jmd said:
The links again highlight the important work which various people are doing and which you (and a small number of other people) are bringing together for all our benefit.
If the date of 1441 is likely for the first Visconti-type 5 X 14 deck, what this shows, to my mind, is the importance of both the meticulous research which needs to be ongoing, but also re-affirms that this deck continues to both fascinate and be closely related to Tarot.
I say this without in any sense demeaning it. As I have highlighted elsewhere and posted some of my own discoveries in relation to Cathedral carvings of the 12th and 13th century, neither are, as far as we can see, Tarot as having 78 emblems with the peculiar structure characteristic of the same.
This is important in that Tarot may also have particular characteristics which are lost if its structure is forgotten.
Part of the important research brought to us by autorbis, which the rest of us may have previously merely wondered about or questioned without any more ado, is that certain cards intrinsic to Tarot may not have been part of the Visconti-Sforza decks (the Devil and the Tower specifically, but also the others in its later increase from forteen to twenty).
Again, it is great for this wonderful research and increasingly greater clarity to be made more easily accessible to especially those of us residing at the antipodes where on-site research remains impossible without huge travelling expenses...
Hm, we don't know, what the 14 figure from 1.1.1441 were, and what the trumps from February 1442 were, we also don't know.
We know the 14 Bembo-cards and they look like the mother-deck of the later order. But we see the Cary-Yale and we see, that the Cary-Yale is different to the Bembo. We see Guildhall cards and Goldschmidt cards and we see, they are perhaps old and perhaps Trionfi, but they are VERY different. We see the Boiardo deck and it has the "right" number, but it is very different.
Actually there is reason enough to assume large variations for the beginning. Also the most early notes seem to indicate, that they really were related to events, done as moment of surprize for a special moment with festivity.
Each festivity had a personal reason and each commissioner a personal character: If we assume, that first only event decks existed before it became normal mode to play this way, then there is absolutely no reason, why the first decks should have had all identical motifs.
There are trumps, which disappear: The Falconer, he's 3x observable. The heraldic device card, the Visconti-Snake.
It's very difficult
