5. From Ruota to Morte

Besides Ruota, the title was spelled Rota and Roda. Petrarch’s Trionfi cycle of poems did not have a Wheel of Fortune, but it did appear in Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione, where Fortune and her companion Death triumph over Love, Wealth, and Fame.[1] Unlike some early decks, the lady in Bologna is unseen, and four rather than the usual three figures are on the Wheel, the one at the bottom holding on for dear life. Another difference is that instead of the king usually seen on top, the early Bolognese card, probably satirically, had a club-wielding large animal (Fig. 6, bottom left); by the seventeenth century, the figure had become an emperor (Fig. 8, top right).

The next card, the Vecchio or Old Man, is in Petrarch, but not in his order or title. He is Time, in the Tarocchi put in this position before Death, whereas Petrarch’s Time was next to last, as the cosmic power overcoming even the most illustrious person’s Fame after Death, for which the chief spokesman, allegorically speaking, was the sun. Showing him as a hunched-over old man, as the surviving cards all do, is in part a reduction of this power to human terms: however, there was also an ancient identification of Chronos, Time, with Cronos, i.e., Saturn, typically represented in medieval illustrations as an old man. To show him hunched over on crutches, as on the Bolognese card (from the ca. 1500 sheet, far left below; 1670-1700 Dalla Torre, second from left) captures Petrarch's sense of the gradual erosion of a person's life from the memory of those who come after.Another feature of the card is his wings : “time flies,” the adage goes.  In the same spirit, several versions of the card had him with an hourglass, for example that of Minchiate (third from left) and the so-called Charles VI, of around 1460 (far right).  It is hard to know what to make of the other symbols - the column and the stag. My own view is that the column symbolizes endurance - as on the Fortitude card - and the stag a longing for death, as in one of the psalms. For another view,

As though to clinch the identification with Time, Florentine illustrations of Petrarch's six Trionfi included much the same presentations in their illustrations of his Triumph of Time. The earliest ones, such as in the detail on the left in an illustration attributed to Apollonio di Giovanni around 1442, had an armillary sphere, a kind of rotating night sky, still suggestive of cosmic time. The hourglass is a human-scaled symbol by comparison (at the figure's feet in Pencz, ca. 1539 Leipzig). If wings and hourglass weren't enough, Pencz also has people running alongside the chariot.

The card was sometimes even called Time – by Teofilio Folengo, Troilo Pomeran, an anonymous set of verses from Pavia, and Minchiate.[2] “Time” was also its interpretation in an 18th century sheet with cartomantic keywords on it, in the collection of Bologna University since late in that century.[3] In putting this figure before rather than after Death, however, it acquires another meaning besides the time, which is now primary: it is not the time of the cosmos, destined to end at Judgment Day, but that of an individual life, which Petrarch also addressed, warning us “to amend while you can your sinful ways. Delay not til death shall strike.”[4]

Then comes the Hanged Man, called Traditor, Traitor. His position, just before Death in the sequence, is suggested by his situation: he is about to die. Even for the Old Man, death is not so imminent: these cards are in their natural place. But why him, as opposed to, say, a man on his death bed? In the earliest Bolognese card, the man clutches money bags (Fig. 10b), an impression made even clearer in the Charles VI card (Fig. 9b).[5 With the title Traditor, the image suggests Judas, with his thirty pieces of silver.

Moreover, if we look at the number later put on the card, 12 (also handwritten on the Charles VI card, xii), there is a numerological connection. Twelve was associated with Judas, typically named last in gospel lists of the disciples (Matt. 10:2-4, Mark 3:16-19, Luke 6:14-16). A fifteenth-century example of Judas’s association with the number twelve, from a chronicle of the time, is a poster reportedly ordered by antipope John XXIII against the condottiero Muzio Attendola for leaving his service. Next to a picture of a person hanging by one foot, it said: “I am Sforza peasant of Cotignola, traitor, who has committed XII treasons against my honor; promises, agreements, pacts have I broken.”[6]

The only problem in applying this interpretation to the Bolognese order is that the figure is actually thirteenth, even though it bears the numeral 12: the numbers start with the sixth card, Love, as 5, the five before it being unnumbered. In the Arthurian romances of the time, the thirteenth seat at the Round Table, the “siege perilous,” was associated with both Judas and Jesus and considered fatal to all but the “chosen” knight.[7] That associates the number 13 with Judas – but also Christ and Death. “Judas” and “Death” were applied to separate cards (e.g., in the “Game of Tarocchi Played in Conclave”[8]), with “Judas” applied to that of the Traitor.

