I have an idea about 15th century tronfi origins that I have not seen presented anywhere. My idea is to take seriously the way that the Beinecke Library catalogued the Cary-Yale. They group the triumphs by suits, as follows.
SWORDS: "Empress of Swords"; "Emperor of Swords"; "Love (Swords)".
BATONS: "Fortitude (Batons)"; "Faith (Batons)"; "Hope (Batons)".
CUPS: "Charity (Cups)"; "Chariot (Cups)"; "Death (Cups)".
COINS: "World (Coins)"; "Judgment (Coins)".
I e-mailed the Beinecke as to where this grouping came from, and what librarian said was that they had been catalogued that way by whoever did it for Cary. So we don’t know where it comes from. Let us suppose it reflects an original grouping.
One consequence of grouping the cards this way is that the deck would have only 4 suits, not 5. There is a precedent for this in the Michelino triumph deck, done for Philippo Visconti in 1424 or so. As can be seen in Trionfi’s chart on their “analysis” page for this deck, these cards can be grouped into 4 suits of 15 cards each, 4 gods and demi-gods plus 11 suit cards associated with particular birds.
Both the gods and the bird-suits, it seems to me, are organized on the 4 themes of Virtues, Riches, Virginities, and Pleasures. One suit is Eagles, the bird of Jupiter and so of Virtues. The next is Phoenices, golden birds that burn up in a fire, like Riches. The chief god of this suit is Juno, whose bird is the Peacock. It is possible that Peacocks are somehow connected with Phoenices. The images of both appear in alchemy to signify different stages of the Work. Turtledoves are the bird of pure, spiritual love, i.e. Virginities, led by Athena. (Recall here Shakespeare’s poem “The Turtle and the Phoenix.”) Doves are the bird of Venus, i.e. Pleasures.
This assignment of god-cards to suits does not mean that they are played any differently than they if they did not attach to suits. In the Michelino deck, Martiano’s manuscript says, “Each of the gods is higher than all the orders of birds and also higher than the kings of the orders.” So they probably acted like trumps. The division into 4 groups might be a mnemonic devide to help one remember the cards' order in the hierarchy.
If we see the Cary-Yale in this 4-suited way, then the Cary classification into four groups, one for each of its suits, might help us reconstruct what cards are missing. The total number of triumph cards would be a multiple of 4. I think it is most natural to assume that each suit would have had 4, giving the deck as a whole a 4x20 structure. 3 is too few, as with one virtue present one would expect the other two, and there isn’t room for both; 5 is a lot.
If so, what is missing in Swords? To start with, let us proceed empirically. Let us look at the other extant early decks and see what they had in the cards before “Love” that isn’t here, and then do a kind of popularity contest, i.e. see which cards appear most frequently. When we do that, the Pope gets 3 votes (PMB, d’Este, Charles VI), the Bagatella 2 votes (PMB, d’Este), and the Popess 1 vote (PMB). (May have left a few decks out, but these are the main ones with these cards.) So, tentatively we go with the Pope.
With the Pope, moreover, the four cards fit a grouping connected with the idea of swords, namely one of combat. The Empress and the Emperor are leaders in temporal combat, the Pope in spiritual warfare, and Love is the combat of the knights for the Lady’s favor.
We also have here the first of Petrarch’s triumphs, that of Love.
Next, Batons. In these middle sections, there are many possibilities: Justice, Hunchback, Wheel, Hanged Man, Temperance, Devil, Arrow (i.e. Tower), Star, Moon, Sun. My view is that we can eliminate Star, Moon, and Sun because iconographically in the PMB they are similar to Hope, Faith, and Charity. That is, Star, Moon, and Sun later on are just a redoing of Hope, Faith, and Charity here. (I can elaborate on this point if needed.) My pick in Batons would be Temperance, because Justice usually appears near the end in the early decks. And Temperance is a popular card: it appears in the PMB, the d’Este, and the Charles VI.
Another reason for picking Temperance is that it fits the Triumphs of Petrarch, as a tarot version of Chastity. Here it is self-control, i.e. Temperance, that triumphs over Cupid’s frequently unwise and disastrous passions.
Batons are Bastoni, sticks. They are the common man’s implement and weapon. The grouping is the common man’s virtues: temperance, fortitude, hope, and faith.
Next, Cups. The possibilities are Hunchback, Wheel, Hanged Man, Devil, and Arrow. Hunchback gets 2 votes (PMB, Charles VI), and so do Wheel (PMB, Brera-Brambilla), and Hanged Man (PMB, Charles VI). Either the Hunchback or the Wheel would do as a suitable representative of Petrarch’s Time. I would pick Wheel for two reasons. First, Trionfi has a good argument that Philippo Maria Visconti, as a user of crutches, would not have liked the image of the Hunchback. Second, the Brera-Brambilla was likely painted by the same artist as the Cary-Yale, as indicated by the similarity of the two Emperor cards. Since Brera-Brambilla has a Wheel, it is reasonable to assume that Cary-Yale does, too.
We now have four of Petrarch’s five triumphs: Love, chastity (as Temperance), Death, fame (as Chariot, even called "fame" by Alciati), and time (as Wheel). In the cards, Death appears after Chariot and Wheel in all the lists, unlike the order in Petrarch. Petrarch is being adapted to a different context.
Cups are the symbol of Religion. A suitable name for this grouping would be Mercies. Charity is God’s mercy, and humanity’s. The chariot represents fame, for which thanks are owed to God. The Wheel of Fortune giveth and taketh away, like God; each is a mercy. Death is a mercy for those bound for Heaven.
