Michael Dummett and Tarot Iconography

The passing of Michael Dummett, especially at the turn of a new year, is a reminder to those interested in Tarot history of what has been accomplished and what remains to be done. I want to emphasize one of his less well known areas of contribution, post some passages and comments, and recommend his findings as a starting point for further study.
But first....

We are entering the 3rd year of the 4th decade since the publication of Dummett's monumental study, The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City. Dummett collected, collated, and analyzed a great body of evidence and drew the most plausible and defensible conclusions. This, rather than playful speculation incorporating esoteric folklore, reflects legitimate historical methods and produces conclusions that endure the tests of time. Many additional facts have been discovered since that publication, (including more than his share by Dummett himself), but The Game of Tarot remains the best source of information on the history of Tarot, and the early history of playing cards in Europe.

Because of Dummett's thorough and sober scholarship, all earlier works are superseded while subsequent works are essentially footnotes to this comprehensive study. The book is out of print and used copies typically sell online for about $300. According to Thierry Depaulis, Dummett’s 1993 book, Il mondo e l’angelo: I tarocchi e la loro storia, (The World and the Angel: Tarot Cards and Their History) presents “a more linear history of the Tarot, focusing on the evolution of the game in Italy, which is so fundamental.” That book, however, is even more difficult to find in libraries and is written in Italian, which limits its direct influence. (I've never seen a copy.) A subsequent book on Sicilian Tarot was published in 1995, I Tarocchi Siciliani.

Matto e Bagatto

Most people who know of Dummett from his writings on Tarot are inclined to ignore, dismiss, or marginalize his work. They may ritualistically genuflect to the name, but the man and his work are held in contempt. The fools and charlatans who inhabit the world of pop-culture Tarot have little fondness for the actual history of Tarot.

The vast majority of Dummett's research on Tarot history was focused on The Game of Tarot and the History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack. As such, it is of no interest to typical Tarotists. They may cherry-pick and distort some of the secondary uses of Tarot for their own fanciful fictions, but history per se holds no appeal.

Dissembling concessions aside, they have never quite come to grips with the fact that Tarot was a card game for centuries before it was turned to esoteric ends. Their fascinations are fortune-telling and romantic pseudo-history. Alchemy and Albigensians, numerology and Neoplatonic mysticism have nothing to do with the origin of Tarot or most of its history. That history must therefore be shoved aside to make room for these sexier subjects.

Other later works are more accessible. Chapter Six of The Game of Tarot, examining the early history of occult Tarot, was revised and greatly expanded into two subsequent books: A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, 1996), covering the origin and first century of the subject, and A History of the Occult Tarot: 1870 - 1970 (Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett, 2002), covering the second century of occult Tarot. The massive A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack: The Game of Triumphs (Michael Dummett and John McLeod, 2004) updates and expands the main thrust of The Game of Tarot in two imposing volumes. Those titles do not exhaust Dummett's Tarot bibliography. Nonetheless, the early history of playing cards and Tarot has not yet had a better English-language treatment than The Game of Tarot.

The Riddle of Tarot

The comments above are merely to point out that Michael Dummett was by far the greatest scholar of Tarot history. There will not be a second like him, for the same reason that there will not be a second Neil Armstrong: only one person can be the first to do something. Dummett was the first to produce a comprehensive study of Tarot history. Among other achievements in that work, Dummett proved that the study of Tarot history need not make any strong assumptions about the meaning of the trump hierarchy. As disappointing as that fact is to Tarot enthusiasts, with their conviction that the trumps are some sort of esoteric manifesto written in pictorial code, Dummett proved that no such assumption is required to study the factual history of Tarot. His research and writings, greatly surpassing anything before or since, made no such assumptions—Q.E.D.

Given that demonstration, it seems paradoxical that Dummett also did some of the most important analysis of Tarot iconography. He began, however, by suggesting that Tarot iconography was probably a dead end. (His view has been mis-stated as being a "theory of no meaning", which quotes below should demonstrate it was not.)

We can derive some entertainment from asking why that particular selection was made, and whether there is any symbolic meaning to the order in which they were placed; and we may or may not come up with a plausible or illuminating answer. (If we do not, that may not indicate that we have failed to solve the riddle; there may be no riddle to solve.) But our answer, though it may throw light on what the original designer of the pack, or the Duke or other noble who ordered it made, had in mind, is unlikely to throw any on the way in which the average fifteenth-century player of the game would have viewed the cards. For him, they were simply a set of picture cards arranged in a particular sequence and having a particular role in the game.
(The Game of Tarot, p.165.)

This gets us into it. He has defined the "riddle" of Tarot: why those subjects were selected and placed in a particular hierarchical order. Did the trump cycle originally have a coherent intended meaning? While it is certainly the case, a priori, that there may be no riddle to solve, it still seems likely that there might be, and that the iconography and sequence might therefore repay study. We know that many medieval and Renaissance series of images do show cyclic design, an overall composition, even though they may be puzzling today. In A Wicked Pack of Cards, the authors put it this way: “The test of whether a coded text has been correctly deciphered is that it allows a coherent message to be read.” (Page 250.) This is a crucial point. Virtually all of the blather in the online fora is incoherent, making no sense of the trump cycle. Rosamond Tuve, in a chapter titled “Imposed Allegory” (Allegorical Imagery, 1966), offers the following two guidelines to avoid imposing unintended allegorical content on a work.

This then is the first safeguarding principle: if large portions of a work have to be covered with blotting paper while we read our meaning in what is left, we are abusing rather than using the images.
(Page 234.)

We arrive at a second principle: the principal drift governs the meanings attributable to the incidents born upon the stream; the latter cannot take their own moral direction as they choose. If we ignore the stream’s main direction of flow, and embark on incidents which travel counter to or unrelated to it, arriving at special separable meanings for such incidents, we shall presently drown farcically, amid the laughter of the characters, who sit on the bank well protected by the natures the author gave them, only waiting for the chance to push us in.
(Page 235.)

Note that both of Tuve's safeguards involve interpreting elements of a work in terms of the entirety. Context counts. The entire work must be considered, and the parts must fit the whole. As Dummett put it, the selection and arrangement of the subjects must be meaningful, hence the essential significance of the order of the cards. A corollary of Tuve's second rule is that obscure or ambiguous elements must be conformed to mesh with the obvious ones. In other words, we should begin with the known and work toward understanding the unknown, those subjects more subtle, obscure, or ambiguous, in terms of that "principal drift". A favorite ploy of the bullshit artists who write most Tarot books and dominate online Tarot discussions is to begin with one of the most ambiguous subjects, particularly the Fool, the Popess, the Chariot, or the Hermit. They select a preferred interpretation for that subject and then bludgeon well-known, historically conventional meanings for the rest of the deck. As James Revak put it, torturing the cards until they confess the desired meaning. Whether this is dim-witted blundering or cynical fraud, it is certainly bullshit.

