MikeH
New Pratesi note (now two) on Cary-Yale
The name Franco Pratesi is not unknown to this forum. The search engine gives 51 threads mentioning him. In the late 1980s he made several important contributions to tarot history, including finding the first document assigning divinatory meanings to the tarot subjects, in Bologna around or before 1750. He also brought the attention of the Marziano "game of the gods" to the tarot community. Over the past 28 years he has built up an impressive list of publications, both in print and on the web, as can be seen by viewing his website, http://www.naibi.net.
Recently he wrote a "note" of 19 pages on the Cary-Yale tarot deck, "Elucubrazioni sui tarocchi Visconti di Modrone o Cary-Yale", i.e. "Ruminations on the Visconti di Modrone or Cary-Yale Tarot". The Cary-Yale is of course the oldest extant tarot, and no stranger to this forum, with over a hundred threads mentioning it. The thread closest to the topic of this "note" is one in 2003, "Reconstructing the Cary-Yale", http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=18173. However Pratesi's effort--actually, in part something of a collaboration between him and me--represents a different approach.
I open this thread to discuss the issues raised by his "note". In the current post I am going to give some introductory material on the circumstances in which it was written, including a brief run-down of a few of his recent essays written in Italian and a very interesting email discussion we had about the meaning of "carte a trionfi", which is the form in which the term "trionfi" first appears in relation to a pack of cards, in 1440 Angieri/Florence (http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=171059). Then I will offer a translation of the essay itself, which Franco wrote in Italian. My task is made easier by the fact that it includes some lengthy quotes by me in English.
First, you need to know about Marziano's deck.The deck itself has not survived, but several testimonies of the time exist, including a detailed description by the designer, Marziano da Tartona, written for Filippo Maria Visconti, the same duke of Milan he is assumed to have commissioned the Cary-Yale. Marziano verifiably died in 1425. It is tempting to wonder if there are connections between the two packs.
In Marziano's deck, 16 Greco-Roman "deified heroes"--i.e. gods and demigods, as described in various classical texts--arranged in a precise hierarchy could, when played in a trick, beat any card in the regular suits. At the same time all of them also belonged to the four regular suits, to which he gave the names of allegorical birds. They look like this:
Suit, Suit-sign_________ Gods, in order from most to least powerful
Virtues, eagle:__________1 Jupiter, 5 Apollo, 9 Mercury, 13 Hercules
Riches, phoenix:_________2 Juno, 6 Neptun, 10 Mars, 14 Eolus
Virginities, turtledove:____3 Pallas, 7 Diana, 11 Vesta, 15 Daphne
Pleasures, dove:________4 Venus, 8, Bacchus, 12 Ceres, 16 Cupido
To the extent that there is a hierarchy of 16 superior cards, this deck resembles the tarot deck, although the cards, from their description, looked nothing like any early tarot cards.
Second, you need to know about a few new essays by Pratesi on early documents using the words "minchiate" and "germini" (the latter thought to be another word for the same game, or one very similar). Before recently, it was thought that minchiate was a product of the 1540s. Earlier, it is true, there was only a not entirely secure mention of minchiate in 1466, in a letter of Luigi Pulci to Lorenzo Il Magnifico (F. Pratesi, The Playing-Card, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1988) pp. 12-15; the letter was first published in 1866, but the original got lost in 1956. But because of the 80 year gap between the two references, it was assumed they were to unrelated games.
Then the gap started narrowing. Franco found references to minchiate in the 1530s ('Italian Cards: New Discoveries", n. 5, The Playing Card, Vol 16 (1988), p. 78-83). He also found it included in a Florentine ordinance about games of 1477 (The Playing-Card, Vol. 19 (1990) pp. 7-17), and in another document, a conviction in 1471 for a crime in 1470 (for playing to close to a church: L'As de Trefle, N. 52 (1993) pp. 9-10). (All of Franco's essays are at http;//naibi.net.) Also, Andrea Vitali found a reference to "Sminchiate" in c. 1510, in a context where it appears to be the name of a game (http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=255#). That makes another reference to "Sminchiate", by Berni in 1526, more likely one to the same game, as opposed to a particular play in the game of Bolognese tarocchini, as Dummett had supposed (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1019&p=15179&hilit=Berni#p15179). Then Huck found references to germini in 1517 and again 1518--actually 1519 in our way or reckoning, in which the year starts January 1 instead March 25 confirmed by Franco in an essay at http://trionfi.com/germini-1517-1519.
