Archivio di Stato di Modena, Camera ducale Estense, Guardaroba, 126, Conto di debiti e crediti, II semestre 1505Francescini also remarks that the word is mentioned in Avignon in 1505 as well, but does not provide the documentation.
c. 93r, 30 giugno:
«Conto de merzaria de Guardaroba de' havere... E de' havere adì ultimo dito [giugno] per pare dexedoto de carte videlicet pare oto de tarochi e pare dexe fra schartini e carte de ronfa, quali fono portati a Viguenza, vene di Guradaroba al 3+, a c. 65 ... pare 18»
c. 96r, 26 dicembre: «E de' havere adì ditto per quindexe para de schartini e tarochi fo mandati a Viguenza per el Signore; vene di Guardaroba a 3+, a c. 68....[para] n. 15»
The most obvious person to have started using the word, at least in Italy, would be Alfonso d'Este, who had just returned from travels in Piedmont, Avignon, Burgundy, and many other places, to see his father Ercole I before he died, an event that most likely happened in January 1505 (Some accounts, such as Wikipedia, say June; but not many others disagree; e.g. the 2004 Lucrezia Borgia, by Sarah Bradford, which gives the date as 25 January 1505.) Alfonso was in June of 1505 the new Duke of Ferrara.
Since Alfonso had recently been in Avignon; it is possible that he got the term "tarochi" from there, or that he started using the new term, and they followed suit, so to speak However this Avignon dating remains uncertain.
Alfonso and his whole family were avid card players. One of the early painted decks, of which there are still extant cards, was done for Ercole in about 1473; and before that, court account records show several purchases of painted tarot decks. Moreover, Alfonso and his court are at the nexus of other theories about the origin of the words tarocchi and tarot. Scartino, the game with the new discard rule (allowing the dealer to discard a few of his cards at the beginning of play and take the undealt remainder in exchange), was also played there and, you will notice, mentioned in the same sentence with tarochi. Also, the game with rules similar to tarocchi but with an ordinary deck, Triumphs, may have been introduced from Spain (as Andrea hypothesizes) via Naples and Alfonso's sister Beatrice, who grew up there.
What does Alfonso have to do with Dionysus? One indication is in William F. Prizer's "Music in Ferrara and Mantua at the Time of Dosso Dossi," (in Dosso's Fate, ed. Ciammitti et al, pp. 295f), He says that Alfonso was in Savoy in 1502, where he hired his principal music copyist. He adds that 1502 is when he married Lucrezia Borgia. Lucrezia enjoyed frattole, hiring from Mantua at least three composers in that genre; Alfonso preferred French music. I mention frottole because that's what Alione's poem was, the one with the word "taroch" in it.
That Lucrezia was familiar with the game with the 22 special cards is almost a given. There is also the fact of the death of the messenger between her and her secret would-be lover Francesco Gonzaga, her brother-in-law: the messenger, Ercole Strozzi was killed on June 6, 1508, with 22 stab wounds (Bellonci, Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia, p. 271, repeated by Sarah Badford in Lucrezia Borgia, p. 282). The murderer was never found; the biographers interpret the murder as a warning from the Estensi, either Duke Alfonso or Cardinal Ippolito, about the fate of adulterers. After that, Francesco appears to have broken off the correspondence.
The biographers do not comment on the significance of 22. However Gianfrancesco Pico, the more famous Pico's nephew, writing in 1507, says "sortium multa sunt genera"--there are many kinds of lots-- including "in figuris chartaceo ludo pictis," which I think means "games with figures pictured on paper" (http://www.geocities.ws/anytarot/picocards.html; I think that this reference was found by Ross Caldwell). "Lots" here has the sense in which one draws lots out of an urn, to decide who will do what (e.g. Esther 14:26, http://www.sacredbible.org/studybible/OT-19_Esther.htm). Sortilege, as it was called, was a well-established practice with dice, dominoes, etc. There were books to look up what fortunes corresponded to what number; 21 was the number of combinations of two dice. Pico is saying that cards with figures on them were used in a similar way. There are in fact extant cards with dominoes on them, i.e. two dice; a Sun-Moon card is at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=321&p=9503 . This is not a tarot card; but Christie's auction house shows one tarot Sun card with the same style of sun; their expert estimates the card (with a Star and a Knight of Cups) to be Lombard, 15th century (for discussion see http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=402&p=4972&hilit=auction#p4972). The Sun-Moon with the domino is one of five cards from the German Liber Chronicarum of 1493 reproduced on pp. 38-39 of Il Castello dei Tarocchi (ed. Andrea Vitali, in his essay "La Scala Mistica dei Tarocchi"); the others do not resemble tarot cards. I'd guess, since they all have dominoes that combine two dice faces, there were probably 21 in that set. For 22, there might have been a "null" card as well, the Fool, called "null" in the late 15th century "Steele Sermon"; there was also a "null" roll in dice games. The correspondence between tarot and dice has been discussed thoroughly by Ross Caldwell at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=321&start=10#p4011.)