In deciding whether the Traitor or Death goes with 13, we have to remember when the numbers were put on the cards: in the late seventeenth century. By then the number 13 was well established everywhere else with the Death card. In particular, Minchiate decks seem to have been produced in Bologna. In Minchiate, the Hanged Man was in fact twelfth - there were only three crowned papi, none of them papal. Perhaps the numbers started at 5 for the sixth card in Bologna precisely to connect 12 with Judas and 13 with Death. But more likely they were added as part of a formula for calculating the points of a sequence made by the opponents in the Bolognese game. At least that is what Pisarri wrote in his rule-book in 1754, in the years just before the numbers start appearing, the same numbers that he to each card to make use of the formula.[9]

But how did the Hanged Man happen to be in the deck in the first place? After all, the number 12 has numerous associations. My hypothesis is that it was a replacement for the missing virtue of Prudence, perhaps in Ferrara. There is a Tarocchi poem of ca. 1550, the “Risponsa” to Alberto Lollio by Vincenzo Imperiali. Descending from the World and then Justice, the highest cards in Ferrara, the poem arrives at Death, after which we would expect the Hanged Man. But instead, we see:

        Then comes Death, and takes another dance,
        And prudence, and malice below,
        And each one appears on the scales.
        But the wise old man beats Fortune . . .[10]

What is written is prudenza, yet the Hanged Man is also suggested: the “dance” would seem to be on the gallows. We should not suppose that “scales” indicates the Justice card, because that card has already been named; the scales rather are what balance prudence against malice. So perhaps Prudence was an older name for the card, since prudence dictates that a ruler sentence traitors to a particularly shameful death, a fate the prudent subject will want to avoid.

Perhaps the card we know substitutes for Prudence, at the request of a ruler who thought that a Hanged Man image was a better deterrent to rebellion than one of a lady looking in a mirror, Prudence’s usual image. If Prudence had been there, moreover, there would be a pattern in its placement of virtues: every third card, in its order: the B order of Ferarra after the Pope goes: 6 Temperance, 7 Love or Chariot, 8 Chariot or Love, 9 Fortitude, 10 Hunchback/Old Man, 11 Wheel, 12 Prudence/Hanged Man.[11] After that, the pattern apparently breaks, but I will give a reason later for thinking that it didn’t, that Justice early on was only two cards further.

That the Hanged Man is just before Death does not hurt – it was the penalty proposed for Traitors.[12] While rebellion was a threat to any ruler, it is known that Niccolò d’Este, marquess of Ferrara, feared opposition from his legitimate sons to his choice of the illegitimate Leonello as his heir, even putting off the official naming of his successor until just before he died.[13]

If the Hanged Man was originally Prudence, we have an explanation for why this personage, of even less worth than the Bagatella, is found among the triumphs, and in such a high position: he wasn’t there at first, but was an afterthought, somewhere Prudence would plausibly have been in twelfth place (probably not Bologna, if its virtues were all together starting after sixth-place Love, more likely Ferrara or Milan).

Imperiali is not the only sixteenth-century Italian writer to have associated the card with Prudence: Piscina in remote Piedmont did so as well: it was one of only two cards he described with that term, the other being the one immediately before it, the Old Man. The latter signifies “a prudent counsel,” while the former is one of those “that despise prudent advice.”[14] If so, Prudence might have been twelfth early on in nearby Lombardy as well.

