Gertrude Moakley, in her 1959 introduction to a reprint of Arthur E. Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, praised Waite’s knowledge and understanding of Tarot, as well as his skepticism of occultist fantasy. Waite was, in some ways, her predecessor in the scholarly study of Tarot and its iconography. In a 1926 article, Waite had described the Tarot trumps as being of four types. A few of the designs were “estates”, symbolic of social rank. The larger portion were “allegorical” per se, including cards like Love, Death, Justice, and Fortitude. A few were “doctrinal in character”, expressing Christian eschatology via images such as the Devil and the Angel of Judgment. Finally, a number of the designs were “symbolical”, such as the Hanged Man. By symbolical, Waite meant that the designs were not conventional allegory, emblematic images with a conventional meaning, but more complex, subtle, and obscure in their design. His comments about these four types of images may have been the earliest attempt at something approaching an art-historical analysis of the trumps. Gertrude Moakley’s book is the best.
The subject of Gertrude Moakley’s 1966 book is narrowly specified in the title: The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family, subtitled, An Iconographic and Historical Study. Moakley’s book is the first detailed, art-historical analysis of a specific deck and its unique iconography. (Decades later, we are still waiting for a second.) The Tarot Cards is 124 pages long, without an index. The five chapters of Part I examine in detail the origin and history of the deck, as well as presenting a detailed interpretation of the program or design of the deck, the meaning of the images and their sequence. Part II (“The Procession”) includes illustrations of all the cards of the Visconti-Sforza deck, along with discussions of each of the trump cards, and each of the four suits. This review will focus on Moakley’s interpretation of the trumps, although that is intimately connected with the rest of her historical studies, and her research in those areas was equally noteworthy.
Overall, Moakley sees the trumps and the suit cards as all meaningfully integrated into a Carnivalesque pageant, a triumphal procession based loosely on Francesco Petrarch’s influential fourteenth-century poem, I Trionfi.
The triumph had three ancestors: the ancient Roman triumph celebrated to honor a victorious military hero, the medieval religious procession, and the processions of knights traditionally held in connection with jousts and trouneys. The Renaissance interest in the Greek and Roman classics revived interest in the Roman triumph....
In Milan, the religious processions very early took on the dramatic quality of the triumph....
It was the knight’s processions which contributed to the triumph the exciting feature of rows of mounted men and footmen, all dressed alike, who marched before each triumphal car. (Page 43-44.)
The dominant theme of this particular pageant, illustrated in the Visconti-Sforza Tarot deck is Petrarch’s I Trionfi. This was an influential work from the previous century. Initially, I Trionfi was written as a love poem about the triumphs of Love and Chastity. Years later, Petrarch added a more allegorical extension to the work, triumphs of Death and Fame. Later still he completed it with the eschatological capstone, triumphs of Time and Eternity. Although written in this disjointed fashion over some 18 years, (and apparently not finished to Petrarch’s satisfaction at the time of his death), the underlying structure of the whole is brilliantly conceived. (The actual poem, at least in translation, is not nearly so compelling as the design.)
In interpreting the Visconti-Sforza Tarot cards as reflecting primarily themes from Petrarch’s poem, Moakley weaves in a number of other motifs as well. Interpreting the suit cards, she cites the allegorical interpretation of Innocentio Ringhieri which identified the suits with the four Cardinal Virtues. Moakley then presents each suit as a chivalrous embodiment of its respective virtue, thereby connecting them with the knight’s processions mentioned above, which integrates the suits into her overall conception of the deck.
With a little imagination one can see that each of the four ordinary suits in any pack of cards is a company of knights ready for one of the jousts or tourneys which were the favorite sports of medieval Europe. Each knight wears the heraldic device of his own company, but “differenced” by number, according to his rank. At the head of each company is its King-of-arms, it’s Queen of Love and Beauty, and its chief Knight. In the tarocchi and minchiate (another variety of tarot cards), there is also a Page. (Page 35.)
She notes that the “delights of the joust and the tourney were kept for the festival times, when religion was forgotten or at least temporarily in the background”. Writing about courtly love, ostentatious pageants, chivalrous knights, and the like, she observes that “the writers of chivalrous literature knew well enough that their work was basically un-Christian.” This is precisely the context in which she places the trumps as well.
As much as people loved their romances, their cards, and their tourneys, they realized inwardly that these pleasures were not quite in keeping with the devout life. After a gay and exhausting Carnival, the exuberant Italians really welcomed Lent as a chance to rest from the festive season and to prove to themselves that they really were Christians at heart. They brought their vanities (including their playing-cards) to be burned in the bonfires at the beginning of Lent with an honest spirit of aspiring to sanctity. (Page 37.)
This ambivalence and mixing of vanities and sanctity is the essence of the Carnival/Lent cycle, and the cultural sensibilities that cycle epitomized. Moakley opens her study with an “Undocumented Prelude”. This presents an imagined Milanese procession on the last day of Carnival, taking place before Duke Francesco Sforza and Duchess Bianca Maria, as well as assembled crowds. In that introduction to her study, she provides a feeling for the kind of sensibilities implied by her theory, while introducing many of her specific interpretations.