Then came Franco's 2015 finding: another reference to germini, in 1506 (The Playing Card vol. 44 no. 1 (2015), pp. 61-71). This last narrowed the gap between notes to less than 30 years.So the essay seemed to me worth translating.
I translated Franco's essay on the "germini" reference; you can read a corrected version at http://pratesitranslations.blogspot.com/2016/02/april-2015-new-information-on.html. Soon Franco was emailing me about some of my guesses as to what certain 15th century terms meant. I corrected them. But one thing still puzzled me. He said that "carte a trionfi" in Florentine documents should not be translated as "triumph cards" but rather as "triumph-style cards". I wondered, what was the difference? He said that "triumph-style cards" meant cards done in the style of pictures with triumphal scenes or characters on them, for example the triumphs of Petrarch, or the cards described by Marziano (email of Dec. 20, 2015). Then would all "carte a trionfi" have been such cards? No, he insisted; it is 99% certain that only some of the cards were of such scenes. It is also only 99% certain that these were cards for use in card games; but such use is not part of the meaning of "carte a trionfi". He thought of an example. A "vaso a fiori" is, in Florentine speech, a vase with pictures of flowers on it. A "vaso di fiori" is a vase with flowers in it.
In English we have no such expression in three words or less for a vase with flowers on it. However we do have "checkered box" versus "box of checkers", with clearly different meanings, one referring to what is on the box and the other to what is in it. By that analogy, it seems to me, we could make up a term "flowered vase" meaning one with flowers on it. Another example is "deviled eggs", which means eggs part of which has spices added to part of it in a kind of paste: "deviled" is to suggest the spiciness of the result. Not all of the egg is "deviled", just the yoke. But the result is still a "deviled egg". On that model, "carte a trionfi" would mean, if we had the expression, "triumphed cards", i.e. cards of which at least some, and most likely only some, have been given triumphal scenes. They would not include only the triumphal cards, for which the term "carte trionfali" would have been appropriate.
So what were the antecedents of "carte a trionfi", an expression whose first documented use is 1440 Florence? Cards, to be sure, including playing cards, but also something else, triumphal scenes, such as those of Petrarch's poem I trionfi, or Marziano's cards. Later he added, in addition to these, "the same triumphal subjects that were used at the time for cassoni, deschi, and so on" (email of Jan. 1, 2016). An example that occurs to me is illustrations from Petrarch's De viris illustribus (Of illustrious men. He also once mentioned cards of saints.
This discussion reminded me of an old hypothesis of mine that I had not talked about in years. My idea was that the connection between Marziano's deck and the Cary-Yale was that both had 16 special cards that functioned both as the highest members of one of the four suits and as a hierarchy among themselves as far as which one, if two in different suits were played, won the trick. I had much difficulty getting this idea taken seriously as an hypothesis. The problem was that nobody believed that the Cary-Yale had such a structure. I gave them evidence, of a sort, but nobody thought it was credible.
Another part of my hypothesis was that the 16 cards included, as one part, the 6 triumphs of Petrarch's I Trionfi plus one more triumph.derived from Boccaccio.
In Petrarch's poem, Petrarch's Love for Laura is triumphed over by her dedication to Chastity, this Chastity in turn is triumphed over by Death, Death by Fame (i.e. living on in people's memory), Fame by Time (one's memory fades over time), and Time by Eternity (the Resurrection of the Dead). .Love, Chastity, Death, Fame , and Eternity are, on my hypothesis, surviving cards in the Cary-Yale. Chastity is represented by the card later known as the Chariot, which the Cary-Yale depicts as a lady on a chariot. Fame is a scene with knights below and a lady on top along with two trumpets, instruments traditionally associated with Fame.
