy, but none anywhere near that early is known.

Whatever the truth, the five cards of present concern, whether including celestials or theologicals, are transitional between Petrarch’s Triumph of Death and the Triumph of Eternity suggested by the imagery of the final two cards, World and Angel, Angel last in Bologna and Florence. One or more angels are shown blowing horns, while naked figures typically emerge from their graves (at right, from the Rothschild Sheet, c. 1500, and the Dalla Torre Tarocchini, c. 1670-1700). Both this scene and that of a triumphant figure standing above our world (the World, second below) correspond to Petrarch’s Triumph of Eternity over Time. In some Minchiates (an expanded Tarot with 40 trumps plus the Fool), the scene on the Angel card is Petrarchan in a different way: the angel trumpets over the skyline of Bologna (third from left below) or Florence (far right below), while words at the bottom declare Fama Volat: Fame has wings. If so, it is the Fame of eternal glory as opposed to the charioteer’s transient success. 

The earliest Bolognese Angel card (far left above), unusually, shows a small ladder stretching between the people below and the angel above. It is the soul’s “ladder of ascent,” sometimes identified with Jacob’s Ladder in the Hebrew Bible, stretching from earth to heaven. In one perspective, it is what the whole last part of the Tarot sequence is about, the journey of the soul after death, for which one must prepare in spirit and deeds also in this life. The image of a ladder for this ascent was common in medieval Europe, made popular by a devotional text by Guigo II in the twelfth century.[5]

From the Tarot of Marseille and the decks deriving from it, we are used to the World card’s being last. That it is after the Judgment in some cases suggests a happy outcome to the Judgment. From the late fifteenth century, one of six “second artist” cards of the Visconti-Sforza (also called Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo and Colleoni-Baglioni) deck (near right) shows two putti pointing to a city in a bubble above.[6] Identified as the World card, it is showing the New Jerusalem, and as such the reward of the faithful after the Judgment. Likewise, the figure on the Viéville card, seventeenth-century Paris, suggests Jesus in a posture of greeting (middle).[7] A card found in an interior wall of the Sforza Castle in Milan (far right) is another version, more androgynous, of the same motif. This  becomes a clearly female figure in the Tarot of Marseille.

But on the corresponding card in the Cary-Yale (Visconti di Modrone) deck (near right), also of Lombard origin but probably decades earlier, what is seen is simply the world of fifteenth-century Lombardy, now on the bottom of the card, with the allegorical figure of Fame looking down from above, holding her identifying attribute of a trumpet in her right hand and a crown in her left. It is an active scene of people rowing from one side of a body of water toward a waiting knight on the other side, and definitely not the tranquil timelessness of Petrarch's Eternity. The scene of the world inside the semi-circular arch is thus before the Last Judgment shown in the same deck (far right). It shows the deeds on which a merciful God can pass judgment.

The c. 1500 Bolognese World card (at right) similarly shows our world, with the four elements inside the orb and a figure standing above it, as though ruling over it and guiding it through time, so not at this point the New Jerusalem, or Petrarch’s vision of the defeat of Time. It is in this sense also that Giulio Cesare Croce’s 1602 Lotto Festivole in Villa speaks in its stanza for this card:

        . . . the world produces to us
        every substance, such that from it derives
        immense goodness, which every soul vivifies.[8]

In contrast, a verse to one of twenty-two ladies of Pavia (in Lombardy, ca. 1525-1540), each assigned to a card, gives gives the World card to a lady whose “mind is a world of every strange thought,” a world accessible only to the imagination, even if not exactly that of the New Jerusalem.[9]

The seventeenth-century Bolognese World card (near right), although showing our world of the four elements, suggests a figure that mediates between our world and the divine world: his caduceus (two snakes around a staff) and winged hat and sandals indicate the god Mercury, the herald of the gods, going between them and from gods to humans. He also led souls upward, whether from Hades to this world, as with Orpheus and Eurydice, or from this world to Olympus, as in the myth of Cupid and Psyche (Greek for Soul) in the Golden Ass of Apuleius. This text was the basis for a wedding chest series for Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici’s ca. 1444, another cassone ca. 1473 Florence by Jacopo del Salaio, and a fresco series in Ferrara for Ercole d’Este ca. 1493. now lost.[10] Other fresco series followed, including one by Raphael in which Mercury carries Psyche to Olympus (far right).[11] So Mercury had some of the same functions as Christ or the four evangelists, as a guide to the transition between this world and the next.

In such a role Mercury is also comparable to the lady on the World card of the Charles VI deck (Fig. 45a). Her depiction corresponds precisely to that of the guide in Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione:  

        . . . her blonde head
        adorned by a crown more splendid
        and fair than the sun, her comely
        clothing seemed to me to be of violet hue.
        Smiling, she had in her right hand
        a royal sceptre, enclosed in her left
        she held up a beautiful golden apple.[12]

In the poem, she has the function of encouraging the protagonist to leave off dallying among visions of earthly triumphs and instead pass through a narrow gate that leads to the heights.[13]

Another such figure is Isis in Book XI of Apuleius’s novel, who in a dream leads his protagonist to join her cult. There is also Dante’s Beatrice, who leads the poet through the celestial spheres and above. As such, and as merging with both the Virgin Mary and Christ, the figure on the Bolognese card leads souls in this life and toward the next. So it is before the Last Judgment.

