Sola Busca: Preliminary Notes toward a Reconstruction of the Internal Structure of the Triumph Sequence

Abstract

This preliminary research note proposes a method for studying the triumph sequence of the late fifteenth-century Sola Busca deck as a numbered historical and visual series. Rather than treating each triumph primarily as an isolated image or assuming that its place in the series merely marks an ascending scale of power, the note takes the unit of inquiry to be name, image, action, historical case, and position within the sequence. Possible historical identifications are therefore only a first step: they require reconstruction of the relevant casus and consideration of the figure as a possible Renaissance exemplum. The proposed approach distinguishes status, action, result, recognition, legitimacy, honor, justice, and responsibility, and tests whether the series differentiates forms of public agency and relations to political order. It also calls for unusual names to be examined through the material history of textual transmission, and for proposed textual or visual parallels to be tested for pre-production accessibility. Roman political and legal vocabulary is used as a set of precision instruments, not as a universal code. The note records an ongoing structural hypothesis; it does not offer individual identifications, source chains, or a complete reconstruction of the sequence.