Finally, Coins. Here is where Justice goes. But we still need one more. My inclination would be the Fool. First, it frequently was listed at the end, even though it technically had no number. But at this point the cards don’t have their customary numbers. And second, it is a very common card, appearing in PMB, d’Este, and Charles VI.
Perhaps World, as the New Jerusalem, represents Petrarch’s last triumph, Eternity.
The grouping here would be Rewards, only not monetary ones. Justice for all at the Last Judgment. And the New Jerusalem for the faithful, Hell for Fools.
So my proposal for the Cary-Yale is as follows.
SWORDS: Empress, Emperor, Pope, Love.
BATONS: Temperance, Fortitude; Faith, Hope.
CUPS: Charity, Chariot, Wheel, Death.
COINS: Justice, World, Judgment, Fool.
For our purposes, the order within suits does not matter: I am just trying to identify what the cards are. For mnemonic purposes there is a symbolic relationship between suit names and their associated triumphs, as in the Michelino: swords for Combats, batons for Virtues, cups for Mercies, coins for Rewards. Or some such thing.
Now for the PMB. My hypothesis accepts Trionfi’s idea of two stages for this deck, based on the two different artists for the deck. It could even be that the first stage only had 14 triumphs, as a fifth suit matching the 14-card regular suits. However the 4-suit principle suggests another approach.
It is possible that the first stage was merely a redoing of the four-suited Cary-Yale, only now with 18 cards per suit (no female pages or knights). In this scenario, in place of the 3 theological virtues, which are removed, there are put the 4 other cards that are in the PMB but not in the Cary-Yale: Bagatella, Popess, Hunchback, and Hanged Man. Here is what it might have looked like:
SWORDS: Bagatella, Empress, Emperor, Popess.
BATONS: Pope, Love, Temperance, Fortitude.
CUPS: Chariot, Wheel, Hunchback, Hanged Man.
COINS: Death, Judgment, Justice, World.
Wild Card: Fool.
Again, the order within suits is not important for our purposes. But now the grouping idea doesn’t fit all the cards. While it still holds in a general way, people have to supplement the groupings with a different mnemonic device, such as an allegorical narrative going through all the triumphs.
Three of these cards--Temperance, Fortitude and World--do not currently exist in the hand of the first artist. Trionfi theorizes that they were not part of the deck at stage one at all. But two of these, Fortitude and World, certainly did exist in the Cary-Yale. Moreover, Fortitude as Strength has a verbal association with the deck’s patron, a Sforza. Why would these cards be dropped? The only reason I can think of would be to fit a 5x14 layout. But Milanese precedent (as opposed to Ferrarese) would go against such a layout.
The usual other explanation for the second artist's work is that these three cards were made (and perhaps the other three), but then were damaged and had to be redone. I can think of other explanations as well: Perhaps the patron wanted these 3 cards changed. Perhaps the first-stage World card was similar to the Cary-Yale card, which looks to me like something out of a Grail legend, fashionable in the 1440’s but not later. As for Fortitude, Galeazzo Sforza and his son owned a tame lion (my source is Gregory Lubkin, A Renaissance Court: Milan under Galeazzo Maria Sforza); perhaps he wanted to imply that he was the Hercules on this card that he called “Sforza.” As for Temperance, perhaps Galeazzo or some other Sforza wanted to put a particular woman on the card—or remove a particular woman that had been on the card.
The four-suit hypothesis has the virtue of accounting for the Fool’s unnumbered status as a natural part of the game. An unnumbered status for the 17th extra card would have been a natural in a four-suited deck, as a 17th triumph would not have fit into any suit. The Fool, for symbolic reasons, is the natural choice. Admittedly the Fool could have gotten this status in others ways—as a novelty, perhaps, or in virtue of the symbolism. But it is by being the odd man out in a deck built on multiples of four that is the most natural, in a set of cards used primarily for gaming.
Then the second artist comes in and expands the deck. He and his patron agree on how to redo the three objectionable cards and how to make the Star, Moon, and Sun cards, which combine Ferrara’s themes with the iconography of the old Hope, Faith, and Charity. Since the groupings have outlived their usefulness, the deck now has the 20 triumphs we associate with the PMB, detached from the 4 suits.
Meanwhile, there is Ferrara. There are 70-card decks in 1457, at the time of Galeazzo Sforza’s visit. But were they made on Milan’s specifications or Ferrara’s? In an Aug. 2 letter Galeazzo writes his father that he played cards and tennis with Francesco Pico della Mirandola when it rained (Lubkin p. 309). The game was probably triumphs, and the players probably included the two older Pico brothers, and possibly the Picos’ cousin Matteo Boiardo. (If Boiardo's birth-year as given by Tarotpedia is correct, they were all close to the same age.) So Ferrara probably had a 5x14 deck. The Cary cataloguer did not identify the 8 surviving d’Este triumphs with particular suits at all, and there appear to have been only 14 cards per suit. Perhaps Galeazzo took a deck home with him. But it was still a Ferrara deck, not Milan's.
Over time, this 14-triumph deck in Ferrara and other Ferrara-influenced cities expands to 21, i.e. 20 numbered cards plus the Fool. We see that in the Charles VI deck, which looks like a descendant of the d’Este. As Ross Caldwell points out, when 19 is the World, and the virtues are early in the sequence, the numbers have to stop at 20 (
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=28920). And when number 3 is the Emperor, that leaves only one number slot for both the Popess and the Empress. Either they shared a number, or only one of them was used at some point. In any event, each got its own number, and there were 22. In Milan the Devil and the Lightning-Bolt were added to conform with Ferrara. The decks were now standardized at 22.