The missing Petrarchan triumph is Time, which we know from the PMB (and Charles VI), where it is represented by an old man with an hourglass. It seems to me that there is one other likely missing card of this sort, derived from Boccaccio's version of the succession of triumphs in his Amorosa Visione, namely Fortune. I say this because Fortune is indeed one of the surviving cards of another deck closely associated with the Cary-Yale, the Brera-Brambilla. It also appears in the PMB, from the same Bembo workshop in Cremona.
Another part of the 16 would have been the four cardinal and three theological virtues of medieval Christianity, of which all three theologicals and one cardinal are in the surviving cards.
Finally there are the the Emperor and Empress, which form another group, of separate derivation; we do not need to know what it was because they are in the preserved cards and there are no other cards to postulate from that source. The game of "VIII Emperors" is one possibility (described at http://trionfi.com/imperatori-cards-ferrara-1423). That is a game we know from a document of Ferrara, about a production in Florence, 1423. Franco speculates that it is another game in which the suits are extended, in this case with 2 emperors per suit (http://pratesitranslations.blogspot.com/2016/02/jan-11-2015-other-comments-qabout.html; see the table there).
This part of what I presented to Franco is from Huck's "chess theory" of the Cary-Yale, which he presented in 2003 (http://trionfi.com/0/c/30/). Later he developed a pictorial version, at http://a-tarot.eu/pdf/cy-jpg.jpg. As he wrote it in 2003, there would have been 16 triumphal cards that corresponded to the 16 chess pieces, the 7 virtues plus Love as the pawns, the Empress and Emperor corresponding to the chess King and Queen, the Judgment and World cards corresponding to chess's rooks (because they both had trumpets on them, and the Chariot and Death cards to the chess Knights , because they had horses on them. What corresponded to the chess Bishops wasn't clear, because those cards were missing. The Pope and the Popess were the possibility he suggested, an attractive suggestion because then each pair would have one male and one female representative, corresponding to "queen's side" and "king's side" in chess.
The difficulty is to assign Petrarch's Time to both a chess piece and a card, such that it would pair up with another chess piece and card, the 16th card, the one I assign to Fortune. I assign Time and Fortune to the bishops, on the grounds that both cards, in their earliest representations, have old men on them, and bishops were customarily senior church officials. My Cary-Yale reconstruction has no Pope or Popess. (Below is the PMB "Old Man", with his hourglass, the BB Wheel, and the PMB Wheel.)
I had the idea from somewhere that Franco did not like Huck's "chess theory". But I thought maybe if the non-chess aspects, namely the "triumphs" of Petrarch/Boccaccio and the seven virtues, were put in a different context, namely that of four groups, from Marziano, Franco might be interested. So I referred Franco to one short section of an old blog of mine (originally 2008, partly rewritten 2012; it is at http://mtocy.blogspot.com/, with the relevant part the section "The Cary-Yale in Relation to Michelino and Petrarch's 'Triumphs'"; it connects Marziano's deck (which I called the Michelino, from the painter known to have done the work) with the Cary-Yale.
Franco immediately started writing a new "note" (I'd call it an essay; it's 19 pages long). He showed me drafts and tables for my response. He didn't accept everything I said, and developed his own version based on minchiate (which I agree would be connected), but he did find my proposal stimulating and not something to be rejected. Franco works fast. He was done in a week.
In my next post I will present the first half of his essay, in my translation (with a little help from Franco); I will present the second half after that. The "note" is on naibi.net in Italian (except for a couple of pages by me), the second note of 2016, starting with the word "Cremona". For the Cary-Yale itself, see http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/visconti-tarot. First you click on "view all images", underneath the card displayed. Then when you get to a triumph, if you click on the image, you will see more information, including the part that interested me.
