which imagery for majors?

mjhurst

Hi, Mary,

Teheuti said:
I agree with pretty much everything that's been said so far ...

You seem to be suggesting that there is some general consensus, even listing some names, but offering no specifics. What is it that you agree with, and in what sense do the other writers you named agree with it?

Teheuti said:
The final third to half of the Trumps correspond very closely to images depicted from the biblical Book of Revelations...

I believe that they do, but only if you know which passages and how they relate to the highest trumps. Who has done this? Can you quote the passage or cite it, or link the webpage? I've read Betts, O'Neill's published stuff, Williams' book, etc., but I don't recall any of them explaining this supposed close correspondence in a way that any others have accepted.

Teheuti said:
... (a book on this was written by Timothy Betts and followed up by Bob O'Neill who related it to the fact that so many Tarot-like images appear in the confraternity chapels of southern France and northern Italy).

Sort of... except that Betts misunderstood the entire sequence as being eschatological, which is patently absurd, (moral allegories such as Cupid's Love, Time, and the ups and downs of Fortune, are obviously not eschatological subjects), and except that it was a far-fetched correspondence with medieval legends, not a close correspondence with Revelation.

Has O'Neill actually followed up on anything Betts had done? Is this online? Betts devised an elaborate theory about specific meanings of ALL the trumps being identified with particular figures of the Last Emperor legends from 14th-century France. AFAIK no one but Betts himself finds his interpretations plausible, nor accepts his connections with John of Rupescissa. (On the plus side, Betts did include a number of interesting findings and a few worthwhile insights, which puts his book ahead of most.) But his views certainly have nothing to do with those who find only the highest trumps to be eschatological. Did O'Neill agree with Betts' idiosyncratic interpretation?

Best regards,
Michael

Starling

That picture is the kind of thing I was thinking about when I wrote my questions. The timing for when the first decks that we know about were being painted is the same time that things like the Dance of Death were being produced in a large part of Europe.

Sometimes things are just "in the air" during a particular period. The pictures on the trumps didn't just come out of no where. There is history behind each of them.

I know that there has been a lot of discussion about this here and in other places that were noted on earlier posts, but sometimes we need an entry place for beginners, and a lot of what is currently available, in the way of information, is just too advanced. It is obvious from some of the recent posts in this thread, that it had a bunch of lurkers. Sometimes you want to learn things, but you aren't really in a position to be part of the conversation.

I wish there was some way to keep this conversation going, but I don't know enough to ask the right questions.

mjhurst

Hi, Starling,

Starling said:
Sometimes things are just "in the air" during a particular period. The pictures on the trumps didn't just come out of no where. There is history behind each of them.

And, a story told by the sequence. That too was not wholly novel, but had precursors.

Starling said:
I know that there has been a lot of discussion about this here and in other places that were noted on earlier posts, but sometimes we need an entry place for beginners, and a lot of what is currently available, in the way of information, is just too advanced. It is obvious from some of the recent posts in this thread, that it had a bunch of lurkers. Sometimes you want to learn things, but you aren't really in a position to be part of the conversation.

I wish there was some way to keep this conversation going, but I don't know enough to ask the right questions.

LOL -- don't feel too alone. I'm not a newbie anymore, having been doing this online stuff -- mostly focused on this fairly narrow area of inquiry -- since the late 90s, and I still get lost on a regular basis when others "drill down" way too deep into some digression or other. With regard to an "entry point", because everyone has their own view of what the trump cycle meant, a coherent introduction would be pretty difficult to craft.

There have, however, been very few serious attempts to understand the trump cycle. Here is one of the earliest, briefest, and best, from Theodore Low De Vinne (1828–1914), The Invention of Printing: a collection of facts and opinions descriptive of early prints and playing cards....