That the Estensi used cards for sortilege is indicated in vol. 2 of Julia Cartwright's 1923 Isabella d'Este by (at http://www.archive.org/stream/isabelladestemar02adyj/isabelladestemar02adyj_djvu.txt). On p. 205 she cites a description by Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera (Impresa p. 59f), of Isabella's rooms in Mantua, completed 1522 (quoted by "Huck" at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=432&p=10778&hilit=lotto#p10778; on the same web-page he documents from Cartwright's books the Estensi love for cards). I highlight the words most important for us:
These four little rooms which Isabella kept for her private use still retain much of their original decoration —...the finely carved wood-work, the azure and gilding of the ceiling, the delicately inlaid panelling of the walls, and the doors of richly coloured marbles. Here, between intarsiatura views of cities and palaces, we recognise her favourite devices and mottoes, the musical notes and rests, and the words Nev spe nec metu which supplied Equicola with a subject for his treatise, the altar supporting a lyre, the candelabra with the letters U.T.S., which Paolo Giovio interprets as Unum sufficit in tenehris, and the Lotto cards with the mystic number XXVII, vinti sette, signifying that she had vanquished all her foes - which motto, adds the Bishop of Nocera, "seems allowable in so great a princess."We will meet Equicola later on in this section. "Lotto" is Italian for "fate," like the English "lot." In this connection there is an Allegory of Fortune by the Ferrara court painter Dosso Dossi showing Fortune grasping after some papers held by a youth who is about to put them in an urn; it is described and shown at http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=943. The description interprets the papers as lottery tickets, adding that a similar bundle was a favorite device of Isabella's, indicating the vicissitudes of fortune. Such papers were used in a game of chance, according to Humfrey and Lucca (p. 215). Also, lots were drawn in some places to determine who would serve in civic office, at a time when elections were viewed as corrupt (http://www.bingomagic.co.za/history_of_bingo.html). In any case, the papers are much like Isabella's "cards of fate." It appears likely that the 22 stab wounds had something to do with the fate of someone besides the victim, and I think suggest that a set of 22 figures on paper were used to tell fortunes.
But frottole, murders, and "cards of fate" do not yet imply Dionysus. For that we have to look at the art that Alfonso sponsored. In 1511 or so he had his sister Isabella's art programmer, Mario Equicola, write descriptions for six paintings, all on the themes of Bacchus and Venus. Then Alfonso slowly commissioned the paintings that Equicola had imagined, four on Bacchus and two on Venus. Eventually all hung in one room of Alfonso's camerino, a long room in his private suite overlooking the market in Ferrara.
Admittedly 1511 is later than the 1505 of the court records about "tarochi." But he had to consolidate his rule, accumulate his famous cannons (reputed the best in Europe, of his own design) and fight some expensive wars. With the death of his nemesis Pope Julius II in 1512, he finally had time and money.
Alfonso had begun work on expanding his private rooms as early as 1507, perhaps with such a project in mind ("From Ercole I to Alfonso I: New Discoveries about the Camerini in the Castello Estense of Ferrara," by Jadranka Bentini, in Dosso's Fate, p. 361). As we will see, the themes were from texts studied by the humanists, including Alfonso's own teacher, Batista Guarini, in the 15th century. Even the artistic style began earlier, with Mantegna, as I shall show. But first Alfonso. My information comes primarily from art history books and my own digging.