One of the most compelling identifications Moakley provides in support of her theory deals directly to this Carnival/Lent cycle. The Mountebank, lowest of the trumps, is identified as the Carnival King himself, and the singular Fool is interpreted as the personification Lent. She discusses the unique iconography of these cards in the Visconti-Sforza deck, explaining the anomalies in terms of these meanings. And she describes their role in the pageant.
If we imagine the Fool, the representative of Lent, running alongside the procession and calling his warnings to the riders in the cards, we can assume that they talked back to him. Happy bits of repartee would please the crowd and encourage the actors to do even better. Finally the representative of Lent might invite King Carnival to leave the safety of his car and fight like a man. Then we would have a scene such as Breughel shows us in his painting “The Battle between Carnival and Lent”.... (Page 58.)
Into this context of a playful Carnivalesque procession, Moakley suggests that Petrarch’s triumphs were blended. They were excerpted, simplified, and rearranged “in the merry mood of Carnival.” Some elements seem straightforward, such as Love followed by the Chariot. In the Visconti-Sforza deck, Love may well illustrate a betrothal picture of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti. The Chariot has a female sovereign being pulled by winged horses, and might easily be intended to conflate the conventional Tarot Chariot with Petrarch’s Triumph of Chastity. (Unfortunately for her presentation, Moakley followed the Bertoni sequence, which inverts the order of these two cards.) Death follows eventually, but Fame appears to be completely absent. The triumph of Eternity (the Angel and World) over Time (the Moon and Sun) would complete Petrarch’s triumphs, in something close to their proper order. Among other problems with this analysis, however, in the Visconti-Sforza deck the Hermit card is clearly intended to represent Time, and therefore ruins another part of the sequence.
Moakley resolves such difficulties with speculations about possible humorous intent. Lack of fit with Petrarch’s design is taken not as a weakness of the theory but as implied satire of that design. The trumps are considered “a ribald take-off” of Petrarch’s story. “Perhaps because, in the merry mood of Carnival, everything possible was done to make fun of the solemn story.” Unfortunately, there is no apparent rhyme or reason to the various mismatches, and no coherent connection with Petrarch’s design. If it were intended as a satire it fails utterly, since the object of the satire is no longer visible. Yes, there are some of Petrarch’s triumphs present in Tarot, but also some absent, some out of sequence, and many more that are simply out of place, having no reasonable analogy in I Trionfi. As Robert V. O’Neill put it in Tarot Symbolism:
The explanation is that the Tarot is not only a simplification of Petrarch’s scheme, but also a spoof, a ribald take-off on the solemnity of the original story in the spirit of the Carnival parade. This explanation is not acceptable simply because it allows too much freedom. Any lack of correspondence can be passed off as part of the joke. Therefore, if the cards match it is taken as positive evidence for the theory, while any discrepancy is dismissed offhand. This is too simplistic. (Pages 79-80, emphasis added.)
Although Petrarch’s poem does not explain the Tarot sequence, conflation of elements of his triumphs with the standard Tarot subjects might well explain some of the variant iconography peculiar to the Visconti-Sforza deck. While failing to provide a convincing explanation of the overall design, Moakley offered plausible interpretations of several specific cards in this particular deck, including the Mountebank and Fool as Carnival and Lent. Some other interpretations offered by Moakley were wonderful historical discoveries and provide essential insights into not only this deck but early Tarot in general. (In particular, two of the most perplexing of Waite’s so-called “symbolical cards”, the Hanged Man and the Popess, were explained in far more down-to-earth terms.) Her iconographic studies are therefore an essential starting point for any subsequent study of the meaning of the Tarot images and sequence.
Moakley’s method is also noteworthy. Like the art historians of the Warburg school who had been so active in the half century preceding Moakley’s work, her approach to the subject matter of this work of art was based on examination of a broad range of historical, iconographic, and literary sources. (In her Preface, she acknowledges the help of Erwin Panofsky when she was writing the 1956 article out of which this book grew.) Every detail is placed in a context, and context within contexts, to attempt to ascertain the intended design of the work, the “author’s message”. Although Tarot does not resemble I Trionfi very closely, Moakley was not blindered by her basic theory. She was able to follow the details wherever they might lead, and discovered many things about the Visconti-Sforza deck that had nothing to do with her overarching thesis. It remains the best iconographic study of a Tarot deck ever published, and well worth reading -- if only U.S. Games would reprint it.
Part I
1. The Cards and their Maker
2. The Cicognara Mix-up
3. The Family for whom the Cards were Made
4. Triumphs and the Game of Triumphs
5. The Death of Carnival
Part II
The Procession
The Tarot Cards
Painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family:
An Icongraphic and Historical Study
Gertrude Moakley
The New York Public Library, New York
Library of Congress Catalog Number 65-18551
© 1966 The New York Public Library