88-99, Coins, Cards XI-XV, (Hunchback-Tower) (Moakley)

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I DENARI (Coins)

The Suit of Coins heralds the Triumph of Death, but with the symbolic reference of the other suits, it also points forward to the preceding Triumph. In this case, it is the Triumph of Fortune, who deals out gold with one turn of her wheel, and blows with the next. The contrast is more evident in the specific reference to the traitor, or Hanged Man, in the triumph of Death. "Il Traditore" is being punished because he has betrayed his lawful lord for gold.

The Queen of Coins has a robe decorated with designs identical to those on the robe of Fortune. The King's legs are crossed, perhaps to stand for the Greek letter Chi, which looks like an X and means "chrysos" — gold.

The Ace bears a shield on its face, party per pale. This is not a heraldic device of the Visconti-Sforza family. However, the faces of the other coins bear the Visconti sun, and several of the Coins have the motto "A bon droyt"; the Three has cruder suns.

On the feminine suits of Cups and Coins the devices of the Visconti family are emphasized. This audacious tribute, probably to the Visconti bride, leads to the conclusion that the cards may represent a Carnival held soon after the wedding of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti, or even to the possibility that the cards themselves were a wedding present to this couple.

NOTE I DANARI
Coins is a feminine suit; the Ace is highest of the common cards.

The Knight of Coins is lost from the Visconti-Sforza set; this card is from an uncut sheet of fifteenth or sixteenth-century tarocchi in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of James C. McGuire, 1931, number 31.54.159.

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XI   IL GOBBO (The Hunchback, Time)
Time, in Petrarch's poem, had a whole triumph of his own. In the Visconti-Sforza tarocchi, Time becomes merely an attendant of Death. "Il Gobbo" suggests the form of death which comes naturally to the aged man, contrasting with the next card which suggests violent death. His red hat and dark blue robe are trimmed with gold-colored fur. He has white stockings, red shoes, and a great hourglass set in a golden frame.

In modern tarot packs this card is called the Hermit, and the hourglass has become a lantern. In minchiate packs he has kept his old character, and the card also shows a stag, reminiscent of the stags which draw the triumphal car of Time in the illustrations for Petrarch's Trionfi. In the minchiate, too, Time is accompanied by the signs of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and the twelve signs of the zodiac.

The ribaldry which accompanied the Carnival makes one wonder whether it was this version of Time who became the doctor of medicine in one of the comedies for Arlecchino. In this commedia dell'arte, the doctor is holding up a urine glass to diagnose Arlecchino's illness. It is interesting to speculate whether Time's hourglass could have become that glass before it became the lantern of the modern tarot.

NOTES  IL GOBBO
For Father Time see Panofsky (Studies) p 69ff. Time is shown with his hourglass in another early set of tarocchi or (more likely) minchiate, the so-called "Tarot of Charles VI," long supposed to be identical with a set for which the painter's bill was still extant, dated 1392, but now known to be fifteenth-century work, probably Italian. cf British Museum (Descriptive) pt I p 19.1 The remaining cards of this set are reproduced Jeux des cartes cartes tarots et de cartes numerales du 14. au 18. siecle (Paris; Societe des bibliophiles francais 1844), and this particular card of that set is also shown in Allemagne (Cartes) pl facing p 14. In an uncut sheet of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century tarocchi belonging to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Time seems already to be turning into the Hermit of the later tarocchi. The object in his hand could be either an hourglass or a lantern,

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Hermits are associated with the triumph of Death in medieval and Renaissance art. They appear in the famous painting of that triumph in the Campo Santo at Pisa, and in many of the Dances of Death along with Pope, Emperor, Empress, and Fool, besides other figures not found in the tarocchi. Hermits were also favorite characters in May-plays and other comedies, which loved to ridicule them as hypocrites (see Smith, Commedia) p 46. For the doctor examining Arlecchino's urine see Enci spett, art "Commedia dell'arte" p 943.