Joseph Manca, in "What is Ferrarese about Bellini's Feast of the Gods?" in Joseph Manca, ed., Titian 500, p. 303) writes:
As early as 1494 Alfonso showed interest in the work of painters in Ferrara. A ferrarese courtier reported to Isabella in Mantua in May of that year that Alfonso had diverted the court painter Roberti from making a portrait of his father, Duke Ercole I, b occupying the artist on another project and that Alfonso "sempre li sta sopra," that is, stood over Roberti's shoulder watching him as he worked (Footnote 12: The important passages of the document are cited in Giuseppe Campori, Artisti degli Estensi: I pittori [Modena, 1875], 49). Alfonso himself was an amateur paitner, as is recorded by several early biographers and documents.[Footnote 13 has numerous documents].Alfonso had a reputation, before becoming Duke, of being "pocho savio," hardly wise ("Dosso's Public: The Este Court at Ferrara," by Andrea Bayer, in Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara, ed. Humfrey and Lucco, p. 27):
In 1494 he and painter Ercole de'Roberti angered Alfonso's father by some unacceptable unacceptable nighttime behavior, while in 1497 rumors of his wandering nude through the city streets traveled as far as Venice. On that occasion Marin Sanudo noted that the Ferrarese found him "poco savio," hardly wise. In a letter written in 1501, when Alfonso was twenty-five, his sister Isabella d'Este, the marchesa of Mantua, was still lamenting his crude behavior (footnote . Many people thought that he spent too much time with artisans, whom he invited to share his table. He was characerized as coarse and cantakerous...The source for the story about his wandering nude is I diarii di Marino Sanuto [Sanudo], ed. Rinaldo Fulin et al, 58 vols. [Venice, 1879-1903], vol. 1 (1879), col. 706, notice for 6 August 1497, as quoted by Manca, n. 23, p. 312:
Item, che pochi zorni fa, che don Alfonso fece in Ferara cossa assa' liziera, che andoe nudo per nudo per Ferara, con alcuni zoveni in compagnia, di mezo zorno, adeo per Ferara era reputa pocho savio.The incident is also mentioned. Manca says, by Bertoni in L'Orlando furioso e la renascenza a Ferrara, 1919, p. 254, and Felisatti in Storia di Ferrara, 1986, p. 157. The letter by Isabella is on p. 470 in Michele Catalano, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto: Riconstruita su nuovi documenti, vol. 1, Biblioteca dell "Archivum Romanicum." Series 1, Storia, letteraturea, paleografia, vol. 15, Geneva, 1930. On p. 301 Catalano also gives "an almost slapstick anecdote describing how Alfonso embarrassed some women during a ball at the palace," according to Bayer.
All of this makes Alfonso out, whether he knew it or not, as a devotee of Dionysus, god of wine and rowdiness, who invited everyone to his feasts. But he certainly did know. For one thing, he was a musician, and a carnival song by Lorenzo de' Medici extolling Dionysus and "living for today" was well known. Here is the first stanza (I get it from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loves_of_the_Gods_(Carracci):
Quest’è Bacco ed Arïanna, Here are Bacchus and Ariadne,Alfonso's understanding may have originally been on that level, not very deep. For his series of Dionysian paintings, he would have gone deeper, with the help of his humanist friend Equicola, his former teacher Guarino, and others.
belli, e l’un de l’altro ardenti: Handsome, and burning for each other:
perché ’l tempo fugge e inganna, Because time flees and fools,
sempre insieme stan contenti. They stay together always content.
Queste ninfe ed altre genti These nymphs and those others
sono allegre tuttavia. Are ever full of joy.
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia: Let those who wish to be happy, be:
di doman non c’è certezza. Of tomorrow, we have no certainty.
Alfonso would have known of Diodorus Siculus, if not through personal reading then through others at the court. According to Michaela Marek, Alfonso's father Ercole had three copies of Diodorus in his library (Ekphrasis und Herrscherallegorie Antike Bildbeschreibung bei Tizian und Leonardo, cited by Wendy Sheard, "Antonio Lombardo's relief for Alfonso'Este's Studio di Marmi," in Titian 500, p. 355 n. 111).
