A solution, where Justice is low, would be to look to a reduced sequence (16 cards) as represented by the surviving cards of the Cary-Yale plus a few more. Justice could be put with the Empress, Emperor, and Love, as pertaining to them. Putting Justice with Love makes it pertain to the marriage contract and the duties of husband and wife. A consequence is then the card no longer has any ribaldry, unless it gets it by virtue of the next suit card, Fortitude. Then the suit that would go with Time (cosmic time as opposed to that of the human lifetime) and Eternity would be Coins. Celestial bodies and the spheres in which they revolved, and even the spheres above them, were thought to be circular, God's favorite shape.
2. It is difficult to say much with any confidence about the Star, Moon, and Sun cards during Francesco Sforza’s lifetime because they are all “second artist” cards. Identifying the Star with Venus indeed fits with the fabled ancestry of the Visconti, descended from Venus by way of her son Anchises, his son Ascanius, and his son Anglus (Filelfo’s “Anglo”). We have discussed this geneology on THF (especially in the thread starting at viewtopic.php?f=11&t=917&p=13402&hilit=Anchises#p13402). Another possibility, if the card originated in some other city, is the Star of Bethlehem. On the Milan card, it would seem to me that the lady is looking more to Christianity, perhaps as a redoing of the Cary-Yale’s Hope card, than to the ancestress Venus. Later tarots, however, certainly did use Venus. In the Cary Sheet, a naked lady with a star on her shoulder pours from a vessel. Since there are four other stars on the card, and Venus typically was portrayed nude, one may conclude that she is Venus. There is also the Leber Star card, with a goddess in the sea and a ship; Venus was associated with the launching of ships.
3. Whether the Moon lady is holding a broken bow, or bowstrings, has been put into question. I am not sure who was first, but a widely accepted alternative is to be found in one of Tiberio Gonard's contributions to Visconti Tarots, 2002, a translation of Tarocchi dei Visconti, 1998. Gonard (p. 91) calls it "reins" and says it is because she was considered a tamer of animals. On THF others--I thought it was first Marco but I cannot find the post--identified it as a bridle, primarily associated with Temperance, whose depiction often has just such a bridle (e.g. Corregio's "Allegory of Virtue", http://mini-site.louvre.fr/mantegna/acc/xmlen/section_8_6.html). Diana was a goddess demanding absolute chastity, so this fits. A bowstring from broken bow at least fits, as there was a popular story by Boccaccio ("Caccia di Diana", c. 1334), sometimes illustrated on wedding chests, in which women following Diana change their allegiance to Venus, break their bows and marry the stags they have killed, now changed to handsome young men..
4. Explaining the sad face on the Moon lady by saying that these celestials are captives of Eternity seems to me to jump the gun. They are only captured when we get to the end, the New Jerusalem, and in any case only the Moon lady is sad. It might be said that she is sad because she knows she will be captured. The problem is that we really don’t know the references. Diana would be sad if her nymphs left her, or had been intemperate, discarding their bridles (as a variation on breaking their bows). Also, it is possible that the Star, Moon, and Temperance lady is someone belonging to the Sforza family who had a sad end; my candidate would be Elisabetta Maria Sforza, Francesco and Bianca Maria’s younger daughter, who died in childbirth in 1472 and for whom these card might have been intended as a memorial. I have expanded on this at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=365&p=4912&hilit=Elisabetta%E2%80%A6#p4912
5. The explanation for why the order goes from Star to Moon to Sun as the order of brightness, each triumphing over the one before, is generally accepted. It was given by Piscina c. 1565 as well.
6. Her reference to the various other planets in terms of astrology has no apparent relationship to the PMB. Perhaps it relates to later versions of the cards, or some schema of interpretation that she could not follow through on. John Shephard did an interpretation of the whole sequence in terms of Renaissance astrology in his book The Tarot Trumps. On THF an interpretation in terms of the planetary spheres in Dante’s Divine Comedy has been worked out by Phaeded.
7. She did not try to explain the little boy on the Sun card, on a cloud reaching for the Sun. Some have appealed to the ancient and medieval view, I think going back to Plato in the Phaedrus, that each planet and star has its own "genius". It seems to me it might also be the purified soul reaching for God or Christ, frequently symbolized by the sun. "Become as little children", Jesus said (Matt. 18:3). That leads into the next card, the Angel.
