In the earliest miniatures, the figure on the twelfth card shows a man hung by one foot from a wooden crossbeam. In the Tarots of Charles VI (figure 1) the man holds a bag in each hand, from which coins spill out, whereas in the Trionfi of the Visconti (figure 2) his hands are tied behind his back. We find both aspects respectively in the “minchiate” and in so-called classical tarots, with a variant in the case of the “minchiate”. In the cards of Charles VI, the free leg is bent and waves in the air, according to a posture that we find for this type of punishment in different depictions of hell (figure 3 - Giuseppe Salerno, The Last Judgment, 1629, detail of Hell, Dome of Gangi, Palermo. Photo realized by Angela Bisesi) while in the “minchiate” it takes on the iconography of the Visconti Tarots, with one leg bent behind the other so as to draw a cross.
In the Sermones de ludo cum aliis, our man is called “lo imphicato” (the hanged man) a term which we find, with a syntactical variant, in Folengo and Garzoni who call him the “Appicato” or the “Impiccato”.
In other 16th century documents, we find him called the “traitor”. In fact, many documents and accounts tell us that this was the penalty for treason. There is a rather obvious reference to the figure of Judas, who is explicitly mentioned in certain texts. In the Gioco de tarochi fatto in Conclavi (Tarots played in the Conclaves), the pack of cards is mixed by cardinal Farnese who distributes a card to each of the cardinals attending. The “Judas” card falls to the cardinal of Pisa, considered a traitor. A similar term already appeared with the Tarots, to be exact, in the Visconti cards of the Yale University Library. The Hope card, apparently unusual in a pack of tarots (see below), is represented by a kneeling woman in the act of praying. Her hands grasp two ropes, one tied to an anchor, the other around the neck of an old man lying on the ground, whose white dress bears the words “Juda traditor” (Judas the traitor).
The manuscript diary of Iacopo Rainieri, which tells us about the events which took place in Bologna between 1535 and 1549, has this to say about the penalty for traitors: “Adi 21 detto fu atachati su li cantoni de la piaza uno foglio de carta nel quale li era depinto Cesaro di Dulcini e Vicenzo de Fardin ditto il Vignola li quali erano apichati per uno piedo per tradittori de la patria li quali avevano portato în la città di Trento il mestiero del fillatoglio de lavorare la seda et aveano taglia drieto che li amazava guadagnava ducati 100 e chi li deva vivi ducati 200. Notta che il ditto Cesaro Dolsino feva l'arte dela seda et Vicenzo feva l'arte del ligname zioe faceva li filatogli” (On the 21st, a sheet of paper was put up on the corners of the square, with a drawing of Cesaro di Dulcini and of Vicenzo De Fardin, known as il Vignola. They were shown strung up by a foot, as traitors to their home, since they had brought the art of silk spinning to Trento, and a price of 100 ducats had been put on their head for killing them, and 200 for capturing them alive. It was mentioned that Cesaro Dolsino worked with silk, while Vicenzo was a carpenter who made the spinning frames) (c. 40 recto - March 12, 1532)
In this document, the two traitors are “strung up by a foot” because they had taught how to spin silk in another town, thus promoting what could well become a dangerous competition to the business of their town.
Muzio Sforza Attendolo seems to have been sentenced to the same torment by Antipope John XXIII who in 1412 denounced him as a traitor for his alliance with the enemy, the king of Naples Ladislao. In his Annali d’Italia (Annals of Italy), Muratori wrote that the Pope felt so offended that he had him painted hanged by the right foot, under a sign in which he was found guilty of twelve betrayals. We receive more detailed information from the chronicles of the time: “On the  order of our Pope, he was painted on all the bridges and on all the doors of Rome, suspended by the right foot from the gallows as a traitor of the Holy Mother Church, and  Sforza Attendolo held a hoe in his right hand and in his left hand an inscription that said : I am Sforza peasant of Cotignola, traitor, that betrayed the church 12 times breaking my honour, promises, chapters and pacts”. This case is important for the number of things he was blamed for, corresponding with the Traitor of tarot cards. Whoever initiated this action knew that people would immediately connect that number to something known, so we must ask whether the XII as well as indicating the twelfth apostle, Judas, also reflected the image of the Hanged Man already present in the tarot cards. If this were the case, immediate recognition would have been much easier.
In Sigismondo Fanti’s Triompho di Fortuna (Triumph of Fortune) we find another significant example. The question XLVII is an attempt to answer “Quel cha l’huomo, o alla donna per li loro ma pensieri averra” (What will happen to a man, or a woman, because of their evil thoughts), and is illustrated by three figures: the first shows a convict climbing the steps of a gallows, the second a man hung by one foot, while the third shows what is left of a man condemned to such a penalty. A head, an arm and a leg are hanging from the rope. Fanti thus explains the question: “Nella presente domanda, l’Auttore tratta di coloro che sono oppressi da molti e scelerati pensieri, e spetialmente di quelli che pensano operarli contra de loro maggiori, notificando, che ogni tristo lor disegno andera fallato, e che da cieli sarano ridotti a pessimo e disperato fine. Onde il Fanti essorta tutti i potentati a doversi da questi tali per ogni modo guardare” (In this question, the Author deals with those who are oppressed by many evil thoughts, and especially those who think of using them against their superiors, and warns them that every wilful design of theirs will fail, and that they will be brought to a bad and desperate end. Therefore Fanti warns all powerful men to beware of such people in every way).
At the card LXII v. of the responses, the Sybilla of Cuma has this to say in the quatrain XVI, illustrated by the same figure of a man hung by one foot: “Se inhumano serai, o traditore / A Signori, o parenti in fatto o in detto / Senza cagion privo d'ogni rispetto / Te veggio in aer terminar tue ore” (If you be inhuman, or traitor / to Lords, or relatives who are such in fact or in word / if you be without any respect, for no reason / I see you finish your days in the air) (figure 4).