A pictorial work such as the trump cycle is inevitably going to be schematic at best. The surrounding composition should provide enough context to determine the significance of each piece, just as the shape and colors of each jigsaw puzzle piece connect it to the surrounding pieces. Also, because the pictorial work is schematic, each element should be essential in some manner. If a source work is being compared to the trump cycle, each supposed element of the comparison should be highly significant to both works—essential elements should have been abstracted from the source, so as to convey the essential meaning.

Conversely, if one must scour the alleged source for incidental elements to mindlessly match with the trump cycle, then it is clear that the meaning is different and the supposed “source” is probably not even an influence or parallel. Dante's Divine Comedy, for example, is a large and sprawling work from which various writers, including Joseph Campbell, have collected supposed parallels with the Tarot trumph cards. This sort of cherry-picking is precisely the selective elimination of context, the opposite of rational iconography. This is the sort of thing that Dummett's emphasis on the arrangement of the cards tends to correct.

Dummett's Null Hypothesis

In formulating the riddle in more detail, Dummett offered an historically persuasive alternative. Here is Dummett's argument about Tarot iconography, from the beginning of the essential Chapter 20 of The Game of Tarot, "The Order of the Tarot Trumps". (Emphasis added.)

Not all those who have sought to decode the symbolism of the Tarot pack have been occultists; some have been serious scholars, well versed in the iconography of later mediaeval and early Renaissance art. One W.M. Seabury wrote a book to prove that the symbolism of the pack was based upon Dante; Miss Gertrude Moakley, in her fine book about the Visconti-Sforza pack, advanced an interpretation of the pack, supported by much evidence from Italian art and literature; Mr. Ronald Decker has engaged in complicated speculations, linking the pack to the astrology of the time. I am not going to advance another such theory. I do not even want to take a stand about the theories that have been advanced. The question is whether a theory is needed at all.

I do not mean to deny that some of the subjects, or some of the details of their conventional representation, may have had a symbolic significance obvious to fifteenth-century Italians, or, at least, to educated ones, that escapes us and may be revealed by patient research; that is very likely to be the case. But the question is whether the sequence as a sequence has any special symbolic meaning. I am inclined to think that it did not: to think, that is, that those who originally designed the Tarot pack were doing the equivalent, for their day, of those who later selected a sequence of animal pictures to adorn the trump cards of the new French-suited pack. They wanted to design a new kind of pack with an additional set of twenty-one picture cards that would play a special, indeed a quite new, role in the game; so they selected for those cards a number of subjects, most of them entirely familiar, that would naturally come to the mind of someone at a fifteenth-century Italian court.

It is rather a random selection: we might have expected all seven principal virtues, rather than just the three we find—and, of course, we do find all seven in the Minchiate pack, and they were probably present also in the Visconti di Modrone pack. With the Sun and Moon we might have expected the other five planets, instead of just a star; with the Pope and the Emperor, we might have expected other ranks and degrees. But of course, in a pack of cards what is essential is that each card may be instantly identified; so one does not want a large number of rather similar figures, especially before it occurred to anyone to put numerals on the trump cards for ease of identification. Certainly most of the subjects on the Tarot trumps are completely standard ones in mediaeval and Renaissance art; there seems no need of any special hypothesis to explain them. Whatever may be the truth about those who first designed the Tarot pack, the inventors of the Minchiate pack surely approached their task in the spirit I have suggested: they wanted twenty additional subjects, and they choose ones which it was natural for men of the sixteenth century to think of—the four elements, the remaining virtues, the signs of the Zodiac—and inserted them en bloc in a convenient place. I do not think that anyone has suggested that there is any hidden significance in the sequence of Minchiate Trumps.

That is my opinion; but I do not want to insist on it. It may be that those who first devised the Tarot pack had a special purpose in mind in selecting those particular subjects and in arranging them in the order that they did: perhaps they then spelled out, to those capable of reading them, some satirical or symbolic message. If so, it is apparent that, at least by the sixteenth century, the capacity to read this message had been lost. There are many references to tarocchi in sixteenth-century Italian literature, in which their symbolic potentialities were exploited, but always in an obvious way: no hint survives that any more arcane meaning was associated with them.[...]
(The Game of Tarot, pp.387-388.)

First, note that this passage refutes those who claim his view to be a "theory of no meaning". He explicitly acknowledges the meaning of the subjects on the cards, and elsewhere he discusses most of them in detail. His actual position, that there is no detailed and coherent design to any known deck, is both parsimonious and historically documented in other games. Dummett gives the example of Minchiate, a variant Tarot deck, which is as close a parallel as possible—it is Tarot! Other examples can be provided from other games of the same period. This makes Dummett's alternative the presumptive explanation, however unsatisfying it may seem. It is the default explanation of the trumps, and will remain so unless and until someone can propose a detailed, coherent alternative hypothesis. (Lawyers would call it a rebuttable presumption based on prima facie evidence.) Gertrude Moakley remains the best alternative yet published, and her explanation, although more agreeable than Dummett's null hypothesis in many ways, is less persuasive.

The Ur Tarot Dilemma

The passage above continues with this rather dismal conclusion:

The search for a hidden meaning may be a unicorn hunt; but if there is a meaning to be found, only a correct basis of fact will lead us to it. The hidden meaning, if any, lies in the sequential arrangement of the trump cards; and therefore, if it is to be uncovered, we must know what, originally, that arrangement was.

Here Dummett introduces another important element, arguing that we need to know which deck was the Ur Tarot before we can begin our interpretation. This is an historian's view, a perspective in which iconography is secondary to documented history. For example, Ross has built a good, (albeit speculative), case for Bologna being the original home of Tarot. From that historical conclusion he then looks at Bolognese trumps, their iconography and ordering, as the best surviving evidence of the Ur design. Drawing a conclusion about the Ur Tarot, based on documentary evidence outside the cards themselves, precedes the iconographic analysis. Dummett assumed this approach and simply pointed out that we do not know, with any degree of confidence, which surviving deck best exemplifies the earliest decks.

Disputing Dummett's argument here provides a context in which to present some of his other contributions to Tarot iconography in the next section. Dummett says that we need to know, a priori, which deck was original. Only then can we attempt to analyze the meaning of Tarot. Practically, however, the converse seems to be the case. We do not need to know what the original order was to pursue such studies, and there are at least two approaches to reversing the process. One alternative is to look at all of the early decks and orderings and ask what the various early orders have in common. From that we can attempt a generic iconographic interpretation consistent with all or most of them, employing additional explanations of the specific differences. Such a study might suggest to us a meaning that was commonly recognized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, perhaps even by the people who were simply playing the game, but certainly by the individuals who created the various orderings. This is the generic or synoptic meaning of Tarot. Dummett himself pointed to the existence of such a meaning, (cf. below), and attempting to discern it in surviving decks does not require any assumption about the Ur Tarot.