The illustration on the next leaf [TdM trumps with Juno and Jupiter] is the reduced facsimile of a suite of twenty-two playing cards, intended, apparently, to convey solemn religious truths in the form of a game of life and death. We do not know how the game was played: we have to accept the figures upon the cards as their own explanation and commentary. In the figures of Jupiter and of the Devil, we see the powers which shape the destinies of men. The Wheel of Fortune is emblematic of the fate which assigns to one man the condition of a Hermit, and to another that of an Emperor. The virtues of Temperance, Justice, and Strength which man opposes to Fate, the frivolity of the Fool, the happiness of the Lover (if he can be happy who is cajoled by two women), and the pride of the Empress, are all dominated by the central card bearing an image of the skeleton Death—Death which precedes the Last Judgment and opens to the righteous the House of God. In these cards we have a pictorial representation of scenes from one of the curious spectacle plays of the middle ages, which were often enacted in the open air to the accompaniments of dance and music. The union of fearful mysteries with ridiculous accessories, and the ghastly suggestion of the fate of all men, as shown in the card of Death the reaper—these were the features which gave point and character to the series of strange cartoons popular for many centuries in all parts of civilized Europe under the title of the Dance of Death.

I can give my own views in endless detail or concise summary (as in an earlier post to this thread), but your need for an "entry point" is precisely why I made a point of noting that it's just my own view -- YMMV. Not too helpful, eh?

Best regards,
Michael

Starling

mjhurst said:
And, a story told by the sequence. That too was not wholly novel, but had precursors.

And what were the precursors? I'd love to see a list of what you think are the precursors. Sometimes something as simple as a list is a good place to start because an annotated list can be too much too soon. And I accept that this is "in your opinion."

mjhurst said:
LOL -- don't feel too alone. I'm not a newbie anymore, having been doing this online stuff -- mostly focused on this fairly narrow area of inquiry -- since the late 90s, and I still get lost on a regular basis when others "drill down" way too deep into some digression or other. With regard to an "entry point", because everyone has their own view of what the trump cycle meant, a coherent introduction would be pretty difficult to craft.

I think that a coherent introduction is what is needed. I'll have another comment to something you said below which is yet another explanation of why it is needed.

mjhurst said:
I can give my own views in endless detail or concise summary (as in an earlier post to this thread), but your need for an "entry point" is precisely why I made a point of noting that it's just my own view -- YMMV. Not too helpful, eh?

Actually very helpful. I think it is OK to have opinions. It helps when the opinions come from someone who has done a lot of study, but even beginners can have opinions.

By the way, I knew about the Medieval Mystery Plays, but had forgotten about them in the context of this discussion. But truly, that too, is one of the places where the Trumps came from. We need to remember that a lot of people who were handling early cards were living in a primarily oral society. At the time the cards were created most people didn't read and write even in a limited way. We aren't always going to find written sources for everything we want to know.

mjhurst

Hi, Starling,

Starling said:
And what were the precursors? I'd love to see a list of what you think are the precursors. Sometimes something as simple as a list is a good place to start because an annotated list can be too much too soon. And I accept that this is "in your opinion."

When Ross was nice enough to invoke my name (Post #9) I offered some of the most prominent precursors (Post #12) along with a very brief explanation of how they relate to the trump cycle. In answer to your follow-up I gave some more, and I'll list some more below. By far the best survey of the precursors of the trumps, in general terms, is an old book by Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy. The Tarot trump cycle is another work in the same family of Stoic-Christian sensibilities.

I'll put a list in a follow-up post. There are lots of different areas of Tarot study. The serious iconography part, however, makes a pretty small bookshelf.

Among the big problems that create confusion about the trumps, the greatest is that for over 225 year people have simply made shit up, claiming superior knowledge and insight, access to secret traditions, and so on. Tarot is part of their personal belief system, rather than merely an artifact from another culture, so they are obliged to impose favored meanings rather than accept what is there.

Until the 1960s, this imposition centered around cabalistic correspondences with the trump cycle, ans was wholly unrevealing of any intended meaning. The neo-occultists have taken a psychological and pseudo historical approach, still making up whatever appealed to them, but based on theories of cross-cultural universals and cherry-picking historical cognates taken out of context. Only a handful of writers have even attempted to understand the trump cycle like any other work of didactic art, without preconceptions about astrology, numerology, heretical sects, pagan cults, initiated mystery traditions, Holy Blood, Holy Grail fancies, etc. All this stuff forms a vast, dark forest in which the handful of serious books seem kind of lost.

