50-Card Mantegna/Fererra & D'Este

50-Card Mantegna/Ferarra & D'Este

I have threes links, all a recommendation if you have interests in historical trump cards, delight in revisiting the Greek and Roman Pantheon and 15th century Italian historical interests:

The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance by Joscelyn Godwin:

touches on ALL the topics below, with the addition of notes on Music and the beginnings of Italian Opera. All are done in historical context and ties together what many of us are studying in different areas. The Mantegna material is woven in with Sigismundo Malatesta and Duke Borso in a wonderful way.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1890482846/ref=nosim/aeclectic/

You can probably get it cheaper on half.com or other booksite searches...


Mark Filpas' summary of the black and white Mantegna: my addendum is that Il Trigono link shows the illustrations and booklet. Alidastore.com carries the same deck.

http://www.spiritone.com/~filipas/Masquerade/Reviews/mantegna.html

http://www.trigono.com/Tarocchi/tarocchi-del-mantegna-meneghello.htm

---------------------------------------------------
Earlier post:

I would like to open a beginning thread for the older cousin and inlaws by marriage to the Visconti Tarocchi threads, generally:

-50-card "Mantegna" series
-Ferrerra and D'Este family relations with tarocchi and Visconti social history/cards
-Lionelle to Isabella family tree and relations to artists or poets who did tarocchi related work of the time.
-Some noted historian highlights (includes respectful annotations to what Kaplan (U.S. Games) or what Giordarno Berti (Lo Scarabeo) or perhaps Michael Dummett/Ronald Decker or Francis Yates might have listed.

I usually have more questions than answers, but I may have some related notes to some questions...anyway, if this works out, I plan to have scans and a website related to this segment...my goal is to be happily ready when the Lo Scarabeo's version of the Ferrara Tarot, misnamed Charles VI comes out in 2004.

I am hoping to gear my Middle Ages/Renaissance study to this portion of Italian history.

Mari--

You've got about half a dozen really interesting topics there, any one of which could be the subject of its own thread. I'll just make a couple of off-the-top-of-the-head comments about the possible relationship between the so-called Mantegna Tarot and the standard Tarot deck as exemplified by the Visconti-Sforza cards and the Marseilles tradition.

*The Mantegna Tarot is obviously and indisputably arranged in a hierarchical fashion, from what many Renaissance thinkers conceived of as the lowest forms of reality (the concrete and material world of human conditions and relationships) to the highest (the abstract and purely ideational mental activity of the source of the universe). The standard Tarot deck is not so obviously arranged in a hierarchical manner, but it bears enough structural similarity to the Mantegna deck to suggest that it may be.

*The first cycle of ten cards in the Mantegna deck begins with Beggar-Servant-Artisan. The Tarot trump sequence begins with Beggar and Artisan, and omits the servant. Additionally, the Tarot's beggar is so completely marginalized that he doesn't even have a place in the sequence, really. He's out of it. Both sequences tellingly have no reference to peasants, and this at a time when between 80 and 90 percent of the population was still living in rural settings and directly engaged in the agricultural production without which the rest of society could not have existed. This attests to the thoroughly urbanized and sophisticated environment in which the Renaissance cards originated.

*The final sequence of the Mantegna deck ends with the highly abstract Prima Causa. The Tarot trump sequence ends with Judgment and the World. Both series of cards begin in the world of humans and end with acts of God.

My own very personal, very tentative conclusion is that both the Tarot trump sequence and the Manegna deck are pyramid-shaped hierarchies that express Neoplatonist ideas about the structure of reality, in that they both begin with the specific and concrete and end with (what they saw as "higher" reality) the abstract and ideal.

A big difference between them is that the Mantegna deck contains nothing other than these philosophical expressions, while the Tarot trump sequence was an original artistic and philosophical product that ended up being grafted on to another, unrelated, and pre-existing sequence: the playing cards.

Thanks for your wonderful comments.

I also wanted to touch on the larger social contexts that might have been overlooked in briefer summaries of the Ferrara style of cards, including the Mantegna as a start. I'm still reading about Emilia-Romagna regions as a whole and want to put a timeline together.

One of the things that I took with me to study was Rafael Prinke's 1991 article of the Mantegna Tarot from the archives of the American Tarot Society. (my car was being inspected for smog compliance.) The brief outline is a good start, but it speaks of the later D'Este influences from Isabella, which is two generations after one or two historians--such as Giordano Berti--place an earlier Mantegna pattern with Lionelle D'Este.

I realized many of my cultural histories of Ferrara which affects Visconti and larger Italian society began with Lionelle D'Este, as well. The most influential time periods of the Fererra and D'Este that seem to touch on Visconti include a flowering of court poetry, Schifanioa astrology/triumph paintings, Maria Matteo Boiardo and influential painters such as Cosme Tura or Francessco della Cossa. So I wanted to touch upon this in a timeline as well and perhaps check on how the art preceding and after Petrach triumphs might have been represented in cards or court art.

I hope this doesn't sound like I am wandering all over the map, but there might be other pieces that have some meaning or influences to Mantegna/Visconti card design. I had just found my reproduction of the early 1400's Hofpenspiel cards depicting different tradespeople and the Dover book allegorical engravings of triumphal procession of Maximillion done just around Durer's time. And it may or may not be related, but earlier depictions of Dante's procession of the cardinal virtues or his allegorical spheres/seven planets also come to mind.

I'm still sorting it out and thank anyone for any interest expressed.