A second possibility is to study all of the variations and attempt to decipher each separately. A best-possible reading of each deck is produced, and then these are compared. The assumption is that the original deck was well designed, and subsequent variations were probably less coherent. Thus, we are looking for the deck and ordering which displays the best evidence of integrated design. Rather than knowledge of the original order being a prerequisite for such a unicorn hunt, it may be the unicorn itself. Such a study might find that one particular sequence, and its corresponding iconography, appears exceptionally well designed. The others would be most easily explained as derivatives which, while making intelligible changes, nonetheless failed to maintain all of the overall meaning and, most critically, coherence. (Such an approach is analogous to that of textual criticism, by which biblical scholars attempt to reconstruct the evolution of texts.) If such an approach proved successful, then we might actually learn something with important implications for the origin of Tarot, we might indeed gain some enlightenment by studying the iconography.

Three Families of Tarot

Despite his claim to eschew iconography, Dummett's findings are essential as a basis for any subsequent study. He documented a dozen different orderings, establishing the Ur Tarot problem. Each locale in Italy had it's own style of Tarot deck, with both its own order of the cards and its own iconographic variations. This is what I have called the "civic pride" aspect of Tarot. Each city-state wanted it's own Tarot, but they still wanted it recognizable as Tarot. Non nova sed nove is the fundamental principle of the changes from one locale to another. Dummett also emphasized the importance of those orderings to any iconographic study, and he is in good company with writers like Tuve, above. Different arrangements of subject matter within the trump hierarchy imply different meanings, so the ordering matters.

Another crucial insight was that these variations in ordering tended to fall into three families, which he gave the uninspired names of A, B, and C. These families were more-or-less geographically distinct, (labeled Southern, Eastern, and Western, respectively, by Tom Tadfor Little), which suggests an historical diaspora: large initial variations were followed by lesser ones. Here is his 1980 description of those three families of decks.

If now, in the light of this analysis, we look at the actual orders, we see that they divide into three sharply distinct types, which I shall arbitrarily label type A, type B, and type C. These types are to be distinguished according to two principles: where the Virtues come; and whether the Angel or the World is the highest card. In type A, the Angel is the highest trump, the World coming immediately below it. The three Virtues, Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice, occur consecutively, usually interposed just above the lowest card of the middle segment, which, in orders of this type, as least whenever we can tell, is invariably Love.

In orders of type B, something completely different happens. In these, the World is the highest trump, and Justice is promoted to the second highest position in the sequence, coming immediately below the World and above the Angel, the third highest card. There is clearly an association of ideas here: the Angel proclaims the last Judgment, at which justice will be dispensed. In orders of type B, Temperance always comes immediately above the Pope, and is separated from Fortitude, which comes three cards later, after Love and the Chariot.

In an order of type C, the World is again the highest card in the sequence, but, this time, the Angel comes immediately below it. Of the Virtues, it is Temperance that is promoted to a relatively high position, namely to just above Death and just below the Devil; any symbolic appropriateness in this escapes me. The remaining two Virtues are again separated and scattered within the middle segment, Justice in all cases coming lower.
(The Game of Tarot, p.399.)

These family similarities may allow other conclusions to be drawn, and they may even allow an entire family of patterns to be dismissed as iconographically derivative. For example, the use of the virtue Justice to symbolize the Archangel Michael, between the Angel and World, is obviously a kluge, a sloppy variant. It is a perfect example of rearranging the standard subjects to tell a new story, and it indicates that the Eastern family of Tarot patterns does not represent the Ur Tarot very well.

Three Types of Subject Matter

Another fundamental iconographic insight was that the trump cycle, in each of the numerous orderings, had the same generic/synoptic design. Pop-culture Tarot enthusiasts routinely assume that everything means the same thing, whatever imposition they are personally fond of. (This is simply a variation of the Romantic view of Frazer, Jung, Campbell, et al. that all stories are the same story.) Dummett's conclusion that the different Tarot patterns had a similar generic meaning was based on his analysis and comparison of the different orderings of the trump subjects.

When we look closely at the various orders, we find that there was far from being total chaos. A first impression is of a good deal of regularity which, however, is hard to specify. Now the cards which wander most unrestrainedly within the sequence, from one ordering to another, are the three Virtues. If we remove these three cards, and consider the sequence formed by the remaining eighteen trump cards, it becomes very easy to state those features of their arrangement which remain constant in all the orderings. Ignoring the Virtues, we can say that the sequence of the remaining trumps falls into three distinct segments, an initial one, a middle one, and a final one, all variation occurring only within these different segments.

Restoring Tarot's Virtues

Note that the virtues are only set aside momentarily. They are the most fugitive of the trumps, having been moved repeatedly as Tarot traveled from city to city, having been revisioned for different purposes/meanings in the trump cycle. By ignoring them for a moment, as a heuristic technique, Dummett reveals an overall design to the trump cycle which the roaming virtues tend to disguise.

Tuve's first rule, however, demands that the virtues be restored to their rightful place in any particular deck before attempting to read the meaning of that cycle. (If our pattern recognition skills are sufficiently well honed, they need not be set aside at all.)

Tuve's second rule requires that these varied, vagrant, and ambiguous subjects be interpreted in light of the specific representation and placement in each deck. Thus, in some decks Temperance triumphing over Death appears to have been revisioned as Fame, and even labeled to make that meaning clear. This revision echoes Petrarch's Trionfi. In other decks Justice was revisioned as Judgment, placed between the Resurrection and the New World.

This is a brilliant observation, one that has been almost entirely ignored by Tarot enthusiasts for more than three decades.

Building on that insight, Dummett went on to explain the significance of those three sections, the genre of each section, if you will. In 1985, Dummett wrote “Tracing the Tarot”, an article in the periodical FMR, which correctly identified the three groups. (In his earlier analysis presented in The Game of Tarot, he included Death in the third group.) This provided the necessary foundation for any serious subsequent analysis, and the fact that hundreds of pop-culture Tarot interpreters have ignored this finding is revealing.

The first group consists of the Bagatto (the “trifle”, aka Mountebank, Juggler, or Magician) and the four “papal and imperial cards”. The Fool is not included in some early lists of the trumps, it is generally not numbered, and it has a unique role in the game. Therefore Dummett left it out of his analysis. However, as part of the allegorical design of the series, its place as the lowest of the low is obvious, paralleled in many other works of art and literature, and essential to the design. Considered as an allegorical figure, the Fool belongs in this group and these six cards form a social hierarchy, a “ranks of man” design. Not surprisingly, it shows two representatives from each of the “three estates” of medieval society. In every ordering of the Tarot sequence, the Mountebank is the lowest of the trumps (not counting the Fool) and the Pope is the highest. This lowest group clearly suggests that a very intelligible and coherent design is present, and this ranks of man genre is the "principal drift" which "governs the meanings attributable to the incidents born upon the stream". That is, it is the context in which the individual card subjects must be interpreted.

