Re: VMs: Has anyone ever noticed this?

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone

At 13:43 25/01/03 -0500, Big Jim wrote:
> This may have been discussed, but, I happened to be looking at the VMS PDF 
> and noticed something odd. Maybe it's nothing, but, there is a rather 
> strange similarity to the center character in f72v2 (the "virgo" pic) and 
> the 15th century Visconti-Sforsa  "star" card. Maybe it's me...it just hit 
> me as so similar.
>
> http://users.gloryroad.net/~bigjim/its_visual.htm

As I've been looking for some time at the (Visconti-)Sforza and Milan, this 
would be no great surprise to me.

There are many Visconti-Sforza tarot-related links on the web. For example:-

        http://www.angelfire.com/realm/venus307/tarotgallery.htm

        Based upon differences in size and artistic style of the cards,
        there appear to be fifteen distinct groups of 15th century
        Milanese Visconti and Visconti-Sforza tarocchi cards. These
        incomplete groups survive by as few as a single card to the
        most nearly complete pack of seventy-four out of seventy-eight
        cards. These cards are sometimes called Lombard tarocchi
        packs, because they were produced in what is now called
        the province of Lombardy. All the cards are handpainted on
        heavy cardboard.

To my eyes, the central figures of the zodiac "volvelles" in the VMS look 
to be an addition by the encoder, rather than a tracing of existing 
pictures from the source data.

In the same way that much of Massajo's 15th Century maps were drawn based 
on the Latin translation of Ptolemy's (often incorrect) written pairs of 
longitude and latitude, I think that the VMS' volvelles may be a graphical 
encoding of a written dataset: and hence that the central figures may have 
been separately copied from various accessible sources, for reasons of 
sheer speed.

The Sagittarius crossbowman has been referred to several times on-list as 
perhaps having been copied from a German calender, for example: and it 
would make sense if the Virgo picture was similarly copied from another 
(possibly more close at hand) source, like a tarocchi card.

However, I think it's important to point out that the tarocchi decks were 
handmade and hand-painted, and are relatively rare: so were probably 
neither common nor cheap at the time - remember that the Visconti-Sforza's 
were the Milanese equivalent of the Kennedy family. :-o

It would be interesting to compare the rest of the VMS with other still 
extant tarocchi cards - are there any tarot historians on-list?

As a further lead, I would also suggest examining the minute detailing on 
the VMS' Virgo figure, far beyond what is visible on the scans available to 
us - are they flowers on her cape, for example?

Also: looking again at the Virgo volvelle, there is a single notable nymph 
in (what Edith Sherwood identifies as) a birthing tub, but without 
geometric decoration and with a more functional-looking shape than the 
others. What star was associated with the 8th degree of Virgo? [inner 
circle of nymphs, 8th nymph counting clockwise from 9 o'clock]

Cheers, ....Nick Pelling....

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