79-87, Staves, Card X (Wheel) (Moakley), with Updating (Howard)

[Conclusion of p. 79.Again, the images of the cards derive from Dummett, The Visconti-Sfoza Cards, 1986.]

I BASTONI (Staves)
Next in the procession is the suit of Staves. At first sight it seems only to herald the Triumph of Fortune, but the Carnival crowd, eager to find a ribald meaning, will pair Staves and Cups in the same way as they paired the urns of Temperance and the club of Fortitude. So the Staves not only herald Fortune, they are also the followers of the Triumph of Love. Like the Kings and Queens of the other suits, those of the suit of Staves bear the same regal scepter as the Carnival King, the Emperor, and the Empress. Several of the suit cards bear the proud Visconti motto, "A bon droyt." The crossed legs of the King of Staves may be intended to suggest the Greek letter Chi. The legs of the King of Coins are similarly crossed. It may be fanciful to suggest that the letter Chi was meant to stand for "chrysos," the Greek word for gold. The equation of staves and coins as both meaning gold would, in this ribald context, suggest the old, old equation of gold and faeces.

[start p. 80]
NOTES I BASTONI
Staves is a masculine suit; the Ten is highest of the number cards.

Note that the tack-hole in the Two of Staves is at the bottom, showing that it must have been hung upside down.

[. Several pages of Staves numeral cards follow. Start p. 86:]

X LA RUOTA (The Wheel of Fortune)
Fortune is shown here in her most common form, with the revolving wheel and four human figures. According to a medieval epigram, the one on the way up is growing a pair of ass ears, and is saying "Regnabo" (I shall reign). The one on top has full-grown ass ears, holds the rod of a ruler, and is saying "Regno" (I reign). The figure on the way down has lost his ass ears, but acquired a tail. He is saying "Regnavi" (I reigned). The lowliest of the group, the man at the bottom, is the only fully human figure of the four. His words are "Sum sine regno" (I am without reign). Fortune herself has a pair of golden wings, and that expression of blissful unawareness of which Dante writes in his description of her:

But she is blissful and she does not hear;
She, with the other primal creatures, gay
Tastes her own blessedness, and turns her sphere.
Between the triumphs of Love and Death,
Fortune turns her wheel and dispenses both joy and sorrow.

The more sophisticated Italians of the Renaissance would find a deeper meaning in the idea that Fortune points to the equivalence of the two seemingly opposite triumphs: to Eros as the god both of love and of death. The beautiful story of Psyche and Eros, well-known at that time, was related to the idea of Hypneros, the funerary Eros pictured with legs crossed and torch held downward. Lorenzo de' Medici referred to "that death in the sense in which lovers are said to die, when they are entirely transformed into the object of their love."

[start p. 87]
NOTES LA RUOTA
Dante's Inferno, Canto VII, lines 94-96, is quoted from Dorothy Sayers' translation, by permission of the publisher, Penguin Books. For Fortune see Patch (Goddess). The medieval idea of Fortune's wheel is drawn from Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, book II, in which Fortune has a long talk with the author. She says: "Rotam volubili orbe versamus infima summis, summa infimis mutare gaudemus. Ascende, si placet, sed ea lege, uti ne, cum ludicri mei ratio poscet, descendere injuriam pates." The idea is strikingly like the Buddhist idea of the wheel of birth and death to which men cling, thereby creating their own sorrow and pain, and may ultimately have sprung from it. There was a corresponding idea that the practice of virtue made Fortune more friendly. "Duce virtute comite Fortuna" is the motto on a medal in Litta (Famiglie) II pt 1, fasc XVII, tav XXI fig 6. On a piece of faience of the Renaissance period Fortune is shown surrounded by Justice, Fortitude, and Prudence, with the Greek motto: "He Tyche akolouthos esti tes aretes" (Fortune is the follower of virtue) (Alexander Speltz, The Coloured Ornament of all Historical Styles, Leipzig, K. F. Koehlers Antiquarium 1914-15, na pl 2,4 fig 3). In the strife between Fortune and Poverty in Boccaccio's De casibus (bk III, ch I), Poverty wins and makes Fortune bind Misery to a pillar. In Gentilshommes campagnards de l'ancienne France, by Pierre de Vaissiere (Paris 1925, p 35), we read of a man who had engraved over an entrance door "Inveni portum; spes et fortuna valete" (I have found harbor; hope and fortune, farewell).