It is often supposed that the next card, Death (near right, Rothschild Sheet, far right Dalla Torre Tarocchini) has the number 13 because of a superstition associating it with Death. If so, I have found no documentation of it at the time of the early Tarot, in fact the reverse. A commemorative book describes a Sforza wedding in Pesaro of 1473 at which Bologna’s “first lady” Ginevra Sforza (wife of two successive Bentivoglio “first citizens”) was an active participant. It says that the bride’s contingent, coming overland from Naples, was met by thirteen horsemen dressed as nymphs, and the wedding feast, had thirteen at the head table, Sforza in the middle.[15] This position may have been to reflect the Last Supper, where Jesus was typically depicted in the middle; likewise, the opposite wall had depictions of the seven planets, with the sun in the middle, otherwise associated with Jesus.[16] Surely the choice of thirteen was not to associate the groom with untimely death.

Yet it is a fact that whenever the Death card has a numeral on it, that numeral is invariably 13, even in Bologna where it is in fact the fourteenth triumph, counting from the Bagattino. In his survey of medieval number symbolism, Hopper found the earliest reference to the superstition that of Montaigne in 1588: “And I think myself excusable . . . if I had rather be the twelfth or fourteenth than the thirteenth at table . . . All such whimsies . . . deserve at least a hearing.”[17] This “at table” strongly suggests the Last Supper, as well as the Round Table, Hopper observes.[18] He infers that “Montaigne’s intimation that the superstition was widely in vogue would tend to push its origin back at least to the Middle Ages.”[19] But rather than a single source, Hopper says, “I should rather assign the superstition to a confluence of factors.”[20] He gives a list: the lunar year of 13 menstrual and lunar cycles; 13 in a witches’ coven and the Infernal Hierarchy; 13 as the number of the Raven, associated with witchcraft and symbol of the discordant intercalary thirteenth month. Petrus Betrus, in his Mystica Numererum of 1591 Bergamo, cited various baleful associations to 13 in the Old Testament; the lack of any such references in previous works of that type suggests to Hopper that he was trying to justify a pre-existing superstition.[21]

If so, that late date does not take us back to the time before Death was 13 in the Tarot, even if not Bologna. Nor does witchcraft: witch trials in northern Italy weren’t prevalent in northern Italy until the late 1450s, and even then away from the main population centers (until an important witch-burning in Bologna in 1498).[22] So while the assignment of 13 to the Death card may reflect a superstition among the people, it is unclear what effect it had on the Tarot. It may at best have been one contributing factor, and Death assigned that number because it follows the Hanged Man at 12, who after all is on the point of death. After Death is 13, given the popularity of the game, an association to death would follow readily enough.

For the next section, entitled "Mondo and Angelo," click on https://bologneseorder.blogspot.com/2023/09/2-matto-fool-and-bagattino-magician.html or on "older post" at the bottom right of this page.

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[1] Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorosa Visione, bilingual Edition, trans. Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton, and Margherita Frankel, Introduction by Vittore Branca (Hanover, NewHampshire: University Press of New England, 1986), pp.

[2] Teofilio Folengo, Chaos del tri per uno, Venice, 1527, pp. 152-57, online in Google Books. Pomeran da Cittadella, Triomphi de Troilo Pomeran da Cittadela composti sopra li Terrocchi in Laude delle famose Gentil donne di Vinegia (Venice, 1534): for "Tempo," see figure 9 of Andrea Vitali, "Tarot in Literature I" at http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=199&lng=eng. Pavia: Rodolfo Renier, “Tarocchi di Matteo Maria Boiardo,” in N. Campanini, ed., Studi su M. M. Boiardo (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1894), p. 256, online in archive.org: "Il pensier che pensando il cuor mi strugge / A poch’ a pocho mi conduce al tempo / e fa ch’ ogni piacer da me si fugge" (the thought, that in thinking, my heart breaks, / Little by little leads me to time / and makes every pleasure from me flee). Minchiate: Thierry Depaulis at https://www.academia.edu/30193559/Early_Italian_Lists_of_Tarot_Trumps_The_Playing_Card_vol_36_n_1_July_Sept_2007_p_39_50, p. 43.

[3] Franco Pratesi, “Tarot Bolonais et Cartomancie,” L’As de Trèfle 37 (May 1989), pp. 10-11, online at http://naibi.net.

[4] “emendar si pote il vostro fallo. / non aspettate che la morte scocchi”: Francesco Petrarch, "Trionfo del Tempo"/"Triumph of Time," https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_trionfi.html?page=V.txt (with trans.)