8. Besides the “New Jerusalem”, it has been proposed that the walled city in the “World” card might also refer to Milan itself in the plans of the Sforza, as worked out by the architect.
9. Fool. Moakley starts out:
That does not apply to the tarot Fool. In the game, it is just the reverse. If the player who has the Fool in his or her hand wants to avoid losing a valuable card, the Fool can be played instead. As she also says:He is not one of the trumps but rather, their worst enemy. During the entire time the procession has been moving he has been threatening it with the club he carries.
This sounds like a very cooperative relationship with the other trumps. It is rather like Jesus's self-sacrifice in a state of powerlessness for the sake of humanity. At the end of the hand, both he and the Bagatella are valuable point-getters, however. The analogy might be to their worth if "played right" after the end of life (comparable to the hand).Together with the first and last of the trumps, the Fool counts as one of the special "Tarot trumps" in calculating the value of one's hand. But in actual play he can take nothing, and his only value is that he may be played at any time instead of following suit, so as to save a valuable card.
10. On the seven feathers, she says
Yes, another self-sacrifice, like the Bagatella's. Oddly, when discussing Giotto's Folly, a possible model for the card, she says:The seven feathers in his hair, and the ragged penitential garments which he wears, show that he is the personification of Lent, which puts an end to the Carnival season. According to custom, one of his feathers will be pulled out at the end of each week in Lent. The figure of Lent himself will be destroyed in effigy on Holy Saturday when the fast ends.
Perhaps Giotto, too, had Lent in mind. The posture seems to imitate, foolishly or mockingly, that of a pope blessing the faithful, in this case the crowd at the end of the parade. There is also the play on "fool" in I Corinthians, with the fool in the eyes of the world, the fool for God, who is no fool but the most prudent of all, because he sees life as a whole, including after death. It is the "Holy Fool" again.The association of feathers with folly goes back at least to Giotto's time, for we find in the Cappella dell'Arena at Padua, which Giotto began to decorate about 1306, the vice of Folly depicted as a woman with a feather headdress a little like an American Indian's, but with the feathers more widely spaced. She is bare-legged, and her dress has a scalloped or ragged hem which is above her knees in front and trails down to the floor in back. She appears to be pregnant, and has a braided girdle.
In that case, the pregnancy is symbolic of rebirth.
Here is the passage from Frazer (from https://books.google.com/books?id=dQdph ... rs&f=false):
It is rather clear that the feathers, especially given that there are seven of them, signify Lent.Thus in the Abruzzi they hang a puppet of tow, representing Lent, to a cord, which stretches across the street from one window to another. Seven feathers are attached to the figure, and in its hand it grasps a distaff and spindle. Every Saturday in Lent one of the feathers is plucked out, and on Holy Saturday, while the bells are ringing, a string of chestnuts is burnt for the purpose of sending Lent and its meager fare to the devil.
The Native American headdress for the chief was meant to suggest, I think, the halo that the shamans saw around people, or maybe spirits, evident in the petroglyphs in my part of the world. The same would be true in Northern Italy in Giotto's time and after. What is foolish, even ridiculous, is also a sign of saintliness.
The same is true for the expression on the PMB Fool's face, which is usually taken as the sign of an empty head, devoid of sense. But compare it to the expressions that the Bembo painted on their "Martyr Saints" (2013 Brera Catalog p. 81, dated by them to c. 1450):
They are lost in the unfathomable inwardness that ps.-Dionysius described in his allegorical reading of Moses' journey up Mt. Sinai (in Mystical Theology, newly translated by Traversari in Florence, c. 1436):
Of course it is the hallmark of the fool to "know nothing". And Saturn, besides being an evil planet, was also associated with wisdom and the Golden Age. He is a comic character, but there is an ironic twist.Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.
In discussion on THF (http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1168&start=40#p19091, "Phaeded" argued that the Giotto Folly was shown looking up, in a posture of mocking the idea of God, in accord with the saying in the Bible, "The Fool says "There is no God". The PMB Fool, however looks straight ahead, at the viewer, in a kind of vacant gaze, more attending to his own whirling thoughts than anything outside.
