In past posts I have mentioned the possibility of a relationship, whether direct or indirect, between Hieronymus Bosch's 1502 masterpiece
The Conjurer (my favorite Bosch by a mile) and the Tarot de Marseille -- particularly the
Magician and
Wheel of Fortune cards.
In the process of collecting various early versions of the Magician card (
qv), I noticed a few hints that that influence or relationship may extend beyond the limits of the Marseille tradition. (Only a handful of fragmentary Italian decks predate
The Conjurer, so direct influence is not out of the question.)
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| The Cary Sheet (Milan, 1550) |
The magician on the Cary Sheet (a partial set of uncut and unpainted cards sometimes considered to be the "missing link" between the Italian decks and the Tarot de Marseille) wears fez-like headgear suggestive of Bosch's conjurer, as opposed to the wide-brimmed hat typical of the TdM. Bosch, the Cary Sheet, and the TdM all agree in putting two cups on the magician's table -- but on the Cary Sheet the cups are apparently
inverted (narrow side up) as in the Bosch painting, while the TdM has the cups upright. The long object situated between the two cups on the Cary Sheet is hard to identify with any confidence. The TdM would lead us to expect a second knife, or a knife sheath, but it could just as easily be a magic wand of the type that appears in the same position in the Bosch painting. And if we really want to push things, doesn't that vaguely egg-shaped object in the far right corner of the table on the Cary Sheet look more than a little like Bosch's little frog?
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| Tarot de Paris (1650) |
It's impossible to tell what's on the magician's table in the Tarot de Paris, but there are other potential links to Bosch. The general layout of the picture is similar: The magician is on the right side of the table, with spectators on the left, and a wall behind them. As in the Bosch painting, a dog hides unobtrusively in the shadow of the table. There is also a monkey, an animal which many people have mistakenly believed to be depicted in the Bosch painting, hiding in the conjurer's basket. (In fact it is an owl.) If modern art historians have made that mistake, the makers of the Tarot de Paris could easily have done the same. Again, the magician is depicted with fez-like headgear.
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| Mitelli's Tarocchini (Bologna, 1664) |
The "magician" of Mitelli's Tarocchini would appear to represent a clean break with Tarot tradition, dispensing altogether with the conventional table-covered-with-gewgaws theme -- but don't the dog, the hoop, and the little cluster of spectators come right out of Bosch?
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| Minchiate al Leone (Florence, 1790) |
The Minchiate al Leone has a very strange Magician card. The familiar cups and balls are notably absent -- and who are those two people standing beside the magician? It would be a strange position for spectators; are they his assistants? At any rate, the vaguely tent-like objects in the center and in the left foreground corner of the table remind me of the equally mysterious object in the center of the table in Bosch.