The fact is that most people who are attracted to Tarot come to it because of such bias and preconceptions, not despite them. Because they are looking for magic and mysticism, and because they are generally ignorant and/or contemptuous of the medieval Stoic-Christian subject matter of the trumps, they don't see much of historical value. But they write books, and sell books, and they maintain thousands of websites. That forest of misinformation, much of it posing as historical research and analysis, confuses everything.

Another big problem is method. Because these writers have desired imposition rather than discovery, their methods are designed to confuse rather than clarify. Obfuscation rather than understanding is a goal, because Tarot itself was not what they want it to be, what it has become since the late 18th century. With that in mind, they routinely take specific images out of context, often focusing on the most ambiguous or obscure, and thus begin their work in the dark. Methodologically, this is all ass-backwards.

If you want to know what kind of thing the trump cycle is, you need to begin with the most obvious subjects and get a handle on the overall design. Then you will have a basis, a meaningful context for interpreting obscure and/or ambiguous figures. Working from the known to the unknown is the way serious investigators routinely proceed. In posts #12 and #14 I attempted to illustrate this, focusing on cards like the Emperor and Pope, Love, the Virtues, Time, Fortune, Death, the Devil and Resurrection to tell the basic story. The overall story of Emperor and Pope (and others) subject to Death and Judgment, is told ONLY in Triumph of Death works, using the term broadly to include the entire allegorical Death genre. One of the greatest examples is by Alberto Costa.

That Triumph of Death, however, is just the beginning. Having figured out that the trump cycle is a Triumph of Death provides a context for a detailed analysis, but the three sections of the cycle were each developed by Tarot's author with their own little narrative to tell, again, as discussed in the posts above.

Starling said:
By the way, I knew about the Medieval Mystery Plays, but had forgotten about them in the context of this discussion. But truly, that too, is one of the places where the Trumps came from.

It's more the allegorical morality plays, like Everyman, Pride of Life, etc., rather than the mystery and miracle plays.

Miracle Plays and Mysteries
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10348a.htm

Starling said:
We need to remember that a lot of people who were handling early cards were living in a primarily oral society. At the time the cards were created most people didn't read and write even in a limited way. We aren't always going to find written sources for everything we want to know.

Tarot was probably invented in Milan, by highly literate people. And while we are unlikely to find the inventor's notes for Tarot, we do in fact have such a record for another deck of playing cards from that place, an even earlier game. But since we have no such record for Tarot, we can best proceed by comparing it with cognate works. For example, Mary mentioned Clusone; Jill Varolo did a course project on the Clusone Triumph of Death in 2004, which used to be online. It had a lot of good pictures as well as a useful discussion. Ah, it still is.

The Triumph of Death at Clusone
http://www.philipresheph.com/a424/projects/varolo.doc

It's 5.6 Mb, so it takes a while to download.

------- Varolo's Introduction
This project aims to investigate the external frescoes of the Oratory of the Disciplini Confraternity in the northern Italian town of Clusone, which include all three pictorial representations of the theme of Death. In the top register is the Triumph of Death and the Encounter of the Three Living and the Three Dead . The middle register shows the Dance Macabre, and the lower register has remnants of the Vices and Virtues.

As well as discussing their historical context, patronage and content, an attempt will be made to investigate the extent and nature of religious motivations in these frescoes in relation to similar frescoes, both locally and in the rest of Italy. The frescoes are dated, but not signed, hence some discussion of the artist will be included.

The three themes of Death are typically shown as the Encounter, where three skeletons greet three nobles/hunters – a reminder of physical death; the Triumph, where death is personified as supreme and ruthless; the Dance Macabre, where couples, comprising a skeleton leading a member of society, proceed in hierarchical order.

The frescoes in Clusone have engendered three international conferences (1987, 1994, 1999), two one-day conferences (1997, 1999) and three related exhibitions (1995, 1998, 2001), from which Acts and Catalogues have been published. In accordance with these manifestations, this project also aims to emphasise the importance of these frescoes, in that they are not only in their original location, but uniquely include all three recognised iconographic themes of Death. They are a chronological and geographic synthesis of this theme in Italy.
------- end of snip

Here are some pages I put up years ago. The first two are "new", from 2005, and the third is from 2003. I think they're all still functional, but the site never got very far, and has been largely abandoned since November 2003. (Oh, also, you may have to try a few times over a couple days -- they just GeoCities pages, and they go offline several times a day because of bandwidth limitations.)

