NOTES ON THE THREEFOLD SCHEME OF THE TAROT TRUMPS IN CONTEXT

Prolegomena to a study of the groups, subjects and sequence of the Tarot trumps
(mostly an art(ist) appreciation exercise)

A depiction of heaven and earth will place heaven above earth; everyone intuitively
understands this. The things of heaven are higher than the things of earth. So, in a
vertical hierarchy, where would you then put depictions of concepts and ideas, or
personifications of moral concepts like allegories? Since they are not people you can
meet or things you can bump into, nor are they real but untouchable like the heavenly
bodies and supreme realities like God on his throne, such symbols will be placed higher
than earth and Man but lower than heaven and God, in the middle space between the
two. This is what the tarot trump sequence does, and so do countless other works
showing formally similar hierarchical orders. Only the specific iconographic content
will differ, depending on the context and function of the work. This is the threefold
scheme of the trump sequence.
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.
Game of Tarot, p. 398.

The threefold architecture of the trump sequence that Dummett discovered is not just a
quirk of Tarot - it is a basic principle of spatial organization in iconographic vertical
hierarchies - the basic moral valuation of hierarchical space, the low, middle, and high
places; the center, and the sides. It forms a part of what Aby Warburg in 1912 described
as the "...noch ungeschrieben 'historischen Psychologie des menschlichen Ausdrucks'"
(the yet-unwritten 'historical psychology of human expression'). It is so basic, intuitive
and natural that it is essentially unconscious and remains unmentioned, assumed, in
discussions of how to read art. It is not a complicated insight, but it is profound; it has
enough analytic power to generate new ways of viewing some artistic productions, for
instance blowing life into a seemingly static monument like Donatello's tomb for
Giovanni XXIII (see below in the examples I analyze in their threefoldness).

It was in September 2013, after a week or so of seriously wrangling with three

"triumphs" (Love, Death, Eternity), a narrative that I saw in the trump sequence, that I
appear to have truly begun to realize Dummett's threefold structure for the profound
insight it was. From my notebook:
"We can look at the Monopoly squares and say "that's Atlantic City". With a little
digging / research we can say it is Atlantic City, first third of 20th century.
"Likewise with Tarot we can look at the trumps and say they contain a moral allegory
and with a little research locate it in the first half of 15th century Italy.
"But neither was intended to teach what the symbols represent, although we can draw a
lesson from either of them. Court cards not numbered; rank is implied. Similarly the
court cards don't tell a story, although they are a meaningful hierarchy. Similarly for
Chess figures or any game with symbolic figures representing the hierarchy.
"It would be absurd to suggest that the order of the court cards was invented to teach
how a court was organized. It would be absurd to suggest that the Chess pieces teach
how a kingdom is organized. Both can do that, in a vague way, but that it not their
intention. The understanding of the hierarchy is implicit, expected of the
audience. Similarly, all Italians of the 15th century would recognize the vague
hierarchy in the trumps: celestial and eternal things are higher than moral
allegories, and moral allegories are higher than human stations/types. These are the
three divisions recognized by Dummett, and already recognized in the 19th century
(and arguably the 16th).
"The nature of the differences among the various trump orders shows that there was a
broad understanding of these three divisions, and the overall hierarchy. "

"Threefold scheme of art; planets (children), Schifanoia, pictures of people having

visions, etc. Pseudo-Mantegna perhaps most relevant scheme:

1. Ranks
______ __Muses (poetry, art)
2. Ideas --- Liberal Arts (science, intellect)
_________Virtues (morality)
3. Celestial

"(Three registers) Check descriptions of Schifanoia, Ps.-Mantegna, etc. for an

authoritative statement to that effect."

Looking for any authority who described "threefoldness" in vertical hierarchies proved
difficult; it became apparent that it was such a fundamental, underlying and
completely natural basis for the spatial organization of iconographic information, that
people describing such art assumed it rather than explained it as a principle.