We too have found a figure identical to the one on the Tarot of Charles VI and on the Marseilles Tarot. This figure can be seen in the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna in the fresco depicting Hell, in the Bolognini Chapel, painted by Giovanni from Modena in 1410. In his will, Bartolomeo Bolognini invited his successor to make the image of Hell “Orribilis quantum plus potest” (as horrible as possible), and the intended result was certainly achieved. At the centre, a gigantic gastrocephalous devil – painted according to the iconography current at the time - sits on his throne. Amidst sharp, cutting and massive rocky shards, the damned are shown as they undergo punishment, with their faults written on small flags, on the stones and above the line of the horizon. On this tar-coloured horizon, the only form of vegetable life are skeleton-like trunks and branches, on which the damned are pierced or hanged. Among these, two men are strung from a foot to the branches of the same tree. We see one from the front, the other from the back. Their heads are above other damned, two groups of three people steeped in water up to their chests, who are looking at the hanging figures above them (figure 5). The caption identifying their sin starts on the left of the hanging figure whose back we see, and ends on the right of the second hanging figure: “ido/latria” (ido/latry). Between the heads of these idolaters, above the people steeped in the water, are the words “ninusrex”. The reference is to the ultimate idolater, King Ninus, the founder of Nineveh, the town where idolatrous rites were performed more than anywhere else. When painting this fresco, in order to invent and describe certain punishments, Giovanni da Modena certainly drew inspiration from previous models. The “Maestro Bolognese” of the Brussels initials, when depicting Hell in the Book of Hours of Charles the Noble, and in the Book of Hours currently in the Bodleian Library of Oxford, seems to have referred to the same models too. The Maestro in fact shows a similar scene: a hanged man above a cistern, which contains several people, including King Ninus with a crown on his head. The scene refers to the Biblical description of the destruction of Nineveh by God (Nahum 2,9): “But Nineveh is of old like a pool of water: yet they shall flee away”.
Giovanni da Modena did not explicitly represent King Ninus, and he used the stones as a natural cistern in which to place the idolaters. The term idolatry comes from the Greek eidôlatres, made up of eidôl-on = image and latrês = servant.
The imagery is based on a law of retaliation: idolaters, who worship images of false gods, are forced to observe the image of their own fault through eternity, represented by the condition of the penalty. The two hanged men had to be represented, one from the back and the other from the front, so the vision of their fault, and hence of the suffering caused by the punishment, could be complete.
Idolatry is the ultimate expression of treason, and the most ignoble, since it repudiates the very creator. Answering question LXIII of his Triomphi, takes into account “Se`l fin dell huomo sara buono” (whether the purpose of man is good), and has this to say: “L’Auttore in questo luogo dimostra che Iddio, rispetto alla sua infinita altezza e somma deita, non hauer potuto crear l’huomo in altra forma, che a l’imagine e similitudine sua. Benche `l Fanti dice, che gli huomini si potrebbero oggi ragionevolmente metter nel numero de gli animali bruti, perche non riconoscono il ricevuto beneficio Ma pagano i loro debiti d'una somma ingratitudine...” (The Author in this place shows that God, because of his infinite height and supreme godliness, could not have created man in any other form, except in his own image and likeness. Yet, Fanti says, men today could reasonably be accounted among the brutes, since they fail to recognise the benefit they have received. Put they pay the debt of a supreme ungratefulness…”).
It is interesting to note the figures which illustrate this question: once again, we find a man walking up the steps of a gallows, and the parts of the body left hanging on the rope. The figure of the man hanged by one foot, that is of the traitor, is replaced by a man kneeling in prayer. There is a clear link here to the Hope card in the Visconti tarots of the Yale University Library: it is only through prayer and devotion to the true God that one can avoid the penalty due to traitors.
A further testimony, definitive for what concerns being hanged by a foot as punishment inflicted to the traitors, it is found in a majolica dish that I have found in the Ceramic Collection of the Museum of the Malatestian Museum in Fano (figure 6).
The plate, fragmented and partly incomplete, has a wide setting decorated with a flowered branch achieved in monochrome blue. At regular intervals, between the sinewy spirals there are small flowers with a central button in orange. At the centre of the plate, stands the figure of a  hanging man, his foot held by a rope and a scroll with an inscription that runs along the top of the cable. The few remaining legible words on the scroll are “TRADITURE NO TE C [...]” (TRAITOR NON TO YOU C […]).
While the concept hanged man=traitor and its iconography is now consolidated, the Fano plate is not only further proof as expressed here, but the inscription that identifies the crime of which he is guilty makes this the only existing example of profane art where the guilt=torture is explicitly defined. And, if the figure of this traitor in the Bolognini Chapel, refers to the iconographic Tarot of Marseilles, with the leg folded to form a perfect cross, the shape of the legs in the Hanged Man plate of Fano is exactly the same as that in the paper Tarot Visconti Sforza (fifteenth century).
Man’s sin is represented iconographically in the image of a fall. First Lucifer, followed by all his host. “Man turned upside down, that is man who has lost his standing position, has lost everything which symbolises an upward thrust, a thrust towards the sky, towards the spiritual, he no longer rises up the axis mundi towards the celestial pole and towards God; on the contrary, he plunges into the animal world and the dark netherworld” (G. de Champeaux - S. Stercks, Simboli del Medioevo  - Symbols of Middle Age, Milan, 1981).
Being hanged, by one or by two feet, an in any case upside down, also became an allegorical representation of negative situations which caused pain and moral suffering. We can see an example in an Italian ceramic plate of 1510 which represents an allegory of love. From the branches of an dried tree, a woman has been hung by per feet, “per non avere fede sopposta” (for not having had faith in her lover)  (figure 7).