Alfonso's desire for Dionysian paintings may even have started, on a superficial level, six years earlier, in April of 1505, only a couple of months before the first instance of "tarochi." Sheard writes (p. 333):
Apparently as the first act of independent art-related activity after his father's death a few weeks earlier, on 1 April 1505, Alfonso wrote to his ambassador in Milan, Gerolamo Seregni, directing him to acquire the Bacchus by Leonardo da Vinci.Sheard (p. 356, note 114) cites Carlo Pedretti, Documenti e memorie riguardanti Leonardo da Vinci a Bologna e in Emilicitesa (Bologna 1953, p. 153) and his Leonardo da Vinci inedito. Tre saggi (Florence 1968, 14-15).Pedretti in turn cites documents in the Archivio di Stato, Modena, first published by Giuseppe Campori in 1865. The wording in Pedretti 1953, from Campori, is as follows
1505 1 aprile - Il Duca di Ferrara eprime al suo ambasciatore a Milano il desiderio di avere il Bacco dipinto da Leonardo.Here is Ambassador Seregni's reply, saying that it was impossible to have the Bacchus, because the work had been promised to the Cardinal of Rohan:
1505, 17 aprile - Girolamo Seregni, ambasciatore estense a Milano, risponde al duca Alfonso I che gli è impossibile avere il Bacco dipinto da Leonardo perchè il proprietario, Antonio Maria Pallavicino lo ha già promesso al Cardinale di Rohan.This "Cardinal di Rohan" was French and an erstwhile friend of the Sforza for many years (Lubkin, A Renaissance Court, p. 224, in Google Books). Pallavicino was at that time governor of Bergamo for the French occupiers, Sheard says.
The main problem with this information is that according to most authorities, the painting known today as Bacchus--the only painting of Leonardo's known by that title--would then have been called St. John the Baptist, as the title Bacchus wasn't given until the late 17th century after some overpainting of ivy and and a panther skin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchus_(Leonardo)). One possibility is that Alfonso thought there was a painting of Bacchus based on a drawing that Leonardo made, now called Young Bacchus and in the Academia Gallery in Venice (Charles Lewis Hind, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/leonardo_da_vinci/drawings/). Alfonso might have known about it from his sister Isabella. Hind notes that this Bacchus is "clothed in a costume, just peeping from the sketch, of a similar material to the dress of Isabella d’Este." But since this drawing is in Venice rather than the Louvre, it probably didn't go to Cardinal Rohan. Either there was some confusion, there is a lost painting that no one ever mentioned again, or even, the painting described in early 17th century France as of St. John the Baptist really was Bacchus in 1505.
Alfonso was one of those rare patrons with a real taste for painting and a shrewd judgment of artistic quality. The pictures he commissioned - re-creations of the kind of masterpieces admired in antiquity - had no close precedents in Venice; he acquired them purely for his own pleasure and sought the services of the best painters in Italy, first Giovannni Bellini, then Raphael and Fra' Bartolomeo, and finally Titian.But the first painter Alfonso asked, in 1512, was Michelangelo, allegedly climbing up to the sceiling of the Sistine Chape to d sol (Bayer p. 34). Michelangelo agreed but in the end gave him a Leda and the Swan (which survives only in copies, e.g. http://allart.biz/photos/image/Michelangelo_13_Leda_and_the_Swan.html, and perhaps a drawing, http://www.flickr.com/photos/quanceblog/1561264/ ).
Next Alfonso asked Giovanni Bellini, who rarely painted mythological scenes, to do a Feast of the Gods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feast_of_the_Gods). It was completed in 1514, although with later reworking of the background by Titian (Bayer p. 34 and Wikipedia).
Bacchus is to the left of Mercury (see also detail below, left) as an infant wearing an ivy wreath. That this infant is Bacchus was probably gleaned from Macrobius's Saturnalia (1.18.7-10, quoted on p. 245 of "Dies Alcyoninae: the Invetnion of Bellini's Feast of the Gods" by Anthony Colantuono, Art Bulletin 73 (1993), pp. 237-256). Macrobius says that Bacchus is reborn an infant every Winter Solstice; then in the spring he is a youth, in summer a man, and an old man in the autumn. Cartari, 1556, cited this passage; and the 1571 has an illustration with three of them together, reproduced below, from Colantuono p. 245).
On the right side, we see Ceres holding up Apollo's shoulder as he drinks.
Who the people are on the far right is subject to debate. Most scholars today (Brayer p. 35) say it is Priapus, Bacchus's son by Venus in the myth, recognizable by the fold in his crotch, planning to take advantage of the nymph Lotis when she's asleep. In Ovid's Fasti (1:391-440), Priapus at a festival of Dionysus is prevented by the braying of Silenus's ass (seen in the right-hand detail but here quite docile), which awakens the nymph and frustrates Priapus, whose member is already swollen in anticipation. As if to confirm the identification, the sickle usually associated with Priapus hangs from the tree.
