Jewel-ry said:
I do hope I am not jumping the gun here or even going off topic, but when looking through this deck (classical) last night I noticed several things which I thought worth mentioning :
Il Matto (Fool) has only one shoe on - perhaps a reference to his eccentricity, but then I realised that his shoe is the one on the Il Bagattel's (Magician) table. Is the Magician a cobbler then? and what then is the significance behind it?
Hi Jewel-ry,
You're not jumping the gun at all. The details you mention are precisely the kind which help make Dellarocca's deck so fascinating. They are also the ones often missing in subsequent versions of the pattern. For instance, in contrast to the Dellarocca, Dotti's
Il Matto is not missing his shoe nor does he have a feather in his cap or the leaves covering his right shoulder. Look close and you'll also see that the creatures accompanying
Il Matto are different in the two versions. This is why I think it's important for those interested in this pattern to have one of the Dellarocca reproductions (either the Lo Scarabeo or an Il Meneghello version) even if one artistically prefers a later version such as the Dotti or one of the woodcuts.
And the historical conundrum of the pattern is this: what, if anything, was the rationale behind the numerous innovations incorporated by Carlo Dellarocca into his "Soprafino" trumps? Many of these details appear for the first time with Dellarocca, details such as the eyes you mentioned on Trump VIII (two eyes closed and the open one upon her chest, suggesting that "blind" Justice sees with an inner, truer vision), the urn and fox on Trump X, the many items at Death's feet, the crayfish on a platter in Trump XVIII, the crossroad beneath the dancers of
Il Sole,
Il Matto's single bare foot, or even the portrayal of
Il Bagattela as a cobbler with cobbling tools arrayed -- a portrayal not seen in previous decks.
Tom Tadfor-Little and Bob O'Neil tried to solve this puzzle jointly about five years ago. They posited that Dellarocca's trump innovations might (at least in part) be his re-interpretation of illegible iconography found in previous decks. Tom discussed this with us online and shared their working list of possible precursors to which some of the Dellarocca iconography might reasonably be traced. But as far as I recall, even Tom allowed that their findings were inconclusive; only a subset of the elements could be explained in this way and no rationale or pattern was revealed which could explain Dellarocca's innovations as a whole.
In 2001, I published an e-book titled
An Alphabetic Masquerade which proposed the theory that the Marseilles pattern indicates an intended connection to the Hebrew alphabet. There are, in my opinion, more than one indication of that alphabet within the Marseilles, one of these being the letterform shapes which are reflected in the iconography, an historically unexplored area which I plan to present new data on in the future. The main topic of
An Alphabetic Masquerade, however, is the fact that the 22 subjects of the Marseilles sequence can be found in alphabetical order within the medieval Hebrew lexicon. Although that lexicon is extensive, I found that a full set of correspondences presents itself only when the trumps and letters are paired in their ordinal sequence, i.e, when the first trump is paired with the first letter, the second trump with the second letter, and so on through the series, with the unnumbered card thus left to the final position. The odds of such correspondences being attributable to coincidence are very high, suggesting that an alphabetic arrangement may have been intended by the original designers of that sequence. The odds increase dramatically when we consider that not only do the subjects follow alphabetic sequence but that virtually every object within a given design can be found in Hebrew to begin with the same letter. The first letter aleph, for example, begins words for
magician (Hebrew: AMGVSh, AShP),
to juggle, to perform magic tricks (AChZ OYNYM),
bench (ATzTBH),
coin (AGVRH),
cup (ANBG),
balls (ASQRYTY),
thin hollow tube (ABVB),
dagger (AVGRTh, ARRN),
pouch or
money bag (ARNQ),
hat (APYLYVTh), and
festive suit (ASTLYTh). A more complete presentation of this theory can be found here:
http://www.SpiritOne.com/~filipas/Masquerade/Essays/allusion.html
with the trump subjects presented in alphabetical sequence here:
http://www.SpiritOne.com/~filipas/Masquerade/Essays/alpha.html
(Please bear with me, I will connect all this to the Soprafino in a moment!)
This research involved the reading of every page in lexicon sources; two of these were dictionaries which specifically represent the body of Hebrew words existent at the time of the early Tarot, and these were read cover-to-cover several times. This process was obviously labor intensive and mind-numbing but was necessary in order to determine whether the body of correspondences was truly singular or whether a similar set of matches could be found by using any pairing of trumps and letters. In other words, I was trying to determine whether the correspondences were there by
design or by
coincidence. And, after having spent much time with lexicon sources, coincidence is clearly the least likely explanation.
It was during this research that I realized all of the "Soprafino" elements -- even the most enigmatic ones -- were present within the lexicon in the same alphabetical pattern I had posited for the Marseilles. These "Soprafino" correspondences are listed here:
http://www.SpiritOne.com/~filipas/Masquerade/Essays/iota.html
As could be said for the Marseilles, what argues so loudly for the "Soprafino's" alphabetic basis is not just the fact that its hundreds of elements can be listed in Hebrew alphabetic sequence but the fact that those elements cannot be so listed if the letter-to-trump association is shifted around. All one needs to do to test this assertion is to choose one of the busier cards (such as Il Bagattel, Il Matto, La Luna, Death, or Il Mondo) and look for its many iconographic elements under a different letter; if one were to do likewise with an additional one or more cards, it soon becomes apparent that the collective elements of the Soprafino simply cannot be found within the lexicon using just any letter-to-trump association.
In my opinion, mathematical odds and the Hebrew lexicon argue fairly convincingly that Dellarocca's original designs evidence an intentional alphabetic scheme.
Thanks,
- Mark