The Voynich Ninja

Please, now... everyone stay CALM.

As Marco will know, I expect, there is astronomical imagery within the medieval paintings set on card, as well as in contemporary paintings on walls or in manuscripts.

Now, for various reasons, not least then-current fashions, we also find images relating to those put on card in other media.  It is mainly studies of those other media which have produced the more scholarly books and papers.

But to consider paintings put on card, as on paper, during the fourteenth- or fifteenth- century is not an outrageous thing to do, even if the pictures were used for playing games, or .. whatever. Even prognostication.

One of the picture-cycles which has shown some clear iconographic links to images on cards (not only the shorter, tarot deck but the larger tarocchi) are those in the Shifanoia at Ferrara.  And the d'Este were the ruling family there.

Another - which Aby Warburg spoke about in about 1912 - is in the old Meeting Hall in Padua. Often distinguished by being called 'il Salone'.

Which is a pretty long introduction to a picture of a lobster.

I think tarot cards are a very good source of cultural clues and medieval iconography.

I also think the d'Este family is of interest due to their property holdings and tremendous influence over the arts at the time. I have copious notes on their assets and history.

-JKP-

The imagery painted on early cards was mostly the same stuff that was painted on walls; a consciously domestic type of high renaissance imagery. Mostly.  Some of it terribly clever, but not intelligent as such.

By contrast, the seventeen which legend associated with Charles V have markedly different character; learned and intellectual, not so cute and not so self-conscious.  

Hope you like the lobster.

All images are good images, they always come from somewhere

I'm only very cautious when an images postdates the VM range. But even later images can be a witness of something more directly relevant.

Koen,
That's an interesting point.  The documentary evidence about using cards in Europe - for whatever reason - pre-dates the Vms by about three generations, (I'm counting evidence from Spain here) and there's an allusion to use of cards as aids to memory in a story of the Alf Layla wa Layla (1,001 nights), whose compilation is generally dated to the 12thC.

Legend associates the 'Charles V' cards with that same king who received the Catalan Atlas In 1375 and as (ahem) I was first to point out, the King of coins is Mansa Musa, as pictured on its worldmap.  That one item from a little of the research I put online, was widely taken up, but few seemed to link it to a document of 1377 or 1378... sorry, I did that research 20 yrs ago... where  Dominican friar speaks of the ludus cartarum in a way that led Dummett to describe it as a 'geographic game'. 


*Dummett  - Professor Michael Dummett was Professor of Logic at Oxford. Author of 'The Game of Tarot'.

The point being, of course, that the content in that particular set of cards, and the sources on which the painters drew for the paintings in Padua and Ferrara are all earlier than manufacture of the Vms.  

Hope you liked the lobster.