“The next group of cards could be described as representing conditions of human life: love; the cardinal virtues of Temperance, Fortitude..., and Justice; the triumphal car; the wheel of fortune; the card now known as the hermit; the hanged man; and death.” These images are allegory properly so-called, rather than the representatives of social rank in the first section. They reflect a “conditions of man” design which, like social ranking, formed a well-known organizing principle in didactic art. The Moral Virtues, Love, Death, and the Wheel of Fortune are among the most common allegories of the era, and the ordering -- successes, reversals, downfall and death -- suggests a coherent meaning. Again, this is the genre of the middle trumps, the context in which the individual cards must be interpreted.

“The final sequence represents spiritual and celestial powers; the devil, the tower, the star, the moon, the sun, the world, and the angel. The angel is the angel of the Last Judgment.” These images are related to Christian eschatology, and although they are not the most conventional representations, they derive from chapters 20 and 21 of Revelation, and tell the central story of Christ’s triumphs over the Devil (the lowest card of the section) and Death (via an image of resurrection.) Again, this is the genre of the highest trumps, the context in which the individual cards must be interpreted.

In other words, Dummett's iconographic analysis results in the same three groups as his analysis of historical sequences. The iconographic analysis of the groupings adds meaning to the structure, identifying the three types of subject matter and making sense of the design: it allows a coherent message to be read. Dummett himself couldn’t resist characterizing the groups by their subject matter in this fashion, even though his analysis was primarily based on sequence rather than iconography.

These three categories of subject matter are common to many works of art, literature, and drama. Representatives of Mankind, routinely including an emperor and pope along with assorted other characters, were the protagonists of such works. Allegorical personifications were varied, but usually ended with Death. These were the conditions of life to which the protagonists were subject. Eschatological subjects most commonly included some indication of the Final Judgment, but Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell were themselves a common motif.

Building on Dummett's Work

In memory of the iconographic prophet who has gotten so little respect in his own land, the Tarot community, let's take things a step further. Dummett noted that the virtues were revised, moved around, more than any other trumps. As illustrated above in the discussion of the Eastern ordering being an awkward and derivative design, the virtues are therefore the most obvious place to look for signs of revisioning. The virtues in Tarot are Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, the three "Moral Virtues", those virtues associated with the appetites. (As an aside, there is no "missing virtue" except in the minds of people who don't know that the three Moral Virtues are a complete set. Writers like Thomas Aquinas make this perfectly clear.) So let's think about the three virtues -- what would a coherent design entail in terms of ording the virtues?

The reasoning is that the most coherent/intelligible surviving deck will be the one that has the fewest changes from the Ur Tarot. There are really only two possibilities for systematic placement of the virtues: adjacent or equally spaced. Anything else is clearly a rearrangement, more or less arbitrary. This means that we can rule out the Eastern family, as discussed above. Notice that we are not selecting the Ur Tarot per se, but rather ruling out decks that do not seem well-designed.

The Southern orderings have the virtues adjacent, although some of them have other structural problems. We can rule out some of the Western designs, including well-known orderings such as that described by Susio and the ordering illustrated by the Vieville deck. The Western ordering known as TdM, historically the most common Tarot deck in the world, has the three virtues equally spaced. Each virtue is also, arguably, meaningfully placed above two related cards. Either TdM or one of the Southern designs would seem to be the best candidate for meaningful analysis and interpretation.

If any surviving design is a well-preserved fossil of the Ur Tarot, it probably a deck with either the Bolognese or Milanese (TdM) ordering. This speculation is based on an important assumption, that the earliest deck was very systematically designed. However, it is not an arbitrary assumption. Consider the alternative: If the earliest deck did not have a recognizably coherent design, then Tarot iconography is not very interesting. The Ur Tarot would be as much a sloppy hodge-podge as any other and, most importantly, Dummett's null hypothesis—that there is no systematic design—would be correct. Dummett must be refuted or accepted; he cannot be ignored.

We are either dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, or we are just dwarfs.
Michael Dummett remains the singular giant in Tarot history and iconography.

______________________

Notes:

This post restates part of the background information presented in The Riddle of Tarot (2004), and the 2007 post, Iconography and the Order of the Cards.

Regarding the three Moral Virtues, this brief summary is from the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Virtue: "As the proper function of the moral virtues is to rectify the appetitive powers, i.e. to dispose them to act in accordance with right reason, there are principally three moral virtues: justice, which perfects the rational appetite or will; fortitude and temperance, which moderate the lower or sensuous appetite [the irascible and concupiscible appetites, respectively]. Prudence, as we have observed, is called a moral virtue, not indeed essentially, but by reason of its subject matter, inasmuch as it is directive of the acts of the moral virtues."

NYT: Remembering Michael Dummett

Professor Sir Michael Dummett

Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett was born on June 27 1925, and has died at age 86. "He was among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality." And in his spare time, "he argued that in the Middle Ages the Tarot was used as a set of playing cards and that it only acquired its association with the occult in the 18th century."

For that latter bit we may add to his titles, Troublemaker.

A sober appraisal of Lévi's works on magic could characterise them only as the product of an advanced state of intellectual deliquescence. Nevertheless, he initiated a boom in occultist writing, and almost all his successors acknowledged their debt to him, and may be said to have belonged to his school.
(Dummett, The Game of Tarot, 120.

______________________

Quotes:
[...] the most interesting fact about the Tarot pack, namely that it is the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched: not by a long way the most important, but the most completely successful. An entire false history, and false interpretation, of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed.
(A Wicked Pack of Cards, p.27.)

It is from Lévi's work, above all from the Dogme et rituel, that the whole of the modern occultist movement stems. At first glance, Lévi's success is bewildering: his style is bombastic, the intellectual content is thin, the factual information is inaccurate, and the claims advanced range from the unintelligible through the obscure to the frankly puerile. [...]
It may well be wondered how such preposterous nonsense ever attracted attention at all.
(The Game of Tarot, p.114.)

Felicities of the Solstice!

“Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”?

“Seasons Greetings”? “Cool Yule”?

Maybe “Marked Down—5 Shopping Days Left!” would capture the meaning of Xmas. But if you're a traditionalist, here is the best way to say you've got that old-time spirit of the season.

As an added bonus, “Merry Saturnalia” might make a wingnut’s head explode.

Ghisi's Labrythine Legacy

INSIDE GHISI’S LABYRINTH PART II:
Still More Fragments of History Recovered

When last we visited Ghisi's Labyrinth, Mariano Tomatis had introduced two more variations on the book: Pastime, pre-dating the 1607 edition, and Devotion of the Lord, subsequent to the 1616 edition. A video by Bill Kalush illustrated how the latter trick worked in practice. Two months ago, Mariano posted The Map of Andrea Ghisi's Laberinto which, in addition to detailing the design and operation of the trick, also introduced yet another variation: La Zecca Aritmetica, by Francesco Gattici.