XII   IL TRADITORE (The Traitor, The Hanged Man)
The special punishment of the recreant or perjured knight was to be hung up by the heels and beaten. If the culprit was dead, his body was hung in this manner, and if he had escaped he was painted thus. Francesco Sforza's father, Muzio Attendolo, was once the subject of this public ignominy. As mentioned earlier, the Pope had given him the title of Count of Catignola in gratitude for his services as a condottiere. When Muzio later offered the services of his army to one of the Pope's enemies, the Pope ordered him depicted on all the bridges and gates of Rome, hung by the right foot to a gallows, with his heraldic mattock in his right hand. In the other hand was a scroll with this inscription: "I am the peasant Sforza of Cotignola, traitor, who have committed XII treasons against my honor; promises, agreements, pacts I have broken."

This type of punishment was inflicted not only in Italy, but in Germany and Scotland, where it was called "baffling." By extension, the custom of the "shame-painting" was also directed against those who did not pay their debts. In one German shame-painting the debtor is hanging by his heels and the Devil is beating him with a club. Beside him is hung his armor, also reversed. In some tarot cards a dancing man called Prudence takes the place of the Hanged Man. Sometimes the card is. called The Acrobat. This seems to hint at some actual processions in which an acrobat did stunts while tied to a gallows by one foot. In the minchiate cards, "Il Traditore" carries a bag of money in each hand, undoubtedly a suggestion of Judas with his thirty pieces of silver.

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NOTES IL TRADITORE
For this kind of hanging see the definitions of "baffle" in Webster's unabridged dictionary (which does not describe it) in Murray's New English Dictionary and in W. W. Skeat's Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. The Italian word for it may have been "impiccare"; although this word normally implies hanging by the neck, "L'Impiccato" is one of the Italian names for this card. The etymology of the word seems to be unknown, but I have made no real search on this question.

To hang corpses by their feet, or to paint traitors so, seems to have been more common than baffling the living man. In 1415 Muzio Sforza and Pandolfello Alopo were both imprisoned and tortured in the course of an intrigue. Alopo was beheaded and afterwards hung by the feet. In 1672, after the brutal murder of Cornelius and John de Witt, the friends of Spinoza, the mob danced on their bodies and finally hung them by their feet to a lamp-post. It was then that Spinoza had to be forcibly restrained from risking his life by confronting the mob with a sign which called them "Ultimi barbaroruni." Cf Petrus Johannes Blok, History of the People of the Netherlands (New York 1907) IV 38o (cited and quoted in Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism, by L. S. Feuer (Boston 1958) p 138).

Mussolini and his mistress were subjected to this ignominy after their deaths, as is well known. This took place in the Piarzale Loreto in Milan. A curious instance of baffling the living man was recounted in the New York World-Telegram and Sun, Nov 1 1954 p 7. A young officer in the U. S. Army was accused of ordering recruits to hang a fellow trainee by the feet from a tree limb. For the shame-painting used against a debtor in Germany see "The Jewish Execution in Medieval Germany and the Reception of Roman Law," by Guido Kisch (in Studi in memoria di Paolo Koschaker L'Europa a ii diritto romano, Milano 1955, n 65-93), or an earlier version of the same article in Historia Judaica v (1943) • 103-132. It mentions hanging by the feet as a method of killing a man as a punishment for theft. One poor fellow hung this way for eight days, and was finally able to free himself, but his feet were too injured to let him get away. I wonder if this was not originally called the "Judas execution" rather than the "Jewish execution," as in German the terms sound more alike than they do in English. However, I have found no instances of Judas shown hanging this way in medieval or Renaissance art.

The corpse of Niccolo Fortebraccio ("Braccio") was so exposed (cf Assum's life of Francesco Sforza in Italian, p 68). Besides the shame-paintings of Muzio Sforza, for which see Assum p 17, there were Raynald and Jordan Orsini, who were depicted on the Capitol head downward at the order of Cola di Rienzi. Vasari mentions several instances of the practice, the best known being the shame-paintings of the men who murdered Lorenzo de' Medici's brother.

Although it was not usual to picture Judas in this way, the presence of the Devil in the same triumphal group inevitably recalls the scenes in the old sacre rappresentazioni where the Devil takes Judas off to Hell. The devils taking souls to Hell usually occur again in the illustrations of Petrarch's Triumph of Death. There is just one suggestion of a "baffled" Judas in "The Gallows of Judas Iscariot" by Archer Taylor (Washington University Studies, Humanistic Series ix (1922) 135-156), which mentions that in northern France and Germany folk see Judas in the moon, hanging from an elder tree by his hair or his feet..."