In Dante's time it was said that Fortune's wheel has eight parts: umilta, pazienza, pace, ricchezza, superbia, ira pazienza, guerra, poverta, in which each state of life is across the wheel from its opposite. (Ancona, Uomo, p 12.) Pope Pius II said of Francesco Sforza that he was the only man of his time whom Fortune loved (Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope, tr by Florence A. Gragg New York, Putnam 1959, p 129).

An epigram known about Fortune in the Middle Ages is quoted in Ancona (Uomo) p 13: "Cursus Fortune variatur in more lune: / Crescit, decrescit et eodem sistere nescit. / Elevor in primis, regno tuo utor, in imis / aufero ecce nimis: raro distant ultima / regnabo, regno, regnavi, sum sine regno."

Besides the wheel, Fortune is sometimes shown standing on a ball and carrying a sail. She appears thus in some of the illustrations for Petrarch's Triumph of Chastity. Here the allusion is to the wind, for in Italian various degrees of storm at sea are known as fortuna, fortuna di vento, fortunate, fortunalone. (Niccolo Tommaseo, Nuevo dizionario de' sinonimi della lingua italiana, Napoli 1935, p 1093; in a footnote he reminds us that for Horace Fortune was "domina aequorum.")

The equivalence of love and death was an idea which came to the Renaissance by way of the classical mysteries (Wind, Pagan, p 93). It is the theme of Colonna's famous Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The thought may be related to the loss of the illusory ego in sexual union, as in death, which is so well described in Watts (Nature), ch 8: "Consummation." Van Eyck's painting, "The Marriage of the Arnolfini," contemporary with the Sforza, seems to me a portrait of a man acquainted with this notion.

Wind (Pagan, p a.33ff) tells us that Hypneros, the funerary Eros pictured with legs crossed and torch held downward, is related. to the beautiful story of Eros and Psyche in the Golden Ass of Apuleius; which was well known in medieval and Renaissance times (Haight, Apuleius, p 111ff), He quotes Lorenzo de' Medici: Natura insegna a not temer la morte, ma / Amor poi mirabilmente face/suave a' suoi quel ch'e ad ogni altro amaro," and more plainly: "intendendo questa morte nella forma che abbiamo detto morire. li amanti, quando tutti nella cosa amata si trasformono."


[Scan of pp. 78-79 (Fortezza, Bastoni and notes): https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SNycMsenwcg/ ... ge-006.jpg]

Scan of pp. 80-81 (Ruota, Denari and notes): https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xslJawHiX4w/ ... ge-010.jpg
Scan of Moakley pp. 94-95 (Gobbo and notes, Traditore): https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ShL2QLcETRE/ ... ge-014.jpg]


UPDATING STAVES, CARD X (Howard)

1. Moakley's association of the PMB's Fortitude with Staves is supported by the Beinecke Library's assignment by the Cary-Yale cataloguers (of unknown origin, but before they got to the Beinecke, the current curator has told me in an email, 2008, but adding in 2016 that there are no notes saved) of that virtue to the same suit (http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3432602). As to whether the cataloguer could have been influenced by Moakley (1966), I will wait until the end of the book to discuss.

2. About the Kings' crossed legs in Staves and Coins. That gold is in faeces was a saying in alchemy, perhaps also in metallurgy, as the acids made from sulfur kind of stank. I am not familiar with the letter Chi/X being associated with gold in that context. Or any context. Europeans didn't know Greek in the Middle Ages. It was associated with Christ, but that happened during the Roman Empire when people did know Greek. But neither has to do with crossed legs on some of the kings. It was associated with judges. Panofsky, in his book on Durer, discussing an engraving of Christ holding the scales of justice, says

This attitude, denoting a calm and superior state of mind, was actually prescribed to judges in ancient German law-books.

The king of Staves is pictured with a scepter of authority. He passes judgment. As for why it's on the King of Coins, well, perhaps dealing with money was thought to require a calm mind. What might be slightly ribald on the Staves court cards, I think, are the green sleeves. See Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensleeves), particularly its reference to the Italian form of composition of a song in Elizabethan times. The Queen of Cups, Empress and Charioteer also have such sleeves. However it might simply have been a conventional symbol of fertility.

3. On the Wheel card. A "faience" is, per Google, "glazed ceramic ware, in particular decorated tin-glazed earthenware of the type that includes delftware and maiolica." It is named after Faenza, famous for such products and still producing them.