Triumphs of Death and Tarot
http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Riddle/DeathAllegories.html

The Middle Trumps: De Consolatione, De Remediis, De Casibus
http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Riddle/MiddleTrumps.html

The Riddle of Tarot: Reflections on a Late-Medieval Artifact
http://www.geocities.com/cartedatrionfi/Riddle.html

LOL -- that should take you a while, and give you enough of an idea of what I've been promoting for the last half-dozen years.

Best regards,
Michael

mjhurst

Hi, Starling,

You asked for a list of precursors, and I tried to answer that with some references to earlier posts and some links. But I also wanted to suggest a booklist. Not that you should read all these books, but to provide a kind of context about what has been done in different areas of Tarot. I'll only touch on the areas related to Tarot history or pseudo history, but even that leads into the occult Tarot bookshelf. Still, I'll avoid the fortune-telling and "self-help" sections, even though they appear to be the most popular.

1. TAROT HISTORY PER SE
Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot.
Ronald Decker, et al., A Wicked Pack of Cards.

Some other playing-card books on my shelf are Detlef Hoffmann, The Playing Card (1973); Sylvia Mann, Collecting Playing Cards (1966); George Beal, Playing Cards and Their History (1975); David Parlett, The Oxford Guide to Card Games (1990); Dummett's The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards, Decker & Dummett, A History of the Occult Tarot.... other stuff.

2. TAROT ICONOGRAPHY
Willard Farnham’s The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy is IMO the most valuable book about the subject matter of the trump cycle, although it doesn't mention Tarot. The things he discusses are the kind of thing Tarot was -- a work of Stoic-Christian art. Used copies of Farnham seem to range from $10 on up.

Two brief discussions, to be downloaded rather than buying the books, are Theodore Low De Vinne's 1876 passage and Waite's 1926 "The Great Symbols Of The Tarot". (DeVinne appears to have gotten his information from Breitkopf, and copies the Besancon trumps from him and yet mentions neither "Tarot" nor "Tarocchi" in regard to either Tarot nor the E-Series.

DeVinne's discussion of Tarot
http://books.google.com/books?id=G6IDAAAAYAAJ&printsec=toc#PPA101,M1

The Great Symbols Of The Tarot
http://association.tarotstudies.org/newsletters/news17.html

Gertrude Moakley, The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo.
John Shephard, The Tarot Trumps: Cosmos in Miniature.
Timothy Betts, Tarot and the Millennium.

These are obviously more developed than the previous two items, but ultimately not as insightful. And Andrea Vitali's books, although for me the main value is the pictures and trump lists in the appendices -- they're in Italian.

Dummett has, oddly enough, been the most insightful of all. In The Game of Tarot and a 1985 article, he analyzed the trump sequence into three types of subject matter, based on the many different orderings of the trumps. This is a crucial finding which, AFAIK, no one else has followed up on. (Except me, of course. I'm crazy about it!) Dummett also established the "null hypothesis" of Tarot iconography, namely, that there is no overall narrative or schematic design to the trump series. It is simply a hierarchy of well-known and easily distinguishable subjects arranged in a vague hierarchy to serve as trumps in a card game. In lieu of a convincing, i.e., consensus alternative, this explanation remains the best by virtue of its parsimony: no assumptions required.

3. MISC ART HISTORY
E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art, or some other general art-history books for context. Then the Warburg guys on iconography -- Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts, etc. The more of these guys one reads the better. Specifically, Jean Seznec’s The Survival of the Pagan Gods and Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. Also, Adolf Katzenellenbogen’s Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Art and Howard Patch’s The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature. Like Farnham, these books don't mention Tarot. The do show how iconography is done by serious and knowledgeable scholars, which is very different from the typical interpretations of Tarot enthusiasts.

4. GENERAL (valuable but not wholly reliable)
Stuart Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, v. I and II.
Cynthia Giles, The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore is a good overview/context of the entire world of Tarot.

5. TRADITIONAL OCCULT TAROT
Court de Gebelin and the Compte de Mellet, "The Game of Tarots" and "A Study of the Tarots" in Gebelin's Monde Primitif. A translation by Donald Tyson is floating around on the Web.