For the dancing Prudence see the Tarot designs at the end of vol VIII of Monde primitif by Antoine Court de Gebelin (Paris 1781). It was this Tarot which set off modem occult Tarotism. There should be a Prudence in the tarocchi, to make up the four cardinal virtues. Possibly the Sforza agreed with Benjamin Rush, who said while signing the Declaration of Independence, "Prudence is a rascally virtue."

For "Acrobat" as one name for this card see Geschichte and Literatur des Schachspiels, by Antonius van der Linde (Berlin, J. Springer 1874) II 390. That this particular trick was possible appears in Paul Lacroix, Manners, Customs, and Dress during the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance Period (London, Chapman and Hall 1876) p 230. He quotes Mathieu de Coucy to the effect that the Duke of Milan once had a rope 150 feet long stretched across his palace, 50 feet from the ground. A Portuguese acrobat did tightrope stunts on it, including hanging from the rope head downward. On the same page in Lacroix is described a similar performance in 1503, at the obsequies of the Duke Pierre de Bourbon. 30,000 people witnessed this.

Voltaire mentions the hanging of a suicide's body by its feet, in his Prix de la justice et de l'humanite, xxx, 543 (cited and quoted in English translation in Voltaire's Politics, by Peter Gay (Princeton Univ Press 1959) p 270).

XIII LA MORTE (Death)
In all tarot packs Death has the unlucky number thirteen. In modern packs each trump bears both a number and a name, except Death, which bears the number XIII, but no name.

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If we are to believe Vasari, the triumph of Death as an actual Carnival feature was an unheard-of novelty in 1511, when Piero di Cosimo planned one for the Carnival in Florence. The car of Death was prepared in the Hall of the Pope by Piero himself in the greatest secrecy. Until the actual procession nobody but the performers had the slightest idea what was to happen. The car was of vast size, and drawn by black buffaloes. Skeletons and white crosses were the decoration, and on the car was a colossal figure of Death surrounded by tombs. Wherever the car stopped, the tombs opened, and people dressed as skeletons emerged amid the singing of dirges. The attendants of the car wore death's-head masks and carried torches. They rode on the scrawniest horses that could be found, and sang the Miserere in trembling voices. At first the people of Florence thought this an unsuitable subject for a Carnival procession, but they eventually appreciated the novelty of it, and gave it a political interpretation. This was during the time when the Medici were exiled from Florence, and the song of the dead in the procession was interpreted as an address to those who had driven the Medici out, and a promise that they would soon be back:

Morti siam, come vedete,
Cosi morti vedrem voi:
Fummo gia come voi siete
Voi sarete come noi.

(We are dead, as you see; just as dead we shall see you; we were once as you are; you shall be as we.)

NOTES: LA MORTE .
The description of Piero di Cosimo's "Triumph of Death" is all taken from Vasari (Lives) II 416-417.

No doubt the feeling that this triumph was unsuited to Carnival time came from the many Dances of Death painted in churches and cemeteries. They were in Lady Lent's province rather than in Carnival's. Clark (Dance p 113) lists more than twenty of these Dances of Death painted between 1424 and 1635 in cemeteries, churchyards, cathedrals, and churches, all over Europe and as far as Scotland and England, where there was one in the Pardon Churchyard of St Paul's, London, in Coventry and Salisbury Cathedrals, and in Hexham Priory. There was one in the Cemetery of the Innocents, Paris.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries really wallowed in the idea of death. Widows wore little skulls, funeral palls were covered with skulls holding bones in their mouths, etc.

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XIV IL DIAVOLO (The Devil)
The Devil is an indispensable character in the triumph of Death. He is there to take the soul of the wicked Hanged Man off to Hell, as we see him in so many of the sacre rappresentazioni of the Middle Ages. In these and in the illustrations for Petrarch's Triumph of Death, devils are shown taking the souls of the damned to hell, and angel carry the souls of the saved in the other direction. In modern tarot packs Temperance has been given a pair of wings and the number fourteen, to represent these angels. To keep Death in the unlucky thirteenth place, Justice has been transferred to the place of Temperance in the Love group.

Saint Bernardino, in a sermon against card-playing, represented the Devil as saying: "I don't want to be without my breviary, playing-cards, in which various figures are painted, just as they are in the breviaries of Christ, which figures show forth the mysteries of evil. Consider the avarice of money, the stupidity or doggish ferocity of dubs, the goblets or cups drunkenness and gluttony, the swords hatred and war." As with Death, the fearsome fascination of the Devil and his pursuit of the traitor Judas make him a favorite Carnival character in Latin countries.