The name Franco Pratesi is not unknown to this forum. The search engine gives 51 threads mentioning him. In the late 1980s he made several important contributions to tarot history, including finding the first document assigning divinatory meanings to the tarot subjects, in Bologna around or before 1750. He also brought the attention of the Marziano "game of the gods" to the tarot community. Over the past 28 years he has built up an impressive list of publications, both in print and on the web, as can be seen by viewing his website, http://www.naibi.net.
Recently he wrote a "note" of 19 pages on the Cary-Yale tarot deck, "Elucubrazioni sui tarocchi Visconti di Modrone o Cary-Yale", i.e. "Ruminations on the Visconti di Modrone or Cary-Yale Tarot". The Cary-Yale is of course the oldest extant tarot, and no stranger to this forum, with over a hundred threads mentioning it. The thread closest to the topic of this "note" is one in 2003, "Reconstructing the Cary-Yale", http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=18173. However Pratesi's effort--actually, in part something of a collaboration between him and me--represents a different approach.
I open this thread to discuss the issues raised by his "note". In the current post I am going to give some introductory material on the circumstances in which it was written, including a brief run-down of a few of his recent essays written in Italian and a very interesting email discussion we had about the meaning of "carte a trionfi", which is the form in which the term "trionfi" first appears in relation to a pack of cards, in 1440 Angieri/Florence (http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=171059). Then I will offer a translation of the essay itself, which Franco wrote in Italian. My task is made easier by the fact that it includes some lengthy quotes by me in English.
First, you need to know about Marziano's deck.The deck itself has not survived, but several testimonies of the time exist, including a detailed description by the designer, Marziano da Tartona, written for Filippo Maria Visconti, the same duke of Milan he is assumed to have commissioned the Cary-Yale. Marziano verifiably died in 1425. It is tempting to wonder if there are connections between the two packs.
In Marziano's deck, 16 Greco-Roman "deified heroes"--i.e. gods and demigods, as described in various classical texts--arranged in a precise hierarchy could, when played in a trick, beat any card in the regular suits. At the same time all of them also belonged to the four regular suits, to which he gave the names of allegorical birds. They look like this:
Suit, Suit-sign_________ Gods, in order from most to least powerful
Virtues, eagle:__________1 Jupiter, 5 Apollo, 9 Mercury, 13 Hercules
Riches, phoenix:_________2 Juno, 6 Neptun, 10 Mars, 14 Eolus
Virginities, turtledove:____3 Pallas, 7 Diana, 11 Vesta, 15 Daphne
Pleasures, dove:________4 Venus, 8, Bacchus, 12 Ceres, 16 Cupido
To the extent that there is a hierarchy of 16 superior cards, this deck resembles the tarot deck, although the cards, from their description, looked nothing like any early tarot cards.
Second, you need to know about a few new essays by Pratesi on early documents using the words "minchiate" and "germini" (the latter thought to be another word for the same game, or one very similar). Before recently, it was thought that minchiate was a product of the 1540s. Earlier, it is true, there was only a not entirely secure mention of minchiate in 1466, in a letter of Luigi Pulci to Lorenzo Il Magnifico (F. Pratesi, The Playing-Card, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1988) pp. 12-15; the letter was first published in 1866, but the original got lost in 1956. But because of the 80 year gap between the two references, it was assumed they were to unrelated games.
Then the gap started narrowing. Franco found references to minchiate in the 1530s ('Italian Cards: New Discoveries", n. 5, The Playing Card, Vol 16 (1988), p. 78-83). He also found it included in a Florentine ordinance about games of 1477 (The Playing-Card, Vol. 19 (1990) pp. 7-17), and in another document, a conviction in 1471 for a crime in 1470 (for playing to close to a church: L'As de Trefle, N. 52 (1993) pp. 9-10). (All of Franco's essays are at http;//naibi.net.) Also, Andrea Vitali found a reference to "Sminchiate" in c. 1510, in a context where it appears to be the name of a game (http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=255#). That makes another reference to "Sminchiate", by Berni in 1526, more likely one to the same game, as opposed to a particular play in the game of Bolognese tarocchini, as Dummett had supposed (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1019&p=15179&hilit=Berni#p15179). Then Huck found references to germini in 1517 and again 1518--actually 1519 in our way or reckoning, in which the year starts January 1 instead March 25 confirmed by Franco in an essay at http://trionfi.com/germini-1517-1519.
