From Deification to Triumph

A possible connection between Marziano's “proto-Tarot” and the Florentine Tarot?

Or: Brunelleschi: “Architect” of the Tarot?

Abstract
The invention of trumps is a uniquely European innovation in card play, specifically an Italian one. It is
attested in two strikingly different symbolic sequences of trumps in the first half of the 15th century, in
Milan in the teens, and in Florence by 1440. The question arises of whether this startling innovation
happened twice, independently of each other, or whether there is a connection between the two, the
former somehow inspiring the later. Taking it for granted that the game of Triumphs was created in
Florence, I argue that Filippo Brunelleschi's visit to the duke of Milan as a consultant, possibly as late
as the spring of 1436, provided the opportunity for him and others to have played Marziano's game
with the duke, and to have been inspired by the “triumphs” of the heathen gods and heroes, translating
it into a Florentine idiom, the civic and Christian “trionfi” of their festival processions, thereby creating
a popular kind of game, in contrast to the recondite erudition and princely focus of Marziano's game,
created for an audience of one. Brunelleschi's social circle, the leading artists and literary figures of the
day, included Lo Scheggia, a woodworker and painter, now known to have painted playing cards. This
group of artisans, writers, and engineers, collaborated with those who made the elaborate floats and
staged the processions and other public games, and provide the ideal conditions for designing and
perfecting the new trumps of a moral game which consisted of subjects in a sequence very familiar to
and beloved by all Florentines.

Before beginning, I would like to say that Marziano's biography and his only known literary creation
have been my main work for the last 20 years, and I am honoured that the Museum has welcomed it
into the exhibition. Marziano's “Proto-Tarot de Milan” is the first chapter of the catalogue, which is
fitting, because his game itself has a few “firsts.”

It is the first card game of which we know the name of the inventor. It is the first card game of which
we know enough of the rules that we can reconstruct the basic game. It is the first description of a card
game in Italy, which incidentally illuminates some features of the standard card games of the time upon
which it was modeled. But the most important first is the feature that gave its name to the catalogue
chapter: it is the first game with atouts. From all indications, Marziano is the inventor of the concept of
trumps.

But was Marziano the sole inventor, or was his idea merely an isolated, independent experiment that
never left the confines of the court of Filippo Maria Visconti? Was the invention of the game of
Triumphs a couple of decades later a second, also independent, invention of the idea of trumps? In
other words, did the game that Marziano invented and Michelino da Besozzo painted in the 1410s, and
which have been irretrievably lost, inspire the kind of cards that are the subject of this exhibition,
which begin appearing in all their sumptuous glory in the late 1430s, as well as in documentary
sources?

The most distinguishing feature of the game of Tarot, of which the luxurious cards which are the
subject of this exhibition are the earliest examples, is its ranked sequence of twenty-two symbolic
cards, which form a permanent trump suit. The founder of our area of study, Michael Dummett, was
convinced that the concept of a trump suit was invented with the game of triumphs, Tarot. Although he
came to learn of Marziano's game after 1989, when Franco Pratesi published on it, in his time the text
was not yet fully edited and studied, and he considered Marziano's game to possess some kind of
strange hybrid form of trumps, somehow both part of the four suits as well as a ranked series
independent of them. But this view is a misunderstanding of the meaning of Marziano's fourfold
structure, in which the four moral categories are composed of two parts, suits with birds as signs, and
the gods and heroes which are set apart and ranked separately. The fourfold structure is simply a
symbolic moral framework, inside of which a normal card game, albeit in this case an unprecedented
“proto-Tarot,” is constructed. The four moral qualities are the invisible conceptual architecture of the
game. But the external structure, as it would look to a casual observer, composed of four suits with a
fifth, symbolic series of trumps, is what Jacopo Antonio Marcello noticed when he described the game
painted by Michelino da Besozzo as “a new kind of Triumphs.” He was comparing Marziano's game to
the standard game of Triumphs because of this formal similarity, since otherwise the two packs have
nothing in common. They share only the feature of four suits with an additional suit of trumps.

The feature that stood out for Marcello was the trumps. I believe that this would have been true for
anyone seeing Michelino's game for the first time. Trumps were a completely new and startling
invention.