In 1613 viscount Francesco Gattici published La Zecca Aritmetica con mirabile secreto at the Venetian typographer Giacomo Sarzina. This book shares the same structure of Laberinto, with some interesting differences. Printing Gattici's book was cheaper because there are no figures in it: its 1260 squares show only three distinct series of words. Using the book, the player may choose between three different divinations: the currency of a coin, the name of its owner or the city he lives in. Every square contains the name of currency, the last name of a person and the name of a city.

This additional title can be added to the Ghisi family tree.

1603 Pastime: The openings show four 13-image matrices, arranged vertically. There are a total of 74 images used, although only 52 which are operative. Some of the images are merely misdirection, tending to conceal the actual design of the trick.

1607 Labyrinth: The openings show four 15-image matrices, arranged horizontally. There are a total of 60 images used. This book was dedicated to Prince Gonzaga of Mantua.

1610 Labyrinth: This was an English translation of the 1607 book.

1613 La Zecca Aritmetica: Ghisi's famous picture book functions just as well without any pictures, driving a stake through the heart of some New Age fantasies.

1616 Labyrinth: The openings also show four 15-image matrices for a total of 60 images used. Most of these (45) were based on the E-Series model book, some were repeated from the earlier edition, and some were new. This book was dedicated to Doge Bembo of Venice.

1617 Devotion of the Lord: The openings also show four 15-image matrices for a total of 60 images used. The images include well-known saints, different aspects of the Virgin, (such as the Virgin of Loreto), named archangels, a few biblical figures, and one square with a crown and lilies, with the words, Dignare me laudare te, Virgo sacrata. Da mihi virtutem.

Today Mariano has posted the slide show of a presentation he made to the CICAP Conference last week. The slides present a different approach to understanding the design of Ghisi's parlor trick and its place in the larger history of mathematical recreations.

Kenneth Clark on Gombrich

Erwin Panofsky offered a cheeky summary of the difference between two approaches to art scholarship: "The connoisseur might be defined as a laconic art historian, and the art historian as a loquacious connoisseur." Below are a few comments by Sir Kenneth Clark on the predominance of connoisseurship in 19th-century art historical studies and the rise of iconographical studies in 20th-century art history. The passage is from "Stories of Art", an article in the November 24, 1977 New York Review of Books.

From about 1864, the year of the publication of Crowe and Cavaleaselle’s New History of Italian Painting, the study of Italian art turned from the imaginative interpretations of Ruskin to the task of amassing information. Ruskin foresaw the change and recommended Crowe and Cavaleaselle as “a book which they have called A History of Painting in Italy, but which is in fact only a dictionary of details relating to that history.” In the 1870s, writers on art, from Morelli downward, set out to discover who painted what pictures, the occupation to which they gave the rather pretentious title of “the science of connoisseurship.”

This new direction of art history was overdue. No one can study an artist’s work without having a fairly correct idea of what he painted, and the accretions that had grown around well-known artists’ names were fantastic. Charles Lamb, writing from Blenheim, says that of the nine pictures by Leonardo da Vinci only two pleased him: needless to say there were no pictures by Leonardo da Vinci at all at Blenheim. The movement totally dominated art historical teaching and produced a vast number of monographs and a few syntheses, of which Berenson’s Drawings of the Florentine Painters was the most intelligent and Van Marle’s History of Italian Painting the most dismal. Although Berenson allowed himself some value judgments his fame and fortune rested on his famous “lists,” which aimed at authenticating the works of Italian painters, and I can testify that the young critic of the 1920s thought this was the only respectable course open to him.

This activity had one serious defect: it did not begin to look at works of art in their historical context. Berenson and Bode never considered what contemporary patrons, guilds, princes, or ecclesiastical bodies wanted from their artists. And one reason for this was that Renaissance patrons of all sorts wanted something almost incredibly different from what we want today. Instead of an aesthetic specimen in a glass case they wanted a symbol, or complex of symbols, which should express their thoughts and aspirations. By the mid-nineteenth century no one (except Ruskin) thought symbolically, and it required a man of wholly original mind to do so. Such a man appeared in the person of Aby Warburg. He was a genius. His approach to art history produced a revolution that has lasted till the present day. Since he was also the senior member of a large banking house he was able to found in Hamburg a library and an institution in which his approach to art history could be developed.

Sir Ernst Gombrich has been for many years the head of the Warburg Institute, now fortunately located in London, and most people interested in the subject would agree that he is the most intelligent, the most learned, and the wittiest of English art historians. He is also one of the most prolific. Eight of his volumes stand on my shelves. I have read them all, but owing to my pitiful inability to follow philosophical arguments, I cannot claim that I have always understood them. Fortunately I do not need to write about this aspect of his work since this has been done already by the philosopher Richard Wollheim. [...]

I hope I have made clear my enormous admiration for Sir Ernst Gombrich's writings, and that I may be allowed to end this review with one criticism, not so much of Gombrich himself as of all Warburgian critics. It seems to me that the chief aim of the art historian is to give the reader some idea of why great artists are great. I know that in the eighteenth century, when various critics allocated marks to painters as if they were examiners, Giulio Romano often came out top of the class. But we all know that, compared to Titian, the industrious Giulio Romano was a second-rate artist. The first duty of criticism is to try to describe why Titian was superior to Giulio Romano. This may be almost impossible, but Berenson, and even Wölfflin (who takes a beating in Norm and Form), tried to do so.

Perhaps I am only saying that criticism should be more concerned with values than with symbols, and Gombrich is well aware of that; but sometimes the Warburgian approach seems to obsess him, and is worked out in such great detail that we begin to grow a little impatient.

Gombrich on Genre

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich (1909-2001) died ten years ago today, November 3, 2001. Along with Erwin Panofsky, Gombrich was one of the greatest exponents of iconography, the study of the meaning of didactic art. This post will mainly consist of quotes from the introductory chapter to his 1972 Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. Excerpts will be included from each section of this chapter. One of his concluding points is particularly important for the soi disant iconographers of the online Tarot community:

Once more we see a confirmation of the methodological rule emphasized by Hirsch: interpretation proceeds by steps, and the first step on which everything else depends is the decision to which genre a given work is to be assigned. The history of interpretations is littered with failures due to one initial mistake. Once you take watermarks in sixteenth-century books to be the code of a secret sect, the reading of watermarks in the light of this hypothesis will appear to you possible or even easy.

Genre is crucial. More generally, Gombrich discusses the fact that art history and criticism has routinely dismissed meaning as irrelevant at best, degrading at worst. Traditionally, if a work of art has an obvious intended message, that lowers the regard most critics and historians will express for it. Focusing on the meaning reduces the art to illustration, unworthy of the attention of scholars and aesthetes. However, ignoring the didactic content is anachronistic. The concerns of the cultures in which pre-Modern art was conceived, created, and appreciated were primarily the meaning of a work—the primary justification for art's existence.