Historians often have wondered why in Triumphs there was not Prudence, since there are the other cardinal virtues (Strength, Temperance, Justice). To answer to this question, it is necessary to proceed to the following exam. We have seen that the figure of the Traitor reflected a Momento Mori, we can express in this way: “Be careful not to betray your own Creator before death comes, since the doors of hell will be open for the ones who won’t listen to this warning.”
To avoid this danger, the teaching of the Fathers of the Church addressed the man to Prudence, considered by Saint Thomas “Cognitive Virtue, since it is a future forecast” (Summa Theologiae, Quaestio 47, 1), and even a gift by the Holy Spirit called Advise: “The gifts of the Spirit are dispositions so the soul is ready for the Holy Spirit motions; during the pondering the Holy Spirit acts in a advising way, so the soul listens: so the  advise is a gift of the Holy Spirit  (Summa Theologiae, Quaestio 52, 1).
Prudence had to show itself directly in the human behaviour, according to an exact moral code: “Prudence is the most necessary virtue of the human life. Really, the good living consists in good acting: To act in the right way a man has not only to make good things, but even the way he does and so it is necessary that he behaves not with impulse or passion, but according to a choose or a right decision” (Summa Theologiae, Quaestio. 57, a.5). This implicated that every offense given to man by a man, such as betrayal, since it is of personal nature, was considered as an action against Prudence and therefore sinful. Even more if this kind of injury was directly against God, as in the case of idolatry.
The intellectuals of the time knew very well this concept and the meaning of Prudence, so it is natural that the figure of the Traitor recalled this virtue. We could wonder why in Triumphs there was not Prudence in its classical version, which means a woman that looks at herself in a mirror, to mean that Prudence cannot be seduced by fleeting appearances.
The figure of a man hanged by his foot that recalled the betrayal and therefore the lack of Prudence, would have obtained more visual impact, because favouring the sense of physical pain caused by the hanging position, it assured a greater emotional effect. The medieval visionary spirituality often recurred to this kind of terrifying representations.  An example of this are the gargoyles, sculpted to suggest to the man that only inside the Church (and into the Spiritual Church) he could have his shelter against the influence of evil that they represented.    
An example of the Traitor-Hanged Man considered as Prudence can be found in the work Risposta di M. Vicenzo Imperiali all’Invettiva di Flavio Alberto Lollio (Answer of M. Vicenzo Imperiali to the invective by Flavio Alberto Lollio) (Ms. CLI, 257, ca. 1554. Modena, Biblioteca Estense).
Imperiali describes the Triumphs in descending order:  the World, Justice, the Angel, the Sun, the Moon, the Star, the Tower, the Devil, Death, Prudence, the Hermit, the Wheel, Strenght, the Love, the Chariot, the Temperance, the Pope, the Priestess, the Emperor, the Empress, the Magician, the Fool.