NOTES IL DIAVOLO
For devils taking souls to Hell see the various illustrations of the Triumph of Death in Massena (Petrarque). They are also in the "Triumph of Death" by Orcagna in the Campo Santo at Pisa. See also Castelli (Demoniaco), especially the paintings and drawings of Italian artists, who seem not to dwell on morbid horrors as much as the Northerners like Bosch. Italians thought of Hell as a place for other people, not you and me. For medieval notions of damnation see Watts (Myth), ch 7.

Saint Bernardino's sermon is cited (Opera omnia .. . opere et labore R. P. Joannis de la Haye Parisini, ed Venetii 1741. t I, sermo XLII de alearum ludo) and quoted in Il Diavolo nella tradizione popolare italiana, by Giuseppe Coechiara (Palermo 1945). In the original Latin it goes: "Nec deficere volo officiis meis Breviaria et Diurna, quae esse jubeo charticellas, in quibus variae figurae pingantur, sicut fieri solet in Breviariis Christi, quae figurae in eis mysticam malitiam praefigurent, ut puta denarii avaritiam, baculi stultitiam seu caninam saevitiam, calices seu cuppae

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ebrietatem et gulam, eases odium et belle." The free translation is mine.

In Mexico to this day papier-mache devils are sold for "Judas popping." This is noted in an issue of Mexico this Month for 1958.

XV LA CASA DEL DIAVOLO (The Devil's House, The Tower)
The Tower is the Hellmouth to which the Devil is carrying Judas. The Hellmouth was a regular part of the medieval religious stage, and was often in the shape of a gigantic dragon's mouth with devils issuing from it. Typical stage settings included "mansions" which ranged from Jerusalem at one side to a pool symbolic of the water needed for any sea-going voyage described in a play. This pool was usually at the opposite end of the stage just next to Hell (a practical location in case the flames got out of hand). In a picture of one such stage, we see the scene of the wicked King Herod's death, and a devil taking a soul away in the shape of achild.

In modern tarot packs the Tower usually has human figures falling from it to the ground. These may have been suggested by some painting such as the "Descent to Hell" by Andrea Mantegna. In this work, the gate of Hell is an arch set in a rough cliff-side. Three bat-winged devils with reptile tails hover in the air before it.

In the eighteenth century, titles on tarot cards were so badly spelled that they often make no sense. In one of these packs the Tower is titled "Lamaisondifie." That may be why this card is now called "La Maison Dieu" (House of God).

NOTES LA CASA DEL DIAVOLO
For the medieval stage see Enci spett, art "Francia," tav LXI. "Hierusalem" is at the spectator's left, and "La mer" is a square pool with a ship on it, taking up about a quarter of the stage. Next to it is Hellmouth in the shape of a gigantic dragon's mouth with devils issuing from it. Behind is a smoking building with prisoners inside. Above Hellmouth is a platform with figures bound to a wheel on their backs. In the same plate is the scene of Herod's death. Mantegna's "Descent to Hell" is reproduced in Hind (Early) vi of plates, pl 500 and 501.

The badly spelled tarot titles are listed in Nuremberg (Katalog) p 15. The Empress is "L'emparabief," the Judgement "Leugement."

[Illustration captions, p. 98 and 99:]
The Devil is lost from the Visconti-Sforza set; this card is from an uncut sheet of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century tarocchi in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of James C. McGuire, 1932, number 31.54.159.

The Tower is lost from the Visconti-Sforza set; this card is from an uncut sheet of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century tarocchi in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of James C. McGuire, 1931, number 31.54•59.

[The sheet is in Kaplan vol. 1, p. 125. Another version, in Budapest, identical except for being a little more complete at the bottom, is in vol. 2, p. 276, the same but a little more complete at the bottom, at http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-icaHABToj_o/V ... lan276.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

Scan of Moakley pp. 96-97 (Traditore notes, Morte and notes): https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uTz9MIfnJNA/ ... ge-015.jpg

Scan of Moakley pp. 98-99 (Diavolo and Casa del Diavolo with notes): https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1ZANt4vkgnI/ ... ge-016.jpg]