I found a few art historians who pointed in that direction, such as Dale Kinney, "The
Apse Mosaic of Santa Maria in Trastevere", in Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas,
eds., Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object (U Michigan Press,
2002), pp. 19-26:
Where should the viewer start 'reading' this mosaic? Literally, with the
inscriptions? In the center? From the bottom? From the top? Structure, both
physical and pictorial, provides an intrinsic hierarchy and with it, a place to
begin. (p. 22)
She then proceeds with her analysis of the verticality, horizontality, and in situ qualities
of the work, along with the inscriptions. She concludes (p. 25):
It takes desire and effort to read them, a physical premonition of the
intellectual exertion that will be required to penetrate the allegory once it is
perceived. To the art historian, this is a signal that visual analysis has done its
work, and it is time to move on to the library.
(this is another implication of my motto, "con gli occhi et con l'intelletto")

Another one was Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan
Poetry (Cambridge UP, 1970):
A more pervasive but also more elusive element, whose bearing on literary
forms we are only beginning to grasp, is the spatial character of Renaissance
thought (2). I shall only touch on one aspect of this: the tendency to order
ideas in visual schemes (especially linear sequences). The dominance in the
Renaissance of the pseudo-Horatian doctrine ut pictura poesis has long been
obvious. But the application of the doctrine to literary structure as distinct
from texture or imagery, is far from obvious. (p. 17)
Fowler's note 2 says: "This topic is brilliantly discussed by Fr. W(alter) J. Ong in The
Barbarian Within (New York, 1962), Ch. V, "System, Space and Intellect in Renaissance
Symbolism"; see also the same author's "From Allegory to Diagram in the Renaissance
Mind", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XVII (1959)." I was not able to see
Ong's book, but I could get his article, but found it concerned with the influence of
printing on the representation of allegorical tableaux, and otherwise too diffuse generally
to find the kind of authoritative "quote" on the insight I was looking for.

I realized I would have to do it myself, and assembled a few examples from art I was
working with at the time, as well as those more generally known to us (such as the E-
Series and Costa's Cappella Bentivoglio triumphs). Finally, when reading Aby Warburg
in order to understand Schifanoia better, I came across his formulation "historical
psychology of human expression", and realized that the threefold structure was an
example of this. Shorthly thereafter I realized why it was "psychological" - the terrestrial
(bottom, ground) is tangible, real; the celestial (planets, stars, the divine) is real, visually
tangible, but between them is an impassable gulf - we can't go up there, we can't touch
those things: we can't fly. So this "middle space", the "air", becomes, naturally, the realm
of the conceptual, the quasi-real (when personified), thought-objects, personifications of
ideas, values, the means by which the intellect bridges the gulf between the lower and
the higher reality. This is why personified and allegorized morality goes in the middle
section, why the designer put it there, and why no one would have had a second thought
as to why it was where it was, as a coherent section of the sequence.

Vertical hierarchy (structure and function of composition impose constraints and

variations)

Physical : Bottom-Middle-Top
Value of placement: Low-Middle-High
Descripton: Terrestrial, literal - Conceptual , figurative (of intellectual or moral
principles)- Celestial, divine
(Psychological origin - terrestrial and celestial are real, but man can't fly - he can't touch
the celestial. The middle - the "air" - becomes the home of the conceptual)

Six examples -

I. Palazzo Schifanoia, Sala dei Mesi

1. Acts of Borso (terrestrial)
2. Moral qualities of the decans (personified; decans are ten-degree segments of the 360
degree circle of the zodiacal band, to which astrologers assign moral qualities)
3. Gods of the months (Manilius), with mythological and planetenkinder scenes

Because the terrestrial and heavenly registers are self-evidently so described, I shall only
detail why the "faces of the decans" between them are in fact a moral register.

April - faces of the three decans

(forIbn Ezra, Raphael Levy, Francisco Cantera, eds., The Beginning of Wisdom, Johns
Hopkins UP, 1939, pp. 159-160; for Picatrix, William Kiesel and Hashem Atallah,
eds., Picatrix; The Goal of the Wise (Ouroboros Press, 2002), quoted in Shawn
Nacol, Scion's Handy Guide to the Decans (PDF, 2005), pp. 10-14)

