Appendix II: Suits, Virtues, and the Visconti di Modrone (Howard)

This post was originally added February 2019, as the amplification of an essay done for Lo Scarabeo's new edition of the Visconti Modrone. Since then, an important fact has come to light, in part as a result of my persistent inquiries to a number of art historians involved with the cards. 

The association of triumphs, or trumps, to suits that the Beinecke website, which I used in my essay for Lo Scarabeo and in the post here (without claiming with any certainty that it was part of the original game)  was undoubtedly the result of a confusion by the scanning department at Yale (of which the Beinecke is a part). Wanting confirmation of his earlier claim that the cards came to Yale in the order then given, assigning specific suits to specific trumps, I contacted the former curator, WilliamKeller,the first to deal with them at Yale, and also a former student who had done a master's thesis on them, Martha Wolff. They assured me that the cards had not had such assignments when they came to Yale, and they contacted the present curator about this. Checking again with the present curator, Mr. Timothy Young, I was informed that the triumphs had been divided into four groups, three of them of three each and one of two, for purposes of storage in four boxes that Yale had acquired, as opposed to five, the triumphs being stored in small groups with each of the four suits. The scanning department then apparently mistook this method of storage as an assignment of triumphs to suits, and labeled the cards accordingly.  Suit assignments for triumphs no longer appear on the Beinecke website, as of April 2019.

As a result, the order of trumps and their suit assignments as presented in the essay for Lo Scarabeo cannot be maintined. That does not vitiate the principle of correlating trumps to suits, which seems to have existed in some early 15th century northern Italian card games, certainly Marziano da Tortona's game of "16 deified heroes" and perhaps, as suggested by Franco Pratesi, the game of "Eight Emperors". It requires considerably more historical argumentation than I presented for Lo Scarabeo, however And the result is a slightly different order of trumps than the order I proposed there, putting the Chariot earlier and Death later.

Another second thought I had is that in the proposed game with the Cary-Yale cards, I do not think that the way in which trumps would have connected with suits in the game would likely have been that a person would have to consider the trumps associated with a particular suits as of that suit for purposes of following suit in a trick. For beginners in the game it would be too easy to make a mistake and not follow that rule, a mistake that would only be discovered later. A better rule would be that the trumps associated with the suit led in a trick take precedence over other trumps in winning a trick. In that case any mistake in remembering the assignment is readily enough recognized during the trick itself. 

For a full presentation of my argument, including not just the Cary-Yale's assignment of trumps to suits but those in other regions as well, see my presentation at https://marzianotoludus.blogspot.com.