catboxer
Y'all have brought up some extremely thorny and complicated issues about the early, early decks. The most interesting one concerns the question of whether the Visconti-Sforza was the first real Tarot, i.e., whether its trump sequence contained the Devil and the Tower.
Bringing up the fact that those trumps haven't been found in the Brambilla or Cary-Yale packs either doesn't really shed any light on the question, because the Visconti-Sforza is the only one of the three that's anywhere near complete. Sixty-seven cards survive from the 86-card (it's widely thought) Cary-Yale, but only eleven of them are trumps, and three of those -- Faith, Hope, and Charity, are unfamiliar. We don't really know what that deck was, but it was certainly not a standard Tarot. It may have been an experimental prototype. Only two trumps still remain from the Brambilla pack, the Emperor and Wheel of Fortune.
I think probably the Visconti-Sforza did originally have those two missing trumps, because it's like a standard Tarot pack in every other way. The reason I think that is because the earliest Italian woodblock cards we know of (crude, ugly suckers they are) have both. These date from the late 1400's or maybe early 1500's. (See Stu Kaplan's Encyclopedia II, pages 272, 275, and 276.) And I'm also convinced that the working-class, woodblock cards are derivative. You wouldn't expect Joe the Barber to be enough of a neoplatonic adept to design the trump sequence.
I'm also glad Mari has brought in the topics of the Mantegna Deck and the work of Dante Algheri. The Mantegna is not really a Tarot (it was printed on paper) and certainly wasn't for gaming. Its 50-picture sequence, as Mari suggests, was probably used for something more like instruction, maybe instruction in the new Platonism that was so prevalent then. It's hierarchal and ladder-like, just as Dante's universe appears to be. I find that the picture in that sequence that really does it for me is the last and highest one, "Prima Causa." It's right out of Dante, it's pure neoplatonism, and it sheds a lot of light on the culture and philosophy that probably informed the creation of the Tarot trumps.
Bringing up the fact that those trumps haven't been found in the Brambilla or Cary-Yale packs either doesn't really shed any light on the question, because the Visconti-Sforza is the only one of the three that's anywhere near complete. Sixty-seven cards survive from the 86-card (it's widely thought) Cary-Yale, but only eleven of them are trumps, and three of those -- Faith, Hope, and Charity, are unfamiliar. We don't really know what that deck was, but it was certainly not a standard Tarot. It may have been an experimental prototype. Only two trumps still remain from the Brambilla pack, the Emperor and Wheel of Fortune.
I think probably the Visconti-Sforza did originally have those two missing trumps, because it's like a standard Tarot pack in every other way. The reason I think that is because the earliest Italian woodblock cards we know of (crude, ugly suckers they are) have both. These date from the late 1400's or maybe early 1500's. (See Stu Kaplan's Encyclopedia II, pages 272, 275, and 276.) And I'm also convinced that the working-class, woodblock cards are derivative. You wouldn't expect Joe the Barber to be enough of a neoplatonic adept to design the trump sequence.
I'm also glad Mari has brought in the topics of the Mantegna Deck and the work of Dante Algheri. The Mantegna is not really a Tarot (it was printed on paper) and certainly wasn't for gaming. Its 50-picture sequence, as Mari suggests, was probably used for something more like instruction, maybe instruction in the new Platonism that was so prevalent then. It's hierarchal and ladder-like, just as Dante's universe appears to be. I find that the picture in that sequence that really does it for me is the last and highest one, "Prima Causa." It's right out of Dante, it's pure neoplatonism, and it sheds a lot of light on the culture and philosophy that probably informed the creation of the Tarot trumps.