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Dante's Commedia and the Tarot
by Dr. Robert O'Neill

Introduction

This essay considers the potential influence of Dante's epic poem, the Commedia (Divine Comedy), on the designers of the Tarot and the early card-players. I am aware of one previous attempt to draw this connection (Seabury 1951) but I have never been able to get access to this privately printed study.

We will consider both the poem and the illustrations that were produced to accompany it. It might seem that a work completed before the middle of the 14th century could have little influence a century later when the Tarot appears. But this is not the case. The Commedia was written, not in the Latin of the intellectuals and aristocracy, but in the venacular of the card-players. The Commedia was regarded with pride as the greatest classic work of Medieval Italy (Ragg 1907) and it was understandable, deliberately so, to the person in the street. There are recorded instances of blacksmiths and drovers singing verses from Dante (Larner 1971). Manuscripts continued to be widely available into the 16th century. Children of the artisan class used Dante to learn Italian though his dark imagery was unsuitable for the youngest (Grendler 1959). Those card-players who were not among the rapidly rising number of readers heard the Commedia recited in the piazzas and from the pulpit. The Commedia was widely known and respected in the first half of the 15th century when the Tarot was designed (Ferguson 1940).

The Commedia is full of visual imagery. The Commedia was completed sometime before Dante's death in 1321 but even the earliest extant manuscripts from 1335 and 1337 were illustrated (Pope-Hennessy 1993). These early manuscripts and their illustrations were individually transcribed and hand-painted.  They would have been prohibitively expensive and unavailable to most card-players. However, that is not the important point. The miniaturist painters and woodcutters who produced the illustrations for the Commedia belonged to the same workshops, guilds, and confraternities as the artisans that produced the early Tarot. The card-player may not have seen the illustrated manuscripts but the artists and woodcutters certainly knew of them.

The direct influence of Dante's poetic imagery and its illustrations on the Tarot designers may not be the critical point. It is abundantly clear that the imagery and illustrations of Dante's poem strongly influenced contemporary artists who produced public art (Pope-Hennessy 1993). For example, Dante was an acquaintance of Giotto during the period when the magnificent fresco in the Arena Chapel of Padua was being painted (Bemrose 2000). An evening spent staring at the available images on the web will convince the sceptical reader that many of the punishments of the naked damned in Giotto's fresco were inspired by Dante's exquisite poetic imagery. The same is true of much of the religious art of the Last Judgment produced in the late 14th and throughout the 15th century. The most lurid imagery of Dante's Inferno was available to the early card-player in public places – whether or not they had read the Commedia itself.

That being said, this essay is NOT an attempt to reduce the Tarot to nothing but imagery taken from Dante. The structure of the Commedia is based on a 3X9 paradigm unlike the 3X7 structure of the Tarot majors. Unlike the Tarot, the Commedia places the Devil at the end of the first series, at the bottom of the Inferno, the first of the three major sections of the Commedia. There is a wealth of imagery in Dante that doesn't appear in the Tarot. There are Tarot symbols that don't appear in Dante. The Commedia and the Tarot are not the same hierarchical symbolic system. Nevertheless, I will attempt to convince the reader that the parallels between these two symbolic systems are little less than miraculous unless Dante had some influence on the Tarot designers. If the reader's belief system makes that infeasible, then perhaps I can at least show that Dante strongly influenced the artistic and symbolic tradition from which the Tarot designers drew.

Toward that latter end, perhaps some of the sceptical readers can agree with me that the early Tarot is a broadly based symbolic system. Well, the Commedia is another of this same sort of symbolic system. One example should suffice. As Dante and his guide Virgil descend toward Satan at the bottom of hell, they come upon a castle (Inferno 4:107-110). The castle is the citadel of knowledge and lies in Limbo where the wisest of the pre-Christians reside. The castle is surrounded by seven walls representing the seven virtues that can be attained through reason alone: prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, understanding, knowledge, and wisdom. The walls have seven gates that one must pass through, representing the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmatic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The relevance of this example is that Dante is clearly attempting to incorporate into his symbolic system the totality of the late Medieval paradigm. If the early Tarot is also a broadly based symbolic system, then perhaps we can agree that both the Commedia and the Tarot are members of the same genus and therefore the one might potentially have influenced the other.
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