But some things don't fit this interpretation. These are gods, where Ovid has citizens of Thebes, in the woods for their festival of Bacchus, and joined there by nymphs and satyrs, but no gods. Also, Priapus was typically presented as coarse, bearded, and older, as in the engraving at left that clearly is of Priapus and Lotis, by "Master I.B. with the bird," c. 1510-1515 (Titian 500 p. 292); on the right is Priapus, according to the caption, in Cartari 1647:
I tend to agree with this interpretation. Bellini mostly painted religious subjects. He would have known The City of God, and moreover, found Priapus and Lotis an unacceptable subject. He would have wanted to paint Priapus as bestial and ugly, and this does not fit the tone of the rest of the painting. Also, Ovid in the fasti and Macrobius in the Saturnalia actually did not use the terms "Bacchus" or "Dionysus" they called him by his Latin name of Liber.. Liber in Latin mythology was paired with Libera. his wife.
On this subject, here is Augustine's City of God 6:9 (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120106.htm):
...They would have Liber to have been named fromIn 7:21 he has more (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120107.htm), about how the people of Lativum placed the "virile member" at crossroads and during festivals took it to the forum,liberation,because through him males at the time of copulation are liberated by the emission of the seed. They also say that Libera (the same in their opinion as Venus) exercises the same function in the case of women, because they say that they also emit seed; and they also say that on this account the same part of the male and of the female is placed in the temple, that of the male to Liber, and that of the female to Libera. To these things they add the women assigned to Liber, and the wine for exciting lust. Thus the Bacchanalia are celebrated with the utmost insanity...
and brought to rest in its own place; on which unseemly member it was necessary that the most honorable matron should place a wreath in the presence of all the people.Such was required to further "the growth of seeds," and for "enchantment to be driven from fields." Augustine is of course trying to show how ridiculous these people are. But the Renaissance is in a different age, further removed in time. These things are quaint, titillating, and may even have a spiritual interpretation., of the union between Christ and his Church; for this same Augustine had said, in Sermo Suppositus 120:8, "He [Christ] came to the marriage bed of the cross and there, in mounting it, he consummated his marriage" (quoted in The Theology of Priesthood, ed. Daniel Goergen et al, at http://books.google.com/books?id=PKGsZ8_zrcwC&pg=PA182&lpg=PA182&dq=Augustine+sacred+marriage+of+Christ+and+church&source=bl&ots=K7B6JazDCs&sig=HXXjpfFKCV-463Q7BZ4ft7c_gG8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-iqKT6qWOaWziQLw_fT5Cw&ved=0CGkQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=Augustine%20sacred%20marriage%20of%20Christ%20and%20church&f=false).
If, as usually agreed, the time of the year of the painting is the Winter Solstice, then this is the time for Liber and Libera, agricultural fertility gods, to copulate, that their child--an abundant crop--may be born in the autumn harvest. Liber. just as much as Priapus. is a phallic god, and would have the sickle as an attribute. They, moreover, are married. Their Greek equivalents, as Augustine plainly says, are Bacchus and Venus. As goddess of love, Venus, like Libera, was a fertility goddess. And the Greek Dionysus/Bacchus had his own phallic festivals, as any reader of Herodotus or Clement of Alexandria would know. Here is Herodotus (http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.2.ii.html), comparing the Egyptian festivals to "Bacchus" with the Greek ones:
In other respects the festival is celebrated almost exactly as Bacchic festivals are in Greece, excepting that the Egyptians have no choral dances. They also use instead of phalli another invention, consisting of images a cubit high, pulled by strings, which the women carry round to the villages.A Latin translation of this text had been published in both Rome and Venice in 1474, according to WorldCat. I will give the Clement passage in Section A7 of this essay.
This identification of the young man in the painting as Liber does not deny that Ovid's Fasti was a major source. It is rather that, just as Bellini has replaced people with gods, he has changed Priapus and Lotis (assuming Equicola actually names Priapus; I have found no source saying so in so many words) to Liber and Libera. Alfonso could hardly object.