Then came Franco's 2015 finding: another reference to germini, in 1506 (The Playing Card vol. 44 no. 1 (2015), pp. 61-71). This last narrowed the gap between notes to less than 30 years.So the essay seemed to me worth translating.
I translated Franco's essay on the "germini" reference; you can read a corrected version at http://pratesitranslations.blogspot.com/2016/02/april-2015-new-information-on.html. Soon Franco was emailing me about some of my guesses as to what certain 15th century terms meant. I corrected them. But one thing still puzzled me. He said that "carte a trionfi" in Florentine documents should not be translated as "triumph cards" but rather as "triumph-style cards". I wondered, what was the difference? He said that "triumph-style cards" meant cards done in the style of pictures with triumphal scenes or characters on them, for example the triumphs of Petrarch, or the cards described by Marziano (email of Dec. 20, 2015). Then would all "carte a trionfi" have been such cards? No, he insisted; it is 99% certain that only some of the cards were of such scenes. It is also only 99% certain that these were cards for use in card games; but such use is not part of the meaning of "carte a trionfi". He thought of an example. A "vaso a fiori" is, in Florentine speech, a vase with pictures of flowers on it. A "vaso di fiori" is a vase with flowers in it.
In English we have no such expression in three words or less for a vase with flowers on it. However we do have "checkered box" versus "box of checkers", with clearly different meanings, one referring to what is on the box and the other to what is in it. By that analogy, it seems to me, we could make up a term "flowered vase" meaning one with flowers on it. Another example is "deviled eggs", which means eggs part of which has spices added to part of it in a kind of paste: "deviled" is to suggest the spiciness of the result. Not all of the egg is "deviled", just the yoke. But the result is still a "deviled egg". On that model, "carte a trionfi" would mean, if we had the expression, "triumphed cards", i.e. cards of which at least some, and most likely only some, have been given triumphal scenes. They would not include only the triumphal cards, for which the term "carte trionfali" would have been appropriate.
So what were the antecedents of "carte a trionfi", an expression whose first documented use is 1440 Florence? Cards, to be sure, including playing cards, but also something else, triumphal scenes, such as those of Petrarch's poem I trionfi, or Marziano's cards. Later he added, in addition to these, "the same triumphal subjects that were used at the time for cassoni, deschi, and so on" (email of Jan. 1, 2016). An example that occurs to me is illustrations from Petrarch's De viris illustribus (Of illustrious men. He also once mentioned cards of saints.
This discussion reminded me of an old hypothesis of mine that I had not talked about in years. My idea was that the connection between Marziano's deck and the Cary-Yale was that both had 16 special cards that functioned both as the highest members of one of the four suits and as a hierarchy among themselves as far as which one, if two in different suits were played, won the trick. I had much difficulty getting this idea taken seriously as an hypothesis. The problem was that nobody believed that the Cary-Yale had such a structure. I gave them evidence, of a sort, but nobody thought it was credible.
Another part of my hypothesis was that the 16 cards included, as one part, the 6 triumphs of Petrarch's I Trionfi plus one more triumph.derived from Boccaccio.
In Petrarch's poem, Petrarch's Love for Laura is triumphed over by her dedication to Chastity, this Chastity in turn is triumphed over by Death, Death by Fame (i.e. living on in people's memory), Fame by Time (one's memory fades over time), and Time by Eternity (the Resurrection of the Dead). .Love, Chastity, Death, Fame , and Eternity are, on my hypothesis, surviving cards in the Cary-Yale. Chastity is represented by the card later known as the Chariot, which the Cary-Yale depicts as a lady on a chariot. Fame is a scene with knights below and a lady on top along with two trumpets, instruments traditionally associated with Fame.
