Italian renaissance woodcut playing cards

Legends on the bastoni pip cards

In the suit of batons, the cards from two to ten have a banner across the center with the appropriate number spelled out with letters. For the most part, the numbers are written in their expected contemporary vernacular Italian forms. These are quite close to the names of the cards as recorded by Tomaso Garzoni in 1585 (identical to modern Italian).

For 2 and 3, classical Latin forms are used. Latin declined the numbers up to three in grammatical cases, and for no obvious reason the tarots, the Fournier and reversed packs use the dative forms, while the crude pack has accusatives. The final m in 7, 9 and 10 was weak already in late classical Latin, but is included in the single instance of the 7 in the tarot. This is particularly anacronistic since it features the assimilation of medial pt to tt, which occurred long after the loss of final m.

Card	Tarot	Fournier	Bassano	Crude	Garzoni	Classical Latin
2	duobus	duob2	duos·	duos·	due	duo/duōs/duōbus
3	·trıbu9	*****·*	·tres·	·tres	tre	trēs/trēs/tribus
4	quatro	quatro	·quatro	quatr·	quattro	quattuor
5	cınque	:cınq3	cınque	·cınq3·	cinque	quinque
6	]*o·	seo:	·seı·	·seı·	sei	sex
7	·settem	sete	–	*	sette	septem
8	·otto·	otto	]:	oto	otto	octo
9	nuoue·	nove		nou	nove	novem
10	·dıexe:	–	–	dexe	dieci	decem

The symbols here approximated by ‘2’ and ‘9’ are variants of the abbreviation sign normally expanded us, even though in the latter case it is somewhat redundant given the preceding u. ‘3’ approximates a sign which after q expands to ue. The asterisk represents approximately one unreadable letter, brackets indicate that the end of the inscription is not visible on any of the fragments.

As the inscriptions on the Fournier and the reversed packs are mirror images of each other, down to the most minute details, I have supplied a missing s on the six and confirmed the absence of a final m on the seven of the Fournier pack with the use of the reversed one. The text of the three is illegible in the exact same way in both, but can be no doubt that they are botched copies of the text tribu9. The mirrored packs are reported to have duoba on the two of batons, presumably a misreading of the duob2 of Fournier and the reversed packs, making it a reasonable assumption that it follows these in the remaining legends as well. It would thus be of great value to see if its legend for the three is equally garbled, or if it is more readable.

On the seven of the crude pack, the ribbon on which the text should be is folded so that it forms three segments. On the middle segment there are two strokes that could possibly represent tt, while the two outer ones are clearly empty in all fragments.

In the Bassano pack, the nine has two stylised flowers on the ribbon instead of letters. On the eight, only a small part of the ribbon is preserved, but this seems to end with a single or double dot like many of the legends do, and therefore presumably contains text. This card also has the same flower symbol in the gap between the batons at the bottom of the card. Only a small part of the seven card is preserved, which does not cover the banner.