The concluding chapter of Symbolic Images, after which the book itself is named, is Icones Symbolicae. (An earlier version of the essay was published in 1948.) In that chapter, Gombrich analyzes different philosophies of symbolism in art. One of these is expressed by Abbé Pluche.

Understand a painting? It is ridiculous that an effort should have to be made.

But the artist should realize from the failure of his allegories how little the public demands this sort of thing. Who gives himself the trouble to read, in the allegorical paintings of M. LeBrun and many others, what the artists have intended to make known? All these enigmatic figures make a burden of what ought to amuse or instruct me... Since the sole purpose of a painting is to show me what cannot be said in words, it is ridiculous that an effort should have to be made in order to understand it.... And ordinarily, when I have succeeded in divining what these mysterious figures mean, I find that the substance has hardly been worth so elaborate a concealment.
Abbé (Noël-Antoine) Pluche, Histoire du Ciel, 1739.(1)

The 18th-century view of Abbé Pluche is that “the sole purpose of a painting is to show me what cannot be said in words”. Compare that with the Gregorian(2) notion of paintings as quasi libri laicorum, that images were books for the masses. This was a commonplace among the people who produced and viewed pre-modern art. Both Gregory and Pluche were emphatic about the sole reason for pictorial representation, but their ideas were diametrically opposed, and other views existed as well. In the Preface, Gombrich explains this central problem, the focus of the book.

The nineteenth century regarded the Renaissance as a movement of liberation from the monkish dogmatism of the Middle Ages, expressing its new-found enjoyment of sensuous pleasure in the artistic celebration of physical beauty. Some of the greatest historians of Renaissance painting such as Berenson and Wölfflin still stood under the spell of this interpretation, which dismissed all concern with symbolism as irrelevant pedantry. One of the first scholars to react fiercely against this aestheticism of the fin de siècle was Aby Warburg, the founder of the Warburg Institute, with which I have been connected for most of my scholarly life. In his intellectual biography, which I have recently published, I have shown how painfully even he had to emancipate himself from this unhistorical view to make us aware of the importance which patrons and artists of the period attached to types of subject matter which can no longer be explained without drawing on forgotten esoteric lore(3).

The rest of the quotes will be from the Introduction: Aims and Limits of Iconology.

There is admittedly some danger that iconology will behave, not like ethnology as opposed to ethnography, but like astrology as opposed to astronomy..
(Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts

1. The Elusiveness of Meaning

It is the essence of wit to exploit such accidents and to discover meanings where none were intended. But does it matter? Is it really with the intention that the iconologist is primary concerned? It has become somewhat fashionable to deny this, all the more since the discovery of the unconscious and of its role in art seems to have undermined the straightforward notion of intention. But I would contend that neither the Courts of Law nor the Courts of Criticism could continue to function if we really let go of the notion of an intended meaning.

Luckily this case has already been argued very ably in a book concerned with literary criticism, D. E. Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation. The main purpose of that astringent book is precisely to reinstate and justify the old common-sense view that a work means what its author intended it to mean, and that it is this intention which the interpreter must try his best to establish. To allow for this restriction of the term meaning Hirsch proposes to introduce two other terms the interpreter may want to use in certain contexts, the terms significance and implication.... Hirsch rejects the facile view that a work means what it means to us. The meaning was the intended one.... [The choice of subject] may also be said to have had implications which account both for its meaning and its subsequent change of significance. But while the interpretation of meaning can result in a simple statement... the question of implication is always open.... Here as always it is clear that the meaning we seek is the one [the artist] intended to convey.

[...]
Dealing, as he does, with literature rather than art, Hirsch comes to the conclusion that the intended meaning of a work can only be established once we have decided what category or genre of literature the work in question was intended to belong to. Unless we try to establish first whether a given literary work was intended as a serious tragedy or as a parody, our interpretation is likely to go very wrong indeed. This insistence on the importance of such a first step may at first look puzzling, but Hirsch shows convincingly how hard it is for the interpreter to retrace his steps once he has taken such a false turning. People have been known to laugh at tragedies if they took them to be parodies.

2. Iconography and Iconology

The historian will always do well to proceed from the known to the unknown.... Moreover, the methodological principles established by Hirsch, particularly the primacy of genres -- if it may so be called -- applies to the art of the Renaissance with even greater stringency than it does to the nineteenth century. Without the existence of such genres in the traditions of Western art the task of the iconologist would indeed be desperate.... It is because there are genres such as altar paintings and repertoires such as legends, mythologies, or allegorical compositions, that the identification of subject matters is at all possible. And here, as in literature, an initial mistake in the category to which the work belongs or, worse still, of possible categories, will lead the most ingenious interpreter astray.

[...]
The identification of texts illustrated in a given religious or secular picture is usually considered part of iconography.... If a complex illustration can be matched by a text which accounts for all its principal features the iconographer can be said to have made his case.If there is a whole sequence of such illustrations which fits a similar sequence in a text the possibility of the fit being due to accident is very remote indeed.

[...]
But by and large we mean by iconology, since the pioneer studies of Panofsky, the reconstruction of a programme rather than the identification of a particular text. The procedure need only be explained to show both its interest and its hazards. There is a number of images or cycles of art of the Italian Renaissance which cannot be explained as the straightforward illustration of a given existing text. We know moreover that patrons occasionally either invented subjects to be represented or, more often, enlisted the aid of some learned man to supply the artist with what we call a 'programme'. Whether or not this habit was frequent, particularly in the fifteenth century, as modern studies appear to suggest, it is hard to say; but examples of this kind of 'libretto' have certainly come down to us in great numbers from the second half of the sixteenth century onward. If these programmes in their turn had consisted of original inventions or fantasies the task of reconstructing such a lost text from a picture would again be pretty hopeless. But this is not so. The genre of programmes was based on certain conventions, conventions closely rooted in the respect of the Renaissance for the canonic texts of religion and of antiquity. It is from a knowledge of these texts and a knowledge of the picture that the iconologist proceeds to build a bridge from both sides to close the gap between the image and the subject matter.

3. The Theory of Decorum

Luckily Renaissance authors have not been totally silent on the principles by which these subjects were to be used in given contexts. They obviously relied on the dominant consideration of the whole classical tradition, the notion of decorum. The application of this term was larger in the past than it is now. It signified what was 'fitting'. There is fitting behaviour in given circumstances, a fitting style of speech for given occasions, and of course also fitting subjects for given contexts.

Lomazzo in the Sixth Book of his Trattato has a list of suggestions for various types of places, starting, strangely enough, with such places as cemeteries where a number of episodes from the Bible relating to death are mentioned.... [Examples for other places, including history and mythology.] These and similar stories were clearly filed in the minds of Renaissance people in such a way that they could easily name, say, Biblical stories involving fire, or Ovidian stories involving water....