The missing Petrarchan triumph is Time, which we know from the PMB (and Charles VI), where it is represented by an old man with an hourglass. It seems to me that there is one other likely missing card of this sort, derived from Boccaccio's version of the succession of triumphs in his Amorosa Visione, namely Fortune. I say this because Fortune is indeed one of the surviving cards of another deck closely associated with the Cary-Yale, the Brera-Brambilla. It also appears in the PMB, from the same Bembo workshop in Cremona.
Another part of the 16 would have been the four cardinal and three theological virtues of medieval Christianity, of which all three theologicals and one cardinal are in the surviving cards.
Finally there are the the Emperor and Empress, which form another group, of separate derivation; we do not need to know what it was because they are in the preserved cards and there are no other cards to postulate from that source. The game of "VIII Emperors" is one possibility (described at http://trionfi.com/imperatori-cards-ferrara-1423). That is a game we know from a document of Ferrara, about a production in Florence, 1423. Franco speculates that it is another game in which the suits are extended, in this case with 2 emperors per suit (http://pratesitranslations.blogspot.com/2016/02/jan-11-2015-other-comments-qabout.html; see the table there).
This part of what I presented to Franco is from Huck's "chess theory" of the Cary-Yale, which he presented in 2003 (http://trionfi.com/0/c/30/). Later he developed a pictorial version, at http://a-tarot.eu/pdf/cy-jpg.jpg. As he wrote it in 2003, there would have been 16 triumphal cards that corresponded to the 16 chess pieces, the 7 virtues plus Love as the pawns, the Empress and Emperor corresponding to the chess King and Queen, the Judgment and World cards corresponding to chess's rooks (because they both had trumpets on them, and the Chariot and Death cards to the chess Knights , because they had horses on them. What corresponded to the chess Bishops wasn't clear, because those cards were missing. The Pope and the Popess were the possibility he suggested, an attractive suggestion because then each pair would have one male and one female representative, corresponding to "queen's side" and "king's side" in chess.
The difficulty is to assign Petrarch's Time to both a chess piece and a card, such that it would pair up with another chess piece and card, the 16th card, the one I assign to Fortune. I assign Time and Fortune to the bishops, on the grounds that both cards, in their earliest representations, have old men on them, and bishops were customarily senior church officials. My Cary-Yale reconstruction has no Pope or Popess. (Below is the PMB "Old Man", with his hourglass, the BB Wheel, and the PMB Wheel.)
I had the idea from somewhere that Franco did not like Huck's "chess theory". But I thought maybe if the non-chess aspects, namely the "triumphs" of Petrarch/Boccaccio and the seven virtues, were put in a different context, namely that of four groups, from Marziano, Franco might be interested. So I referred Franco to one short section of an old blog of mine (originally 2008, partly rewritten 2012; it is at http://mtocy.blogspot.com/, with the relevant part the section "The Cary-Yale in Relation to Michelino and Petrarch's 'Triumphs'"; it connects Marziano's deck (which I called the Michelino, from the painter known to have done the work) with the Cary-Yale.
Franco immediately started writing a new "note" (I'd call it an essay; it's 19 pages long). He showed me drafts and tables for my response. He didn't accept everything I said, and developed his own version based on minchiate (which I agree would be connected), but he did find my proposal stimulating and not something to be rejected. Franco works fast. He was done in a week.
In my next post I will present the first half of his essay, in my translation (with a little help from Franco); I will present the second half after that. The "note" is on naibi.net in Italian (except for a couple of pages by me), the second note of 2016, starting with the word "Cremona". For the Cary-Yale itself, see http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/visconti-tarot. First you click on "view all images", underneath the card displayed. Then when you get to a triumph, if you click on the image, you will see more information, including the part that interested me.