Fulgour said:
I've been hearing some irate scoffers lately saying
we're koo koo for Dodal, or calling Dodal a doodler.
But for anyone who has worked and studied long
and hard to develop an understanding of Marseille,
Dodal is the anchor to which all else must answer.
From the scans I have seen, Dodal's is undoubtedly an attaching deck. But I am curious as to why you would call it the anchor (better word than Ur!!) - rather than, say, Noblet, given Noblet is older, and more vigorous in style - closer, possibly, to the older renaissance models. The European 18th C. (which is almost to say the French 18th century, such was the dominance of French culture in Europe at that time) sanitised many things in culture, and tarot was no exception, if one compares the cards available. Two examples jump to mind: Le Mât, where Noblet has the animal biting the fool's genitals, emphasising the animal quality of both beast and man; and the XIII-La Mort in Noblet, a heritage of the
Danses Macabres of the 14th-15th C. if ever I saw one: Dodal politely removed it. This reminds me of what happened in French comic theatre, which changed hugely from the cruel and crude farces of the 17th C. (direct descendents of the farces of the Moyen Age and of the Commedia del'Arte, very popular in France), to the cleaner, less anarchic popular comedies of the 18th C., though the people still preferred the old unsubtle stuff.
I am not a tarotist, but I wonder why the 18th century - Dodal, Payen or Conver - is the TdM lynchpin for those who are. Undoubtedly the artist who drew the Dodal was more accomplished that the one who did the Noblet model; likewise, as Flornoy points out, between the Conver and the Dodal, but I didn't think you would say that's one of the criteria applied. Noblet has popular vitality that the others lack. So what are the criteria? If we found tomorrow a tarot pack in the Marseille style dating back to 1600 that had features found later, while others had been removed by Dodal or Conver to conform to decency laws or for the sake of aesthetics, or for some reason of their own, would that qualify as a TdM, and an anchor?
As for restorations/recreations - I agree the latter word is better. But if the old woodblocks of the 16th-17th centuries (and possibly before) were destroyed by the time Dodal's carver got to work (no doubt under the strict influence of Mme de Maintenon), so all he might have had was Noblet's model, which he had to sanitise, can we not also say that Dodal and Conver are also "recreations?" Elements which we might consider crucial for an initiatory or divinatory understanding of the cards (the Pances/Papesses' egg, the Mât's genitals), appear and disappear, numbers of flower petals vary, Valets are indoors or outdoors, etc. Since much of the card interpretations are founded on such details, then can we ever be certain that we are interpreting "TdM iconogaphy and symbolism", rather than simply one version of it? It seems to me much of the quarrel around finding an Ur or anchor, takes place because admitting that there several, not one TdM, as well as hybrid Marseille-Besançon, etc., would destroy any pretension to a beautiful unified pythagorician system of ancient esoteric symbols and mathematics. As Rusty said -
diversity in unity; unity in diversity.
Edited after reading the another post of Shalott: the above remarks bear on the choice of colours as well.