Concepts

As Thierry Depaulis mentions briefly in his introduction to the catalogue, page 13, card games were
invented in the East and diffused westward. Some aspects of the games played with these cards
remained with them wherever they were adopted along the way. Such features as trick-taking games,
the reverse order of half of the suits, “court” cards, are all inherited from these common ancestors.
(John McLeod at pagat.com/notrump/ on Ganjifa games Hamrang and Ekrang, trick-taking games with
no trumps, “It seems that trumps were a European 15th century invention” on Ganjifa: “For Hamrang
and Ekrang, the suits are divided into two groups. The king and minister are always the highest cards,
but in one group of suits the pip cards rank from the 10 (below the minister) down to the 1 (lowest),
while in the other group they rank in the reverse direction from the 1 (below the minister) down to the
10 (lowest). It is interesting that this feature is also found in some early European trick taking games
such as Tarot, Hombre and Maw, and also in Ma Diao, an old Chinese trick-taking game with money
cards. This is a strong indication that these games and cards have a common ancestor.”
pagat.com/class/ganjifa.html)

But trumps are an Italian innovation of early 15th century. Marziano invented his game in Milan in the
1410s, while the game of Triumphs, Tarot, was invented in the 1430s. As unique as the concept is, for it
to have been conceived twice independently within 25 years and 250 km seems too coincidental to be
likely, but the limited circle of Marziano's game and the vast difference in the symbolic subject matter
of the trump sequence makes any direct connection merely a vague, speculative scenario, however
plausible it might be. In other words, the games are so unlike each other that, without direct evidence of
knowledge of Filippo Maria's game on the part of some Florentines, it seems wiser to be cautious and
assume the counter-intuitive independent invention scenario. But I have now found a plausible
connection between the duke's game and a Florentine card-maker, who also illustrated triumphs, both
Petrarchan and classical, and quite likely triumph cards themselves (Labriola's attribution of Alessandro
Sforza cards to his atelier).

Franco Pratesi, who brought Marziano's game to the notice of playing card historians in 1989,
speculated on a conceptual relationship between the games of Deificiation and Triumph. At first he
posited that a Florentine or other “proto-Tarot” had instead inspired Marziano. He reiterated this in
1999. But, writing on the subject in 2013, he suggested the other way around, that Marziano's
conception had influenced the invention of the game of Triumphs, perhaps through a series of unknown
transformations that evolved into the new game. But to me it seems unnecessary to posit anything so
elaborate. The evidence for the game of Triumphs appears all at once, within two years, in three
different cities. The first documentary evidence is 1440, the first “popular” quality packs in 1442, and
the oldest surviving cards, the subject of this exhibition, from 1442, or between 1435 and 1440 if we
accept Ada Labriola's new dating for the Rothschild cards. This quick coincidence in the appearance of
every kind of evidence does not leave much room for a long period of hidden evolution, and the most
straightforward view to take should be that the game was invented not long before 1440. About 1440 is
also when the Florentine artists began illustrating Petrarch's six Trionfi with what quickly became a
canonical iconographic form.

Why triumph? Deification implies triumph. Additional copies of Marziano's text were also made,
perhaps the Florentine visitors received a copy. It is also possible that some of Michelino's designs
resembled the illustrations for Petrarch's Trionfi that began to be painted in Florence around 1440, or
the triumphal carts sometimes seen in the festival processions, and thus could be said to have directly
inspired the name of the game. For instance, one can imagine that Michelino's depiction of Cupid,
which Marziano even describes as his “triumph,” resembled the Charles VI Lovers, which recalls it in
many ways: “He is distinguished by a very youthful face... in flight... girded with human hearts, since
he triumphs as victor over these. Entirely nude, because lovers desire one another completely; with a
full bow...” The direct association – perhaps unthought by Marziano – with Petrarch.

Idea of writing, symbols for words and ideas, invented at least three times. Alphabet however invented
only once. Every alphabet descends from one invented in the Levant about 4000 years ago.

Once a concept is realized and shared, it spreads rapidly and takes different forms.

Playing cards are like the alphabet. Invented in eastern China at least 1000 years ago, they began to
spread westward with the Mongol empire in the middle of the 13th century. The idea or concept of
sequentially numbered suits evolved in different ways in every culture that adopted it.

The earliest history of card games is obscure, but neither traditional games nor the form of the cards
give us reason to think that that the idea of a trump suit was thought of until the early 15th century, in
western Europe.

Dummett on name of game of Triumphs loaning the name “trumps” to the concept of the trump suit in
card games. But what of concept of a trump suit?

Concept appears self-evident to us, but is actually quite rare. For nearly 20 years I have thought that it
must have been invented twice, independently: Marziano, in the 1410s, and the game of Triumphs,
Tarot, which I now think was invented in Florence in the late 1430s. But, like the alphabet, it may be
that it was invented only once, and there was a transfer of the idea between Marziano's Deification and
the Florentine Trionfi. The connection may have been made in the vibrantly creative circle around
Filippo Brunelleschi, which included a long-lived and versatile artist, who incidentally painted playing
cards, Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, nicknamed “the Splinter,” Lo Scheggia.

For Marziano “deification” is equivalent to “triumph.”

Other possibilities are Karnöffel, and the Liechstensteinische Spiel with five suits, one of which is the
imperial eagle, which suggests it is higher than the suits of four kings, therefore possibly a trump suit.

Franco Pratesi thought at first that Marziano could have been inspired by an already-existing Florentine
game of triumphs (1989 and 1999).

Jacopo Antonio Marcello immediately saw what was similar between the two games. Because of the
trump suit, he called Deification “a new kind of Triumphs.”