What these examples suggest, then, is a simply principle of selection which is easy to discern. We may call it the principle of intersection -- having in mind the use of letters and numbers arranged on the sides of a chequerboard or map which are used conjointly to plat a particular square or area. The Renaissance artist or artistic advisor had in his mind a number of such maps, listing, say, Ovidian stories on one side and typical tasks on the other. Just as the letter B on such a map does not indicate one field but a zone which is only narrowed down by consulting the number, so the story of Icarus, for instance, does not have one meaning but a whole range of meaning, which in its turn is then determined by the context....

Not that the intersection of two such requirements would necessarily satisfy the demand of the Renaissance patron for the most fitting image.... There were other requirements to be considered, not least among them the predilections and aptitudes of the artists concerned.... The repertory from which to choose was so rich and varied that the final choice could easily be adapted to the demands of decorum and the preferences of the artist.

4. The Dictionary Fallacy

The programme [an extended example in the previous section] confirms what has been suggested here from the outset, that taken in isolation and cut loose from the context in which they are embedded none of these images could have been interpreted correctly. Not that this observation is surprising. After all, it is even true of the words of an inscription that they only acquire meaning within the structure of a sentence.... It is true that those who learn a language are under the illusion that 'the meaning' of any word can be found in a dictionary. They rarely notice that even here there applies what I have called the principle of intersection. They are offered a large variety of possible meanings and select from them the one that seems demanded by the meaning of the surrounding text....

What the study of images in known contexts suggests is only that this multiplicity of meaning is even more relevant to the study of symbols that it is to the business of everyday language. It is this crucial fact that is sometimes obscured by the way iconologists have tended to present their interpretations. Quite naturally the documentation provided in their texts and footnotes gives chapter and verse for the meaning a given symbol can have -- the meaning that supports their interpretation. Here, as with language, the impression has grown up among the unwary that symbols are a kind of code with a one-to-one relationship between sign and significance. The impression is reinforced by the knowledge that there exist a number of medieval and Renaissance texts which are devoted to the interpretation of symbols and are sometimes quoted dictionary-fashion.

The most frequently consulted of these dictionaries is Cesare Ripa's Iconologia of 1593.... It turns out, in fact, that the same 'principle of intersection' that has been postulated of programmes such as Caro's applies to Ripa's technique of symbolization....

Ripa establishes quite explicitly that the symbols he uses as attributes are illustrated metaphors. Metaphors are not reversible. The hare and the sparrow may be used in some context for their association with solitude, but they have other qualities as well, and the hare, for instance, can also be associated with cowardice. Ripa was also quite clear in his mind that the method only worked if it was aided by language. "Unless we know the names it is impossible to penetrate to the knowledge of the significance, except in the case of trivial images which usage has made generally recognizable to everybody."

5. Philosophies of Symbolism

It is to this problem that the major essay in this volume [the concluding section of Symbolic Images] is devoted. In Icones Symbolicae two such traditions are distinguished, but neither of them treats the symbol as a conventional code. What I have called the Aristotelian tradition to which both Caro and Ripa belong is in fact based on the theory of the metaphor and aims, with its aid, to arrive at what might be called a method of visual definition. We learn about solitude by studying its associations. The other tradition, which I have called the Neo-Platonic or mystical interpretation of symbolism, is even more radically opposed to the idea of a conventional sign language. For in this tradition the meaning of a sign is not something derived from agreement, it is hidden there for those who know how to seek. In this conception, which ultimately derives from religion rather than from human communication, the symbol is seen as the mysterious language of the divine. The augur interpreting a portent, the mystagogue explaining the divinely ordained ritual, the priest expounding the image in the temple, the Jewish or Christian teacher pondering the meaning of the word of God had this, at least, in common, that they thought of the symbol as of a mystery that could only partly be fathomed.

This conception of the language of the divine is elaborated in the tradition of Biblical exegetics. Its most rational exposition is to be found in a famous passage from St. Thomas.

Any truth can be manifested in two ways: by things or by words. Words signify things and one thing can signify another. The Creator of things, however, can not only signify anything by words, but can also make one thing signify another. That is why the Scriptures contain a twofold truth. One lies in the things meant by the words used -- that is the literal sense. The other in the way things become figures of other things, and in this consists the spiritual sense.

[...]
But St. Thomas warns us not to take this technique as a method of translating unambiguous signs into discursive speech. There is no authoritative dictionary of the significance of things, as distinct from words, and in his view there cannot be such a dictionary:

It is not due to deficient authority that no compelling argument can be derived from the spiritual sense, this lies rather in the nature of similitude in which the spiritual sense is founded. For one thing may have a similitude to many; for which reason it is impossible to proceed from any thing mentioned in the Scriptures to an unambiguous meaning. For instance the lion may mean the Lord because of one similitude and the Devil because of another.

St. Thomas, as will be perceived, again links this lack of a definite meaning of 'things' with the doctrine of metaphor.... Each such symbol exhibits what may be called a plenitude of meanings which meditation and study can never reveal more than partially....

Nobody who has looked into medieval and Renaissance texts concerned with symbolism can fail to be both impressed and depressed by the learning and ingenuity expended on this task of applying the techniques of exegetics to a vast range of texts, images, or events. The temptation is indeed great for the iconologist to emulate this technique and to apply it in his turn to the works of art of the past.

6. Levels of Meaning?

But before we yield to this temptation we should at least pause and ask ourselves to what extent it may be appropriate to the task of interpreting the pictures or images of the past. Granted that any of these images could be seen to carry all kinds of implications -- to allude to Hirsch's use of the terms -- were they intended to carry more than one meaning? Were they intended, as is sometimes postulated, to exhibit the distinct four senses which exegetics attributed to the Holy Writ and which none other than Dante wished applied to the reading of his poem? I know of no medieval or Renaissance text which applies this doctrine to works of pictorial art....

[...]
The possibility of making 'things' signify was not lost on such masters as Leonardo, who represented the Christchild playing with a yarnwinder recalling the shape of the cross. But to what extent are these and similar examples applications of the principle of several meanings? The event is illustrated and the things figuring in the event echo and expand the meaning. But this symbolism can only function in support of what I have proposed to call the dominant meaning, the intended or principal purpose of the picture.... Here as always the symbol functions as a metaphor which only acquires its specific meaning in a given context. The picture has not several meanings but one.