The vessel being held by the satyr on the left is also of interest, for its phallic appearance, a suitable correlate of the scene on the other side. I will say more, in relation to the early Bagatella/Bateleur cards, in section B1 of my essay.
About Silenus, the man with the donkey, there is a stanza in Lorenzo's Carnival song that might serve as an introduction (This translation is by Translated by Alan D. Corré June 3, 2005, posted by "Huck" at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=775&start=10#p11173:
Questa soma, che vien drieto, Upon a donkey, corpulent,
sopra l’asino, è Sileno: Silenus wends his weighty way.
cosi vecchio è ebbro e lieto, Heavy, drunk and senescent,
già di carne e d'anni pieno; Years and blubber on him lay.
se non può star ritto, almeno He can't stand straight, he is quite bent –
ride e gode tuttavia. Yet still he smiles the livelong day!
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia: If you'd be happy – don't delay!
di doman non c’è certezza. Tomorrow's ills we've yet to meet.
We will see more of Silenus as we go, and in a more serious context.
Alfonso also included Raphael in his plans; he received an advance payment from Alfonso in 1514 (Bayer p. 35). From Rome, in 1517 Raphael sent a cartoon of an Indian Triumph of Bacchus, with elephants. Then he delayed doing the painting. Alfonso had it done by a Friulian painter named Pellegrino de San Danielle, the painter who did the sets for Ariosto's La Casseria, certainly in its 1508 version and probably again in 1528 (Bayer p. 42f). There survives an engraving of it by Conrad Martin Metz (http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/thumbnail/372461/1/The-Triumph-Of-Bacchus-In-India.jpg). With its huge elephants in the background and reveling nymphs and satyrs in the foreground,. it is a burlesque of Mantegna's pompous but famous Triumphs of Caesar. At the same time it is inspired by a Dionysian sarcophagus, Campbell says (p. 262 of Cabinet of Eros, citing Sheard's essay in Titian 500, p. 319).
The date of 1514, for the first of the Bacchanals, and for the payment to Raphael, may explain a fact about tarocchi in Ferrara rhwn, if there is a connection between this painting project and the cards. In 1515 tarocchi production there suddenly spikes. Trionfi ("Autorbis") writes, after giving the notations for 1505 (http://trionfi.com/0/p/23/)
Second to this, we've a strong Tarocchi production in the years 1515/1516 in Ferrara (more than one entry in the account books - although there should have been opportunity to leave some notes in the account books between 1505 and 1515, there is nothing)In fact Autorbis goes to list 7 notations, on different dates in 1515, from one source, and 5 more, 1515-1516, from another.
Other paintings were in the works., although I don't know exactly when the agreements were made. Alfonso wanted Fra Bartolomeo to paint a Bacchanal for him, according to Humfrey and Lucco p. 147, but nothing came of it. Bayer (p. 37) says that the Fra Bartolemeo was for a Worship of Venus; it was partially completed before the painter's death in 1517 and later satisfied by Titian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worship_of_Venus). The source was a description in Philostratus' Imagini (1:6), in manuscript translation on loan from Alfonso's sister Isabella in Mantua, as interpreted by Equicola.
And finally Alfonso enlisted Titian, whose Bacchus and Ariadne was completed in 1520; it shows Dionysus viewing Ariadne for the first time, leaping toward her, while she both recoils, fearful of the cheetahs, and fixes her gaze on his (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchus_and_Ariadne). Its principal source (Bayer p. 37) is Ovid's Ars Amatoria I:529. Another source is an edition and commentary of Catullus (LXIV: 50-75, 251-64) published in 1521 by Battista Guarino, whom Alfonso had studied under (Bayer p. 37). Also. the best-known poem of the Florentine scholar (and friend of Lorenzo) Angelo Poliziano, written in the 1470s, had a similar description (Le Stanzi i.cx-cxii, cited in Shearman, Only Connect, pp. 255f). A more commonly recognized source is an ekphrasis (description) by Ariosto, the major poet in Ferrara at that time, who also gives us an early reference to tarocco as a game in the 1528 version of the play La Cassaria (for which see Andrea's essay at http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=63&lng=ENG). Both ekphrases are referenced in Orlando Furioso, published in 1516 (Bayer p. 37).