There is also a parallel between the concept of deification and that of triumph.
Deification is Latin for apotheosis. The triumphator was held to be in the image of Jupiter, therefore
deified. In this way, triumph and deification became synonymous. For instance, various paintings are
called both the Apotheosis of Thomas Aquinas or the Triumph of Thomas Aquinas.

Lippo Memmi, Santa Caterina, Pisa, c. 1340, both apoteosi and trionfo di san Tommaso d'Aquino
Andrea di Bonaiuto, Cappellone degli Spagnoli, Florence, 1365-1367, both apoteosi and trionfo
Benozzo Gozzoli, Duomo di Pisa, 1470-1475, trionfo
Francisco de Zurbarán, Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla (originally for Colegio de Santo Tomás de
Sevilla), 1631 “Apoteosis de Santo Tomás”

Filippo Brunelleschi's trips to Milan. No primary documents prove a visit, but all commentators accept
it as historically probable, preserved in the large “oral tradition” surrounding Brunelleschi. Even
Antonio Manetti, Brunelleschi's earliest biographer and a Florentine republican supremely hostile to
Milan, grudgingly remarks that some work in the Duomo of Milan is attributed to him.

(illustration of tiburio of Duomo from La Lombardia delle signorie page 179; see Claudio Giorgione,
“A Humanistic Debate in Renaissance Milan Surrounding the Tiburio of the Duomo, from Filarete to
Bramante and Leonardo da Vinci,” in Constance Moffatt and Sara Taglialagamba, eds., Leonardo da
Vinci – Nature and Architecture, Brill, 2019, pp. 253-279) tiburio2019

Also, Filippo Maria's interest in Florentine innovation is well-known; Brunelleschi's genius

accomplishment of the dome in Florence must have aroused his admiration and jealousy, and may have
occasioned the second invitation, in the late 1430s (conceivably he may have been sounding out
Florentine sources to better understand their defences as well).
(mention Filippo Maria's letter to Poggio Bracciolini in 1438)

Brunelleschi was involved with artists; he mourned Masaccio. It is not surprising to find Masaccio's
younger brother, Giovanni, nicknamed “lo scheggia,” “the splinter,” among his friends as well. In his
recent research, Franco Pratesi has discovered that, among his many other talents, Lo Scheggia also
painted playing cards.

When Brunelleschi went to Milan on the duke's invitation in the late 1430s, it is plausible to imagine
that Lo Scheggia accompanied him, perhaps even with the express purpose of meeting one of the most
celebrated Milanese artists of the time, Michelino da Besozzo. Given Scheggia's documented interest in
cards, it would not be unlikely for the duke to have shown them Michelino's game, and even played it
with them. Perhaps they read Marziano's book, as well, or copied it, since two Italian copies are known.

If the feature that delighted Marcello, the trumps, also intrigued the two Florentine creators, a plausible
scenario is that they returned to Florence, with its thriving playing-card manufacture, and suggested a
similar princple to be imitated there. But instead of slavishly copying Michelino's designs, along with
the time and expense of engraving an entirely new kind of cards, they chose to merely add a single
trump suit to the already existing game. Instead of deification of gods and heroes, the suit's theme was
a procession, with subjects familiar to Florentines (as indeed to all Italians).
Brunelleschi, Lo Scheggia et al. worked on the edifici and paintings for the rappresentazioni.

It is no longer necessary or more convenient to assume that the concept of a distinct allegorical suit of
permanent trumps was invented independently twice. Also, while direct symbolic equivalences are not
apparent, it is legitimate to look for thematic parallels in the moral content of the two sequences.

Lo Scheggia's Triumphs
The fool sitting on the chariot derives from the long history of moralizations of the Roman triumph,
which say that the triumphator is accompanied by a ribald or wretch, who constantly reminds him of
his mortality by saying “Remember you are only a man,” and other phrases. Onlookers were allowed to
shout insults as the triumphator as well. This mockery served both to turn aside the bad luck that might
come from being elevated so high, as well as to prevent the experience of the triumphal dignity, in
which he became the embodiment of a god, from going to his head.

Brunelleschi himself was a poet and sketch-artist, as well as being an engineer, creating intricate and
complicated machinery as well as cunning practical jokes. He could well have found a kindred spirit in
Filippo Maria Visconti, who had a similar reputation for playing games with people. We can imagine
Brunelleschi or one of his entourage saying, upon their return to Florence: “I saw at the Duke of
Milan's a card game, with images of the triumphs of the heathen gods. We should make a game that
shows the triumph of the Christian religion, as it is done in our city.”
(like Christ triumphed over Rome, Florence over Milan)

In summary, it seems that we have hit a rich vein of coincidences among several figures relevant to the
beginning of the Petrarchan trionfi genre in painting, as well as the game of Triumphs. A point of direct
connection between the two Triumph-games is found in Brunelleschi and the triumph-artist Lo
Scheggia.