But the clouds add a certain ambiguity to this scene. If it is above the clouds, is it not in heaven? Here is one possibility: at that time, all educated people - and the artists who served them - knew that the world was round, even though most also thought that the heavens revolved around it. That view of the cosmos still has the earth somehow suspended in space. The circular bands around the inner scene also speak to its being our world in the center of the cosmos, because such arcs or circles characteristically represented the "spheres" in which the planets and stars were thought to move, taking more time to traverse the larger orbits and less the smaller - for example, in a Florentine illustration of the Triumph of Eternity by Pesellino, ca. 1450. On the other hand, an ambiguity might have been intended to remain, since heaven is indeed the reward of the virtuous.

Raphael’s Mercury shows that this god was not always depicted with sandals; nor do snakes have to appear on his rod. Thus the figure on the c. 1500 Bolognese card (third above) might also be Mercury. But other interpretations are possible, especially when the card is seen in relation to the figure on the Chariot card (at right): the winged helmet and orb in one hand identify both as triumphators. Illustrations of Petrarch’s Triumph of Eternity, such as that by Pesellino in ca. 1450 (at right above),[14] portray Christ as cosmocrater, ruler of the cosmos and victor over Satan in the Last Days; Christ will also be the judge in the next event of the Tarocchi sequence, the Angel’s call to judgment. Christ is to the cosmos, i.e., the world in time, what secular rulers are on earth.

On the other hand, the similarity to the figure on the Chariot card also suggests another interpretation: that the warrior of that card, if he continues to practice the Christian virtues after his secular triumph may, with God’s grace, enter the next world in triumph as well. The Viéville World card (sixth above, middle), with its four evangelists, positions Christ in two roles, guide and ruler. He rules the world with the aim of leading humanity to glory (one sense of Fama), just as he is in glory himself.

For the next section, click on https://bologneseorder.blogspot.com/2023/09/16.html, or on "older post" at the bottom right of this page.

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[1] The cards of the Cary-Yale deck are on the website of the Beinecke Library, as “Visconti Tarot.”

[2] This order, in two variations, is given in Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot, From Ferrara to Salt Lake City (London: Duckworth, 1980), p. 400.

[3] Adriano Franceschini: Artisti a Ferrara in eta humanistica e rinascimentale, Testimonianze archivistiche, vol. I, Dal 1341 al 1471 (Ferrara-Roma: Corbo, 1993), p. 485 and 823 f., cited at http://trionfi.com/0/f/11/.

[4] Ibid. For how this would work in the Visconti-Sforza deck, see “Huck” [Lothar Teikemeier] at https://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=17682#p17682 (2016).

[5] See Wikipedia entry on Guigo II (12^th c.).

[6] Six triumphs in the deck are in a later style than the rest. This card is currently held by the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, and reproduced in Dummett, The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards (New York: George Brazilier, 1986), p. 190, and on many Internet sites.

[7] Held by the Bibliothèque Natonale de France, Paris, viewable on Gallica.

[8] Giulio Cesare Croce, Lotto Festevole, fatto in Villa, Fra una nobil schiera di Cavalieri & di Dame, con i Trionfi de’ Tarrochi, esplicati in lode delle dette Dame, & altri bei trattenimenti da spasso (Bologna: Vittorio Benacci, 1602), online in BUB Digitale, n.p. https://bub.unibo.it/it/bub-digitale/giulio-cesare-croce#lotto : “. . . il mondo a noi produce / Ogni sostanza, tal da lei deriva / Un’immensa bontà, ch’ogn’ alma avviva.”

[9] “Motti alle Signore di Pavia sotto il titolo de i tarochi,” Pavia, ca. 1525-40, author unidentified, MS 8583, fols. 268r-269v, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris: “Mond’ è mia mente d’ogni stran pensiero.”

[10] Luisa Vertova, “Cupid and Psyche in Renaissance Painting before Raphael,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 42 (1979), pp. 104-21, on pp. 112-15 and 119-20 (in Jstor).

[11] Julia Haig Gaesser, “Cupid and Psyche,” in Vanda Zajko, Helena Hoyle, eds., A handbook to the reception of classical mythology (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), p. 342, in Google Books.

[12] Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorosa Visione, bilingual Edition, trans. Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton, and Margherita Frankel, Introduction by Vittore Branca (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1986), pp. 6-7 (I.36-42): “sua blonda testa /ornata di corona e più che ‘l sole / splendida e vaga, / ed oltre mi parea / il bel vestir suo tinto di viole. / Ridente in vista, nella destra avea / un real scettro / ed un bel pomo d’oro / chiuso nella sinestra sostenea.”

[13] Ibid., Branca’s introduction, p. xx.

[14] At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, on its website.