1. Ibn Ezra, "A hirsute woman, who has a son and who wears clothing partly burnt."
Picatrix, "A woman of curly hair, having a single child who is dressed in clothes like
unto fire, and she herself dressed in similar clothes. And this is the face of plowing and
working the earth, of sciences, geometry, of sowing seed, and making things."
2. Ibn Ezra, "A man who resembles a ram in his face and his body, whose wife
resembles an ox; his fingers are like goat's hoofs. That man is very hot and
gluttonous, and he does not have peace of mind; he cultivates the earth, and he
drives the oxen to plow and to sow."
Picatrix, "A man like the figure of a camel and having on his fingers are hooves like
those of cows, and he is covered completely with a torn linen sheet. He desires to work
the land, to sow, and to make things. And this is the face of nobility, power, and of
rewarding people."
3. Ibn Ezra, "A man whose feet are white and likewise his teeth, which are so long that
they stick out beyond his lips; the color of his eyes as well as his hair is reddish, and his
body resembles that of the elephant and the lion, but prudence does not reside in him,
since all of his thoughts are bent on doing evil; he is seated on a cloth. There go up
also a horse and a little dog."
Picatrix, "A man of ruddy coloring with large, white teeth appearing outside of his
mouth, and a body like an elephant whose legs are long; and there ascends with him one
horse, one dog, and one calf. And this is the face of laziness, poverty, misery and
fear."

II. Triumphal Arch of Alfonso V in Castel Nuovo, Naples

1. Triumph of Alfonso (terrestrial)

2. Virtues (moral)
3. Archangel Michael flanked by saints Anthony and Sebastian (celestial)

The rivers Sebeto and Volturno (under the arc as the "vault of heaven", i.e. the "world",
centered, symbolically, in the land of Naples between these rivers) - the virtù of the King
causes the land to flourish (the rivers are not personified below, where two decorative
griffons bear the horns of plenty, so it is not the land that has brought Alfonso victory,
but rather Alfonso that has brought the land victory).

Looks like this now -

As engraved in 1870 -
The statue at the top
is the Archangel Michael, who until sometime after the 18th century had wings, as in
this engraving from 1756 -
This Michael was probably the model for the image on a coin of Ferdinando of Aragon,
son of Alfonso and king of Naples 1458-1494.

An actual example -

In the engraving from the 1870 Moniteur des architectes above, you can vaguely see the
dragon Michael is slaying (I have not been able to find a good photograph with a top
view of the pedestal).
Alfonso's arch is not merely a triumphal arch, commemorating a victory, but also serves
an architectural function as a gate. One of constraints of the design was that it match the
height of the two towers it stands between. This accounts for the second, decorative arch
above the main entrance arch. What precise symbolism it had remains obscure, but the
presence of a statue with an antique toga suggests that the people on it represented
philosophers or other great figures of the past, i.e. exempla, belonging to
the moral aspect of the threefold division, rather than the terrestrial and real Triumph of
Alfonso, or, because it is under the Cardinal Virtues, to the celestial realm.

Threefold symbolic structure of entire monument -

Boiled down to symbolic essentials of the hierarchy -
Note that the four Cardinal Virtues stand for "all virtue". The iconography of the
triumphal arch is a contextualized and idealized representation of Alfonso's triumph, not
merely an attempt to depict what really happened. We know from written descriptions
that the Theological Virtues were also present at the event, and of the Cardinal Virtues
only Justice played a major role, along with four other Virtues, Magnanimity, Constancy,
Clemency and Liberality; Temperance, Fortitude and Prudence played no particular role
at all; Fortune-Occasio, who played a central role in the actual triumph, is not
represented on the arch, and neither is Julius Caesar, another central figure of the real
event (although he might have been in the middle section, with the second arch).

III. Lorenzo Costa, Cappella Bentivoglio Triumph of Death (starts with allegory,
introduces concept of "literal" as a subset of "terrestrial" or "real" (actually vice-versa))