Just as a matter of interest, since the so-called Mantegna cards are the subject of this thread, and Dürer has just been mentioned, it is claimed that this latter executed twenty drawings based of the E-series (the older of the two groups of Mantegna cards).

One reference, rarely mentioned in Tarot related material, is Oliver Perrin's 'Reflections on the Tarocchi of Mantegna', published in what I consider to be one of the finest journals around: Alexandria: the Journal of the Western Cosmological Traditions, vol 3, 1995.

I noticed with interest about the Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) mention in the Encyclopedia of the Tarot, Volume I, pages 35 through 47 on the Mantegna. Page 47 has six of the Durer cards. Kaplan cites the Complete Drawings of Albrecht Durer, c. 1974 by Walter Strauss. Kaplan says art historians suggest the first group at around 1496 and a later group by 1506, possibly by Durer's assistant. I can at least cite the listing of 21 Durer cards and the 'tarocchi of Mantegna' cards:

Durer-Knight and Page
Mantegna E-Chavalier VI

Durer-The Doge
Mantegna E. Doxe VII

Durer-Pope-
Mantegna E-Papa X

Durer-Muse Calliope
Mantegna D-Caliope XI

Durer Muse Urania
Mantegna D-Urania XII

Durer Muse Thalia
Mantegna D- Talia XVI

Durer-Muse Melpomene
Mantegna D-Melpomene XVII

Durer-Muse Euterpe
Mantegna-Euterpe XVIII

Durer-Muse Apollo
Mantegna D-Apollo XX

Duerer-Muse Logic
Mantegna C-Loica XXII

Duerer-Muse Rhetoric
Mantegna C-Rhetorica XXIII

Duerer-Muse Philosophy
Mantegna C-Philosophia XXVIII

Duerer-The Genius of Time
Mantegna B-Chronico XXXII

Durer-Cosmos
Mantegna B-Cosmico XXXIII

Durer-Prudence
Mantegna B-Prudencia XXXV

Durer-Justice
Mantegna B-Justicia XXXVII

Durer-Hope
Mantegna B-Speranza XXXVOOOO

Durer-Faith
Mantegna B-Fede XXX

Durer-Mercury
Mantegna A-Mercurio XXXXII

Durer-Jupiter
Mantegna A-Mercurio XXXXVI

Durer-Angel of Primum Mobile
Mantegna-Primo Mobile XXXXVIIII

At some point if you come across Durer or similar samples, it might be an interesting link or a look-see. Thanks for the mention of the books and other comments.

Just fyi

Some discussion and notes of historical Italian interest might have been posted in the old tarottales@yahoo.com (outgrowth of the cancelled antiquetarots)---but a newer group with excellent historical Visconti, Mantegna and other early Italian historical resources is forming. If you pop over to tarottales@yahoo.com, a gentleman has posted an early draft of a historical webpage. He is good enough to correct my wanderings at many points, so I am hoping to be more tidy and apt in some of historical meandering.
Thank you and hope to post more as I learn...
Mari H.

Tom Tadforlittle's chart

of "more than gaming" references to card playing, including Mantegna, triumph cards, etc., from the mid-1400s onward

http://www.tarothermit.com/more.htm

Some researchers might want to include these references in their timelines of playing cards. It is rather valuable if this what people are interested in.

I wanted to call people's attention to an essay by Adam McLean on the so-called Mantegna Tarot:

http://levity.com/alchemy/mantegna.html

So-called because not only was it not a Tarot deck, it was not even a deck of cards at all but a series of prints. It is also wrongly attributed to Andreas Mantegna (1431-1506).

Here is another essay from the same website by Rafael T. Prinke, which references some of the points Mari brought up in her original post:

http://levity.com/alchemy/prink-ma.html

Felicity

Err....it can be slightly confusing...

There's at least two Mantegna series.

There's at least 5-7 cited/attributed "Ferarra" patterns by Berti in his introductory essay of partial Ferarra decks in the book for the Sola Busca. They range from handpainted to processes also related to early copper-engraving over a 20 year period.

The dating that is elegantly presented in Berti's introduction may be not the last word. When I let a few history-minded people know....sigh, even as they read the Italian sources, dates can vary within a five year period. For cards might have been produced for things such as marriages, celebrations, etc., and the elegant Marquis Niccolo the III had more than 20 recognized offspring to arrange such things. The joke of the time for Nicollo the III is in terms of kids, 300 on either side of the Po River might be his.

At some point, I may cite the Berti's names for the 5-7 patterns, as he might be a good starting point. You may run across variations in dates and names--I believe Berti and Kaplan are in close agreement.

You may also find sources such as Giorgio Vasari (noted in the Rafael Prinke essay) may also have some bias. Vasari is readily available and might be an interesting starting point in popular beliefs of the Renaissance. Vasari is an elegant and gentlemanly artist-writer who can be a little snobby and glossy about his observations. (At least in terms of his biography of Jacobo Pontarmo, Vasari really disliked the quiet artisan of Pontarmo and presented a miserly, strange personality. Vasari neglected to mention fraternal study groups, at least two orphans Pontarmo sponsored and brought up, and enough riches and continued partronage from the Medici to buy and build on two vacant lots in a nice neighborhood during the seige of Florence and afterwards. I noticed the same presentation in at least three text that heavily cite Vasari).

Sorry to be long-winded...just a few suggestions that you can run across confusing bits and pieces.

Mari H.

Well, here's one link...

That isn't quite related, but I didn't want to lose it . It is an Italian text of Petrach's trump verses.

http://petrarch.freeservers.com/trionfi/