7. The Psychoanalytic Approach

The discoveries of psycho-analysis have certainly contributed to the habit of finding so many 'levels of meaning' in any given work. But this approach tends to confuse cause and purpose. Any human action, including the painting of a picture, will be the resultant of many, indeed an infinite number of contributory causes. Psychoanalysis likes to speak in this context of 'over-determination' and the concept has its value as a reminder of the many motivations that may overlap in the motivation of anything we say, do, or dream. But strictly speaking any event that occurs is 'over-determined' if we care to look for all the chains of causation, all the laws of nature that come into operation.... What would matter in any of these cases is only that the innumerable chains of causation which ultimately brought the work into being must on no account be confused with its meaning. The iconologist is concerned with the latter, as far as it can be determined... We are rather concerned with categories of social acceptance, as is the case with all symbols and sign systems. It is these which matter to the iconologist, whatever penumbra of vagueness they may of necessity exhibit.

[...]
In looking at a work of art we will always project some additional significance that is not actually given. Indeed we must do so if the work is to come to life for us. The penumbra of vagueness, the 'openness' of the symbol is an important constituent of any real work of art.... But the historian should also retain his humility in the face of evidence. He should realize the impossibility of ever drawing an exact line between the elements which signify and those which do not. Art is always open to afterthoughts, and if they happen to fit we can never tell how far they were part of its original intention.

8. Codes and Allusions

Vasari tells us that Vincenzio da San Gimignano carried out a facade painting after a design by Raphael, showing the Cyclops forging a thunderbolt of Jove, and Vulcan at work on the arrows of Cupid. These, we read, were intended as allusions to the name of the owner of the house in the Borgo in Rome which these paintings adorned, on Battiferro, meaning hitting iron. If the story is true the subject was chosen as what is called in heraldry a 'canting device'. The story of such allusions should be quite salutary reading for the iconologist, for we must admit again that we could never have guessed.

[Another example from Vasari, with a topical allegory.]

It is characteristic, though, that this recourse to a code was taken in the context of a festive decoration, which would be taken down immediately. Secret codes and allusions of this kind have much less place i works of art intended to remain permanent fixtures. Codes, moreover, cannot be cracked by ingenuity alone. On the contrary. It is the danger of the cipher clerk that he sees codes everywhere.

To my knowledge neither Vasari nor any other text of the fifteenth or sixteenth century ever says that any painting or sculpture is intended to have two divergent meanings or to represent two distinct events through the same set of figures. The absence of such evidence seems to me to weigh all the more heavily as Vasari was obviously very fond of such intricacies both in his own art and in the inventions of his scholar-friends. It is indeed hard to imagine what purpose such a double image should serve within the context of a given cycle or decoration. The exercise of wit, so relished by the Renaissance, lay precisely in the assignment of a meaning to an image which could be seen to function in an unexpected light.

9. The Genres

We come back to the question of decorum and the institutional function of images in our period. For the exposition of ambiguity, the demonstration of plenitude had indeed a place in Renaissance culture, but it belonged to that peculiar branch of symbolism, the impressa. The combination of an image with a motto chosen by a member of the Nobility was not often witty but more frequently the cause of wit in others....

But if the iconologist must pay attention to the technique of the impressa and its applications, he should not forget to attend to the other end of the spectrum of Renaissance art, the free play of form and the grotesque which could equally be fitted into the theory of decorum.... The enigmatic configuration, the monsters and hybrids of the grotesque, are professedly the product of an irresponsible imagination on holiday. Take any of these images in isolation and place it in a conspicuous place in a solemn building and everyone would be entitled to look for a deep symbolic significance. The grotesque would become a hieroglyph, asking to be unriddled.

[...]
Once more we see a confirmation of the methodological rule emphasized by Hirsch: interpretation proceeds by steps, and the first step on which everything else depends is the decision to which genre a given work is to be assigned. The history of interpretations is littered with failures due to one initial mistake. Once you take watermarks in sixteenth-century books to be the code of a secret sect the reading of watermarks in the light of this hypothesis will appear to you possible or even easy....

[...]
One methodological rule, at any rate, should stand out in this game of unriddling the mysteries of the past. However daring we may be in our conjectures -- and who would want to restrain the bold? -- no such conjectures should ever be used as a stepping stone for yet another, still bolder hypothesis. We should always ask the iconologist to return to base from every one of his individual flights, and to tell us whether programmes of the kind he has enjoyed reconstructing can be documented from primary sources or only from the works of his fellow iconologists. Otherwise we are in danger of building up a mythical mode of symbolism, much as the Renaissance built up a fictitious science of hieroglyphics that was based on a fundamental misconception of the nature of the Egyptian script.

This redaction of the introductory chapter to a single book is, of course, inadequate. The point is to suggest the value of reading the whole chapter, the entire book, other works by Gombrich, as well as Panofsky, et al.

______________________
NOTES:

1. 1. Gombrich cites Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, for the quote, and I have reproduced the longer quote from page 273 of that book.
2. 2. Pope Gregory, in a letter to Bishop Serenus of Marseille in 600, chastised the iconoclastic Serenus with this rationale: “For what writing is to those who can read, a painting presents to the uneducated (idiotis) who look at it, since in it the unlearned (ignorantes) see what they ought to follow, and in it those who know no letters can read. Hence, painting serves as reading, especially for the people (gentibus).” Didactic illustration, (pro lectione pictura est), was the predominant use of and justification for images prior to the 19th century.
3. 3. A number of dim-witted loons are likely to read posts on a Tarot blog. Therefore, it seems useful to point out the obvious: “forgotten esoteric lore” in this context includes subjects like biblical stories, the Golden Legend, classical mythology, medieval romances, and the like, in addition to the Neoplatonic sources, astrology, and other areas of Renaissance culture which have been co-opted by modern occultists. Forgotten esoteric lore is synonymous with “shit that is obscure to modern audiences”.
4. Portrait of Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich by Ronald Brooks Kitaj at the National Portrait Gallery site.

Ivory Cassone

Gertrude Moakley wrote the earliest scholarly account of the iconography of Tarot, and her book remains the most substantial analysis yet published. She argued that the Tarot trump cards, originally known as trionfi, were one of many examples of pop culture derived from Petrarch's I Trionfi. Tarot's trumps show both individual parallels with the subjects of the poem and a similarity to the overall design. Petrarch's Triumphs spawned an iconographic tradition in the 15th century well beyond illustrated manuscripts and printed editions of the poem.

Petrarch's Triumphs were depicted in various media, the most spectacular being giant tapestries, nearly twenty feet long.

A more common form for the Triumphs was as decoration for wedding chests, cassoni. Some had a single triumph, usually the Triumph of Love, but most of them had the triumphs of Love, Chastity, and Death painted on one side, with Fame, Time, and Eternity on the other. One surviving example, however, stands apart from the rest. It was an ivory wedding chest.

Cassone nuziale con i Trionfi del Petrarca, 1477
http://www.atlantedellarteitaliana.it/artwork-4431.html

Here is the Triumph of Death panel from that cassone, in honor of tomorrow's macabre holiday.

Triumph of Death from Ivory Cassone Circle of Andrea Mantegna, 1477