1. Triumphs of Fame (and Fortune) and Death (and Chastity)

2. Exempla (Fame), souls ascending (Death)
3. Souls ascending, angels, God the Father, Jesus, Mary (in Death triumph only; the two
compositions are a diptych)
In the Death triumph, the physical space of the viewer is important - he is already
looking up, above his head - this composition starts in the conceptual realm, with an
allegory. Yet the picture can still be analyzed in the usual threefold way. In this case, the
triumph, although strictly speaking allegorical, is presented as real, as it might actually
be seen on the ground. The weight of the geographic features all around emphasize the
point - this allegory is the "terrestrial", bottom part of the structure. We can now
understand that our terms need some refinement; the lowest level is not always a
depiction of the literally real, but is also a literal depiction of some kind of reality. As in
the "quadriga" reading of scripture (and Dante), the first, most basic and lowest level is
the "literal"; since all art is representational (even Borso's acts, while real, are idealized
representations of those acts), we can see that the lowest level, the terrestrial, worldly, or
mundane, can actually be seen as a subset of the literal. In the case of Costa's painting,
the "literal" reality is the Petrarchan text, and this forms the lowest register of the
underlying threefold structure.
But there seems to be a real story woven into the allegory: the death of a child, standing
for all deaths. We are not part of Death's long train, we enter the scene from a different
angle. Our eye might first meet an exotic musician, perhaps Orpheus, his back turned to
us: this is a private mourning we are coming upon. Or, we may first fall upon a young
woman presenting a nude child, partly covered by the somber robe of the musician, who
looks straight at us. This must be the dead. As our eye is drawn inward, Costa's
placement of the two other nudes suggests an ages of man motif, first a young, beardless
man, next a bearded mature man. Nudity symbolizes the purity of the soul, so these men
are deaths at various ages. Like the child, these perhaps represent real people who would
be known to the intended original audience of the composition.

Our eye is drawn to where Death meets Chastity (virtuousness), an explicit

representation of Petrarch. Then following further, finally we get to the visual center of
the composition, Death itself, pointing upward. Going up from Death's scythe, we
immediately enter a celestial panorama, conceptually moving from sadness to joy;
schematically it is a series of concentric rings occupied by souls, saints, apostles and
angels respectively, until the inmost space, the realm of divinity proper. We note that the
first souls above the scythe's blade have become angelic infants; one is nude, and looks
like the child gazing at us at the beginning, and two are wearing red and green, which
with white are the same colors as the virgins meeting death below. In Dantean
symbolism these colors stand for the Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity
(perhaps it is Dante and Virgil in the distance). In these three children, then, the allegory
and the real reference, our entry point, of the composition are blended.

The moral overlay suggests that the mountain is part of the moral landscape: the grim
procession is descending from the mountain, or, we are mentally ascending it, to
contemplate death. The presence of hermits in the procession recalls another famous
triumph of death, in Pisa. Despite the implication of a vast, murmuring throng,
accompanied by mournful music, the mountain and hermits remind us that the mystery
of death is encountered in solitude and silence.
Costa's work conflates with vertical values of space and placement perspective uses of
those spaces; the three-dimensional aspect allows God to be both the highest and most
distant, as well as at the center of the encircling choir of angels, as the summit of the
ascent. The change from linear and two-dimensional representations, which used size
and placement alone to indicate importance, to three-dimensional perspective realism
forces late-quattrocento artists like Costa to adapt space and placement accordingly; we
are now invited to go in and up, whereas before the perspective of the viewer was
implicitly static - the picture did all the work for itself.

The dynamic nature of the interaction between the real and the conceptual in this
painting makes it more challenging to map than a monument like Alfonso's Arch or a
strict hierarchy like the E-Series, but applying the threefold analysis to it looks
something like this -
The light blue is the entry point, the ground of the viewer's perspective and expectations,
where real and recognizable people meet the gaze; almost simultaneously the allegory
or moral stream in purple begins, with the musician's turned back; the blue fades and the
purple stream grows larger as the gaze is drawn inward, and can go either straight
upward or take in the side-streams of the Petrarchan allegory. In both cases these meet in
the exact visual center of the painting, where the celestial realm begins.

This discussion of Costa's Triumph of Death is something of a digression, since it does

not illuminate the structure of the Tarot trump sequence per se. But it illustrates how the
threefold structure can be used to look at a composition in a new way; it has helped us
broaden the definition of the lower level, and helps us appreciate works that similarly
begin, on the lowest visual level, with allegories or moralities. However, as we can see
in Costa, there is always a real terrestrial context in which to view the work, its ground
in real events, or literal representations of them.