Then Lévi, Papus, Waite, Wirth, Regardie, Crowley, Tomberg, and Wang, if you want to go there.

6.a. MODERN TAROT FOLKLORE - pt.1 (intriguing but wildly biased)
Earlier playing-card historians, (like Hargrave with her assumptions re divination), have some great stuff (in her case, the illustrations). But most of the writing is best considered folklore. For example, Roger Tilley's A History of Playing Cards (1973) is most notable for its extended speculation on the Waldensian origin and meaning of the Tarot trumps. This was based on Arthur Waite's (ironic) comments, and foreshadows things like Christine Payne-Towler and Margaret Starbird, as well as Robert O'Neill's discussions of Catharism and Tarot. Then there's the new-school esoteric Tarot:

Alfred Douglas, The Tarot, (1972).
Robert V. O'Neill, Tarot Symbolism, (1986).
Brian Williams, A Renaissance Tarot: A Guide to the Renaissance Tarot Deck, (1987).
Robert M. Place, The Alchemical Tarot, (1995).
John Opsopaus, The Pythagorean Tarot, (2001).
Paul Huson, The Mystical Origins of the Tarot: From Ancient Roots to Modern Usage, (2004).
Robert M. Place, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, (2005).

6.b. MODERN TAROT FOLKLORE - pt.2 (laughable but still noteworthy)
Christine Payne Towler, The Underground Stream: Esoteric Tarot Revealed, (1991).
This is probably the most significant apologia for "old school" occultism, and combines it with the modern Holy Blood, Holy Grail mythos. Brilliant but silly.

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is by far the most pervasive reference to Tarot ever. And it relies on Margaret Starbird for it's "facts", which makes her important. The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail, (1993), and The Tarot Trumps and the Holy Grail, (2000). Also, Christopher Knight, Robert Lomas, The Second Messiah, (2000).

7. CONTEXT FOR OCCULT TAROT
Danny L. Jorgensen's The Esoteric Scene, Cultic Milieu, and Occult Tarot, (1992) is interesting, but appears to be hard to find. Hmmm... Then there's Faivre's Modern Esoteric Spirituality, (1992), and Hanegraaf's New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996), but I haven't bought either (they're available at the library). These three are... what, vaguely interesting. And there are lots of others, and then there are "debunking" books about Neopagan and New Age stuff. One book I've found particularly interesting is The Jung Cult by Richard Noll. It has some great background on the fin de siecle sensibilities of the late 19th and early 20th century, in which modern Tarot -- occult Tarot outside the realm of French Freemasons -- took root. And, of course, there's some HBHG history.

Richard Barber's The Holy Grail.
Susan Haskins' Mary Magdalene.
Peter Partner's The Knight's Templar and their Myth.
Putnam and Wood's The Treasure of Rennes le Chateau.

The HBHG stuff is all tied to the notion that the mythos of Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh, as adopted by folks like Starbird and Payne-Towler, is the controlling context for today's Tarot folklore. That's my view of things, although it doesn't fit with the mainstream of the Tarot forums I've seen.

LOL -- whether that might be useful to you or not, I can't say... but it should generate a couple comments.

Best regards,
Michael

Cerulean

Michael, thanks for the references in number 2!

Prior to now, I've been exploring poetic subjects and art and family histories of Florentine, Milanese and Ferrarese art and family histories up to the 1500s--so I have half of the references you named. The ones you named in number 2 seem much closer to where I'd like to read next.

Just to add to this thread, I summarized notes and typed text on the circle of Bonafacio Bembo in the thread below if the artist of the miniatures or the 'circle of Bonafacio Bembo' is of interest. The Cantor Art Museum still shows the alterpiece in it's permanent collection and the artwork and artist were discussed in a recent Cantor Art Museum catalog. The art is very much like the Visconti cards--the art is not online, but perhaps the notes and the numbered footnotes I typed will be helpful for research and interest.

http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=83317

Best regards,

Cerulean

mjhurst

Hi, Cerulean,

Cerulean said:
Prior to now, I've been exploring poetic subjects and art and family histories of Florentine, Milanese and Ferrarese art and family histories up to the 1500s--so I have half of the references you named. The ones you named in number 2 seem much closer to where I'd like to read next.