There was also, according to Vasari, an all-male Bacchanal by Alfonso's own court painter Dosso Dossi, a work apparently now lost, and possibly one of Vulcan at his forge, unless that was somehow incorporated in the Bacchanal. One painting attributed to Dosso that at one time was considered to be the one in question: is a Bacchanal in London (http://www.webexhibits.org/feast/location/BacchanalOfMen.html. Another, a "Bathers" http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Dosso_Dossi_042.jpg, is probably not Dosso, according to Humfrey and Lucco. Two other similar paintings are at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... si_018.jpg and http://www.wikigallery.org/paintings/389001-389500/389126/painting1.jpg. Despite Internet attribution to Dosso, who did them is quite unknown. (I thank "Huck" at THF for the last three links.)
At least one of Dosso's paintings hasdepictions similar to those on d'Este tarot cards. One, part of a series probably illustrating the seven liberal arts, shows an astronomer or astrologer looking up with a globe next to him and holding compasses, according to Humfrey and Lucco (p. 139). Compare with the d'Este Moon card of c. 1473, and also the Charles VI of uncertain date but within 10 years of the other, and the Rothschild a little later.
Another painting, done by his brother Batista c. 1527-1530 (Humfrey and Lucco p. 230f), shows the same scene from Orlando Furioso as the Star card of one incomplete 16th century deck now in the Museo delle Arti e delle Traditioni Populari in Rome: Orlando and Rodomonte fighting above a stream. The card is on p. 288 of Kaplan's Encyclopedia of Tarot, Vol. 2. i give it below along with the comparable part of the painting (for it all, see http://www.roberto-crosio.net/cavallo/cavcri10.jpg). It is part of the story that Orlando took off his armor and clothes. I cannot find other Renaissance paintings on this subject.
Not long ago I was a useless pieceThe "raised right hand" probably refers to a sickle: another such poem cited by Cartari, by Tibullus, describes "the rustic child of Bacchus"--i.e. Priapus--as "the god who's armed with the curving hook." Since the statues were made of wood, all that would have survived in the Renaissance would have been poems like this one. The fig was sacred to Dionysus because its fruit at one time looked like male genitals and at another time female genitals. There were also stone ones. Cartari tells about a famous one in Rome called "Mutinus Tutinus." Before marriage, a bride-to-be would be expected to sit on its horizontally protruding member (mentioned also by Richard W. Hooper in his Introduction to The Priapus Poems: Erotic Epigrams from Ancient Rome, p. 3).
Of wood, a fig tree's trunk. A carpenter
Debated what to make of me. I might
Have been a stool; instead he fashioned me
A god, Priapus. Awesome now, a god,
I panic thieves and birds. No thief gets past
My raised right hand. My crotch is armed with this
Obscenely long and red protrusion. Birds
Don't bother me. A reed stuck in my head
Spooks the pests and keep them off this new
And lovely park...
It was said that Barnabo Bembo and his son Pietro Bembo, when they lived in Ferrara, actually had an ancient stone Priapus statue in their curiously named estate, the Nonianum (Fiorenza p. 88). The poet and humanist Cielo Calcacigni, at Alfonso's court, wrote a Priapus poem for the Bembo statue, inscribed at its base. Its content is relevant to our investigation (quoted in Giancarlo Fiorenza, "Dosso Dossi and Celio Calcagnini at the Court of Ferrara," in S. J. Campbell, ed., Artists at Court, p. 184):
Tu quicunque meum supplex venerare sacellum,
Disce prius liceat qua sibi voce loqui.
Nanque ea quae crebro nobis versantur in usu
Digna priapea duximus esse nota.
Esto pepon culus, mihi sit colocyntha cinedus,
Cunnus erit malacae, mentula crinos erit.
Haec sint assuetis signata vocabula rebus
Sed tum hortensi non minus apta Deo.
(You, whoever you are who comes as a suppliant to worship at my shrine, must first learn what words are permitted to be spoken. For those which are habitually employed in common usage among us, we have deemed to be worthy of a Pripaic stamp. Where I say melon, I mean the buttocks; the gourd is the sodomite; the vagina will be the mallow; and the penis will be the red lily. Let these be the words marked by familiar objects, but also no less fitting for the god of the garden.)What is interesting for us is an observation by Fiorenza:
The symbolic and sexually allusive metaphors of this epigram, which employ Latin translations of rare Greek words, are Calcagnini's own fresh inventions.In other words, Calcagnini is anothe humanists of that time that reveled in inventing new words in grammatically correct Latin from Greek originals, just as I have been hypothesizing happened with the Greek words tarachos and Tharopes. Fiorenza does not say which of the words in the epigram are Calcagnini's inventions.