IV. Donatello tomb of Giovanni XXIII

(structurally/conceptually equivalent to Costa Triumph of Death; Death implicit in

function/meaning of monument; so in tomb context, the terrestrial level is the context
itself, death is the "ground" of the monument)

1. Theological Virtues (same role as Virtue-Pudicità in Costa Triumph of Death)

2. Effigy of dead man ascending (middle - corpse is actually in the sarcophagus)
3. Mary and Jesus (welcome into the celestial realm)

The relationship of the viewer to the imagery is important again. Since I haven't found
any photographs of the monument which show a person standing close by, I have added
one in the proper dimensions.
One can immediately see that the viewer is looking up at the Theological Virtues;
already the mind is being taken on a climb, ascending. Since the context of death does
not need to be spelled out on a tomb (although it often is), the moral level, like in Costa,
forms the first explicit or visual level.

With the idea of the "middle" space, and the analogy of Costa's and countless other
depictions of souls ascending to heaven, we see now that the effigy of the dead man is
figuratively ascending, on the wings of his faith and piety (the three Theological Virtues)
into the bosom of heaven. By virtue of the threefold analysis, movement has been
granted to a monument that seems static, which we would otherwise pass by without a
second look.
In retrospect, I can see that this analysis works for other tombs too, like the Rosellini one
we recently looked at. In this, however, there are no Theological Virtues; beneath the
sarcophagus, at the base, there is a kind of Arcadian tableau of memento mori. As we
know, on the side there is a chariot of the soul (the other side is invisible, apparently, to
viewers). All in all, the pagan elements are kept low, as is appropriate in a Christian
monument.

V. Pseudo-Mantegna (PsM) model book

1. Human conditions
2. Muses, Arts and Sciences, Virtues
3. The celestial order

The middle, conceptual level has three parts, themselves hierarchically placed according
to moral value. The lowest, the pagan muses; the middle, the intellectual arts and
sciences; the highest, the moral virtues.

VI. Tarot trump sequence

1. Human types (highest and lowest; highest complete ranking of court cards)
2. Virtù and Fato
3. Heavenly order

Underlying, threefold conceptual structure of the trump sequence (like many other
vertical hierarchies, why it made sense intuitively)-

The ludic structure, how it was learned at the table (conventional groupings, one ludic
(highest and lowest, a group because counting cards), no narrative necessary) -
The tarot trumps are neither monument, nor painting, nor quasi-encyclopedic model-
book; they are the pieces of a game. Their context is ludic, and play-function is therefore
one of the constraints upon their design.

Note that for none of the above examples is it necessary to understand the implicit,
sometimes explicit threefold structure. As an analytical tool, it merely explains why
morality goes in the middle space, and by looking at different works that way, we can
understand what that middle space is. It is sometimes physically in the middle of the
composition, as in Schifanoia, Alfonso's triumphal arch, the E-Series, and the Tarot
trump sequence; other times it is the physical placement, above the viewer's gaze, that
places the entire composition in conceptual space, with the lowest, terrestrial realm
implied or only hinted at in the composition itself, as in Costa's painting of the Triumph
of Death; at other times, such as in Donatello's tomb monument for Baldassare Cossa,
the composition begins in the middle, moral and allegorical, space, with the context
remaining implied (death), but nevertheless clear.

This explains why the various sequences share the threefold sensibility, and why
Dummett was able to reduce it to three families. It also explains why the designer chose
these three types of subject matter, vertically arranged in three divisions, to illustrate the
pieces of his game. It finally explains why it was easy for the players to understand the
logic of the subjects, why they were where they were. The threefold structure is a
necessary, but not sufficient, explanation for the choice of subjects and their
number - different subjects could occupy the lower, middle and highest levels (exactly
as in the PsM, which is partly why so many people cannot believe it is not a card game
related to Tarot); or, a story whose plot is so well known that the iconographic sequence
clearly illustrates it and therefore doesn't need these symbolic ranking spaces; or, with
the addition of numbers, the trumps need have no iconographic program at all, indeed no
content at all but the numbers themselves - but with this threefold hierarchy of groups in
the back of their minds, the specific placement of pieces in the hierarchy was easy to
memorize. It can be done in a matter of minutes (with this basic "grouping method" I
have taught several people completely unfamiliar with any Tarot at all the Bolognese
order, including the counting trumps and the equal-papi rule, to test how well it works).