I'm sorry that I don't have a longer list to suggest. I will add Huson's 2004 book to category #2, with caveats. On the one hand he's all over the place with his suggestions of meaning, including most of the neo-occultist favorites, and he interprets the trump cycle only in general terms and vague comparisons rather than a card-by-card analysis of an overriding coherent design. On the other hand, he does make a strong point about morality plays in general, the Dance of Death in particular, and the Four Last Things. These good comparisons are diamonds in the rough, as it were, rather like De Vinne's comments or Waite's analysis of the different types of subject matter. They stand out only because so little has been written that comes close to explaining the design of the trump cycle.

This brings up another methodological problem of the neo-occultists: their aversion to critical thinking. Casually adopting other people's interpretations, up to and including the proverbial kitchen sink, is standard operating procedure for the writers in the Modern Tarot Folklore category. (In Tarot Symbolism, O'Neill concluded that this was precisely what the "Renaissance Magi" who invented Tarot had intended.) Everything is kept purposefully vague, and everyone agrees with everything. For example, one apocalyptic reference is the same as another, since we're not evaluating any details anyway. This tendency toward universal affirmation was explained by Jorgensen.

It is considered a serious breach of community ethics for members to criticize one another's beliefs or practices, at least publicly. Refusal to acknowledge many paths to truth and enlightenment is perceived as dogmatic and intolerant.

This is honorifically termed "syncretism" by its proponents and pejoratively termed an abdication of critical thinking, sloppiness, and worse, by its critics. It is also one of the primary ways in which the writers in the Modern Tarot Folklore category differ from writers in the Tarot Iconography and the Art History categories. Occultists embrace this universal affirmation of general ideas vaguely expressed because they are on a religious quest and theirs is a "big tent" religion. Art historians generally embrace critical thinking, comparing specific and precisely detailed explanations against each other, selecting the best and rejecting the rest, because they are on an historical quest. (Sorry 'bout the rhyming bit.)

Vague comparisons are fine, of course, when giving examples of what Tarot is LIKE. Tarot is vaguely like many different things. As examples, my own comparisons with Boethius' De Consolatione, Boccaccio's Visione and De Casibus, and Petrarch's I Trionfi and De Remediis, are all pretty generally drawn. These things have characteristics in common with the trump cycle, they are like it in some ways, but not in others.

However, to explain the trump cycle requires more than hand-waving comparisons with what Tarot is like. It also requires a detailed explanation of what Tarot IS. While the trump cycle is like many different things, it is not those things. What it actually is requires a detailed analysis, and -- anathema to the occultists -- the rejection of what what it is not. Comparison between competing explanations is needed rather than a happy but ultimately pointless affirmation of all.

Moakley, Shephard, and Betts each attempted a more detailed analysis of what the trump cycle actually represented, and didn't bother tipping their hat to all the old favorites. (Of course, most of the new "old favorites" were devised after Moakley, but it seems highly unlikely that she would have felt obliged to include them.)

Best regards,
Michael

Starling

OK, that is a huge amount of stuff. Maybe too much? <grin>

Actually that isn't a question. It is absolutely too much. It is overwhelming.

How about a study group based on what is on the Web? Like the Study groups in the Tarot section of this forum, it would need a leader (obviously not me) and it would also only work if someone chunked it up into small enough parts that the "students" could actually discuss what they were reading.

Anyone interested in running something like that? I'd be interested in doing such a study, and who knows, there might be enough lurkers in this thread for it to make sense to have one.

Teheuti

Also meant to mention that most of the tarot themes and card titles appear in Dante's Divine Comedy but not all together. One or two Cantos refer to at least half the themes by name. See especially Purgatorio, Canto VI: Empress, Emperor, Strength, Justice, Star(s), Chariot, Judgment, Moon, Hanged Man. Some themes mentioned directly and others by implication.

Petrarch's Triumphs include images in the text that go with several more Tarot cards beyond the specific Triumphs named earlier in the text & this thread.

These two works were certainly on a short-list of the most widely known and quoted texts of 14th and 15th century northern Italy.

Mary