[5] Held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, viewable on Gallica, search “Tarot dit Charles VI.” The deck is so called because it was once associated with Charles VI of France. Its dating and origin are uncertain, but given as “Florence (?), around 1460” by Thierry Depaulis, Le Tarot Révélé, une histoire du tarot d’après les documents (La-Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland: Swiss Museum of Games, 2013), p. 21.

[6] Gertrude Moakley, The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family (New York: New York Public Library, 1966), p. 95 (online at http://moakleyupdated.blogspot.com/): “Io sono Sforza vilano de la Cotignola, traditore, In che XII tradimenti ho facti alla Chiesa contro lo mio honore, promissioni, capitoli, pacti aio rocti.”

[7] Vincent Foster Hopper, Medieval Number Theory: Its Sources, Meaning, and Influence on Thought and Expression (Dover, Mineola NY, 2000; originally New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), pp. 132-33; one of the fifteenth-century manuscripts is held by the Estense Library in Modena.

[8] Como, Biblioteca Comunale, MS 2.5. I. fol. 59r-v. Author and year disputed, but the conclave was in 1550. Photos of the verses are online in the essay “Tarot in Literature I,” (2005, revised trans. 2012), http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=199&lng=ENG; different Tarot subjects are passed out to different candidates for pope, including “. . .iuda a pisa traditore” (Judas to traitor Pisa) and “Al Cardinal Marsilio die la morte” (to Cardinal Marsilis [that] of death).”

[9] [Carlo Pisarri], Istruzioni necessarie per chi volesse imparare il giuoco dilettevole delli tarocchini di Bologna (Bologna: Ferdinando Pisarri, 1754, online in Google Books and archive.org), p. 40.

[10] Vien poi la Morte, et mena un’altra danza, / Et la prudenza, e la malitia atterra, / Et pareggia ciascuno alla bilanza. / Ma, ‘l vecchio saggio la Fortun’ afferra . . . ,” in Franco Pratesi, “Ferrarese Tarot in the 16th Century: Invective and Answer,” The Playing-Card 15:4 (1987), pp.123-31, at http://naibi.net. Translation taken from Andrea Vitali, “The Hanged Man,” (trans. M. Howard, 2015) at http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=124&lng=ENG.

[11] For this order, see Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot, from Ferrara to Salt Lake City (London: Duckworth, 1980), p. 400, this chapter online at  https://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=117. For how a similar pattern, but every other card instead of every two cards

[12] See Andrea Vitali, “A Gang of Traitors,” at http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=352&lng=ENG..

[13] See Wikipedia entry for Niccolò.

[14] Francesco Piscina, Discorso opra l’ordine delle figure de Tarocchi (Monte Regale, Piedmont: Lionardo Torrentino, 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), original p. 20, trans., p. 21 (these pp. in Google Books): “un prudente conseglio” vs. “che fanno i speratori de i prudenti consegli.”

[15] Jane Bridgeman, ed. and trans., A Renaissance Wedding: The celebrations at Pesaro for the Marriage of Costanzo Sforza & Camilla Marzano d’Aragona, 26-30 May 1475 (London: Harvey Miller, 2013) pp. 47 and 61.

[16] See my discussion of the Sun card in a later section.

[17] Hopper, (n. 7 this section), p. 131. Michel de Montaigne, The essays of Montaigne, with some account of the life of Montaigne, notes, and a translation of all the letters known to be extant, Charles Cotton, trans., William Carew Hazlitt, ed., Vol. 3 (London: Reeves & Turner, 1877), p. 184, online at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne/Book_III/Chapter_VIII. The original is in Les essais de Michel, seigneur de Montaigne (Paris: Michel Sonnius, 1595), Vol. 3, pp. 95-96 (in archive.org): “Et me semble ester excusable, si ie m’aime mieux douziesme ou quatorziesme, que treisiesme a table . . . Toutes telles revasseries . . . meritent au moins qu’on les escoute.”

[18] Hopper (see above n. 7), p. 132.

[19] Ibid., p. 131.

[20] Ibid., pp. 131-32.