"Phaeded" also argues that feathers were in fact a symbol of the demonic in the medieval-renaissance period, citing Ruth Mellinkoff's article "“Demonic Winged Headgear,” Viator 16 (1985), pp. 367–81. However the feathers in that article are all in the context of wings on the head or helmet, i.e. masses of feathers in the shape of wings. There is no mention of isolated feathers, much less precisely seven of them. And even in the case of wings, the attitude was sometimes ambivalent in the Middle Ages, becoming more so in the Renaissance. She says that wings got their demonic character by association with Greco-Roman gods or heroes, a Mercury or a Perseus, thought of as demons by Christians.However they were also thought of as expressive of noble qualities, in the case of Perseus, and even qualities that anticipated Christianity, such as Hermes' role, comparable to that of Christ in the Last Days,, as the conveyer of souls to heaven or hell. In the Bolognese
10. "Phaeded", in the discussion (see my previous link), drew attention to the goiter on the PMB Fool. This is a feature that Moakley does not address. Phaeded observes that in the Middle Ages goiter was taken as a sign of insanity. To be sure, that is what the term "Matto" means as well. And actually, "dullness" would be more specific. In any case, there is another aspect. The PMB Fool's goiter is reminiscent of the ailing Fisher King, an important figure in the romances that these nobles read. The salmon the Fisher King traditionally fished for had phallic connotations, and his personal history is one of sexual folly (as is Folly's, on one level). He is a symbol for the ails of the world. Yet as fisher he is also Christ, the "fisher of men", whose symbol was the fish, and whose castle was not of this world. It is like the city in a bubble of the PMB "second artist" last card, which the Fool follows, in Moakley's presentation of the imagined pageant that is the tarot sequence. Another analogy is to Oedipus, Greek for "swollen foot", also a euphemism for the phallus. His sexual folly, once he realizes it, casts him out of the city of which he was king, and he blinds himself in atonement to the god of light. It is another precursor to the King of Lent, whose allegiance is to the new god of light and purity. Yet Oedipus as a result becomes a wandering seer, with Apollo's gift of prophecy, as is clear in the next drama in the trilogy
This is me talking, not Moakley. I am just trying to make sense of her contrast between Lent/Fool and Carnival/Bagatino. For the Fool, she only refers to his being "the spirit of Lent" and "the successful outsider":
That of course hardly describes the spirit of Lent! And such freedom has both evil and good aspects. To do as one pleases is not to "love your neighbor as yourself." To mock society, even to mock religion, is not to be above society or religion, any more than Erasmus's quintessential Renaissance work Praise of Folly, which certainly mocked both, meant to be above either. Or the participants in the "Mass of Fools", which made fun of Christendom's most holy ritual, felt themselves above the Mass as performed the rest of the year.He is the successful outsider, the man who has escaped from the demands of society, and no longer attempts to dress or act to please it. He is the prince above all princes, who dares to do as he pleases.
11. Where is the Fool in the sequence? It is clear from the rules that the Fool is not a triumph, nor a member of any suit, because he can be played at any time and never, or almost never, takes a trick. (There is one exception, pointed out to me by Alain Bougereal, namely in the "Grand Slam": if the Fool is played last, after a player has one every trick, it also wins the last trick.That is a special case.) For that reason Moakley places him on the sidelines. Yet she also places him at the end. This is because she believes, perhaps rightly, that the personification of Lent came at the end of the procession, to signify that Carnival was over and Lent was about to begin. There is also some precedent for this placement, namely that the "Steele sermon" in fact places this card last, even while giving it the number 0. But in the Roman numerals in which the order was indicated, 0 is not a number. There is also ample precedent for putting the Fool first, before the Bagatto, which is where the Arabic number 0 would go. The Bertoni poem in fact lists the Fool next to the Bagatto, as the lowest of the special cards. Many other poems of the time do so as well. These are all much later than the PMB, of course, and even later than the "Steele Sermon".
Dummett in Game of Tarot argued that the Fool was likely the first triumph in the beginning, because the idea of a "wild card" was a new one, and it is not likely that two new ideas--the special suit of triumphal cards--would be introduced at the same time. However it is not clear that all 22 cards were introduced at the same time; it may have started with a lower number. If so, the Fool might have been one of the additions, and so a "new idea" at a different time, a wild card from the start.
The Fool could be put first and also put last. In the 18th century it in fact became the 22nd trump in some places. An alternative would be to see the cards as grouped in a circle, in which the Fool is placed between the last card and the first. In that case it would be both and neither.
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