The author, who listed the Triumphs in a literary form, writes in the verses 274 - 275 - 276:

Here come Death, and brings another dance,
And down prudence and malice,
And equal everything on the scales.

To better understand this passage it is necessary to know what the author writes about the Devil and for this reason we report the verses from 263 to 279 (in original Italian language with English translation) explaning the meaning of the verses below.

Quivi il Demonio di rado sta dentro,                                                                              265
Rarely the Devil stays here in Hell,
Anzi fra l'human seme sviluppato
On the contrary, developed among the human seed
Sempre dimora: ed io in un gran mar entro:
Always lives here: and I get into a great sea:
S'io voglio di costui haver narrato,
Since I want to have told of this one,
Come nel Mondo ognihor fa nuova preda,
How in every instant he makes new preys in the world,
Onde di quella Principe è chiamato.                                                                              270
So he is called Prince of that.
Tal, che conviene qua giù ch'ognun li ceda,
So it is better that everyone down here considers him as superior.
D’ingegno, di malitia et di possanza,
In genius, malice and power,
Ben ché la sciocca turba ciò non creda.
Although the foolish people don’t believe this.
Vien poi la Morte, et mena un’altra danza,
Here come Death, and brings another dance,
Et la prudenza, e la malitia atterra,                                                                               275
And down prudence and malice,
Et pareggia ciascuno alla bilanza.
And equal everything on the scales.
Ma, ' l vecchio saggio la Fortun' afferra,
But the old wise man catches Fortune,
Et fa di lei, e di sua ruota un fasso,
And makes of it and its wheel a faggot,
Quantunque essa la forza vinca in guerra.
Although it (Fortune) wins Strength in war.

"Rarely the Devil lives in Hell, instead he always stays with men and now I’m going to get into a great discussion: the fact that in every moment in the world he makes a new prey gives him the title of Prince of lost souls. So it is necessary on earth that everyman be afraid of him, considering him superior in genius, malice and power, even if the foolish people thinks to be able to cheat him. Then comes Death that with another dance submits Prudence (referring to the game take) and men (the author, to identify men uses a negative aspects that the human feeling shares with the Devil, that is malice) equalling everybody in the same chance. But the Hermit takes Fortune and makes it and its wheel a faggot, even if Fortune in war wins upon Strength". 

Even Court de Gébelin connected the Hanged Man to Prudence. In his Tarots, engraved in the eighth volume of the work Monde Primitif (Paris, 1781), the figure of the man is upset (as already represented by some card makers of Rouen and Bruxelles at the beginning of the XVIII century, with a foot tied to a piece of wood fixed in the ground, to mean the necessity of not to act by impulse, and ponder well all things before undertaking any action (figure 8). While Eliphas Levi gave the meaning of Prudence to the Hermit, the next scholars of esotericism kept the image of a hanged man and exploited the iconographical form of the figure, the cross composed by the two legs and the overthrow, to satisfy their own doctrinal speculations. Actually, the position of the free leg being bent was a natural one for anybody in those conditions, and the victim would inevitably tend to rest one leg against the other in order to soothe the pain created by the unbalanced position of the body.