The garden plants in Calcagnini's epigram help to elucidate another Dosso painting of commissioned by Alfonso, probably on a Dionysian theme, the so-called Myth of Pan, by Dosso (http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/images/enlarge/00082601.JPG):
You will notice the red lily in the foreground near the sleeping maiden's genitalia, which is to be interpreted according to Calcagnini's epigram (the lily is clearer in the detail I have put below). Called "crinos" in the poem, it symbolizes the penis. This word would not seem to be a word of the poet's invention, as it appears in Pliny the Elder (Fiorenza, n. 37 p. 246). All the poet has done is to give a masculine ending to a word that is neuter in Pliny.
The armored woman on the left, scholars today agree, is an addition by unfortunate 19th century "restoration," which mistook a figure that Dosso had removed for an element of his finished painting. X-ray analysis reveals this fact; it also shows that originally she was playing a viola da gamba. Originally there were simply the three women. But for the final version Dosso replaced the armored lady with more landscape and added Pan and the upturned vessel on the ground.
There is much controversy about what is represented. Art historian Luisa Ciammitti provides the only analysis that accounts for all the details in the picture (p. 86f of Dosso's Fate, http://books.google.com/books?id=vquUIckH9pUC&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=Dosso+Myth+of+Pan&source=bl&ots=kzJ6YuZAEQ&sig=HMp610iUyxe4aw4TaSvSHU3qc3A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LNB0T9f_HqG4iwKAqYUM&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Dosso%20Myth%20of%20Pan&f=false), She says that it is Pan looking enviously at a maiden recently violated in her sleep by Dionysus. A devotee of Artemis, Nicea had rebuffed Dionysus while awake, so he took other measures. Dionysus is represented by the upturned vessel in the right foreground, in this interpretation. Since that detail isn't clear in my image of the whole painting, I reproduce that detail and the sleeper below:
To make sure she slept after drinking the wine (magically created by Dionysus) from the spring that usually provided water, he created a bed of flowers for her to rest on. And afterwards an old woman comes out of the tree and predicts that instead becoming his bride, as Dionysus wishes, she will die. When she wakes up and realizes what happened, she kills herself. To commemorate her, Dionysus founds the city of Nicea, seen in the background. (That is the city for which the Nicean Creed was named.) The book is not explained, but that is not a major element.
The episode occurs in the 5th century Dionysica by Nonnus. The manuscript of that very long epic poem in Greek had been brought to Italy by Filelfo and then deposited in the Medici library, where Poliziano identified it as by Nonnus. It was supposed to be printed in Venice in 1508, but a war interrupted the plan. In Bologna in 1507, Piero Candido was still working on the text, as a letter to Aldus explains (Ciammitti p. 89). In the meantime the manuscript would have been available to humanists looking for programs for paintings.
Other scholars think it illustrates Pan's own attempt to violate another maiden, Echo or Syrinx. These interpretations do not fit all the major elements. But since Pan is a companion of Dionysus, in either interpretation the painting is Dionysian. On the other hand, the theme could have been non-Dionysian, an allegory based on one of Equicola's treatises without reference to mythology: e.g. the satyr is Vice, the nude is Innocence, the armored lady is Self-Control, the old lady is Philosophy ( Humfrey and Lucco p. 204). Such an interpretation is not excluded; but in most of his paintings, in keeping with the times, Dosso was a story-teller, whatever else he or his patron had in mind.
So far I have mostly been focusing on how Greco-Roman literary sources are useful for understanding art done for the Duke of Ferrara, roughly from the time of the first use of "tarochi" in 1505 until the spike in tarocchi deck production in 1515-16. For another layer of meaning, the relationship of this art to Greco-Roman Dionysian visual art as then known, we will have to turn to Mantua. After that, we will look at this art again from the perspective of Dionysis in philosophy, as understood in Ferrara. Then we will almost be ready to look at the tarot sequences.
Read today just some part of it, but indeed we can see the great value of your work. I am also in the some line of looking to the origins of the Tarot. My best wishes of higher discoveries and inner realizations!
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