Osvaldo Menegazzi, the artistic genius behind Il Meneghello, has once again created a beautiful facsimile of an historic tarot deck. This deck, commissioned by the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, in the 1440s, is one of the oldest Italian tarocchi decks we know of. The cards were hand-painted on an embossed gold background, much like the Visconti-Sforza deck commissioned by Filippo’s son-in-law, Francesco Sforza, a decade later.

The deck has two names: Visconti di Modrone after the Italian family who owned the deck; and Cary-Yale after the American who bought the deck in the early twentieth century then donated it to Yale University.

We can’t know for sure how closely this deck conformed to the 78-card pattern that emerged later in the century since it isn’t a standard deck. Each suit has extra court cards arranged as three couples: King and Queen, male and female Knights, and Page and Maid. The three theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity are unique to this deck, either replacing three trump cards or serving as additional trumps. Since only 67 cards remain in the deck, some are obviously missing, but it’s difficult to say which ones.

The Cards

The World is an exceptionally beautiful card. A knight on horseback in the foreground of an idealized landscape greets two monks arriving in a boat. The stylishly dressed Allegory of Fame floating overhead holds a crown and trumpet.

The Emperor and Empress are surrounded by four attendants standing at the four corners of their thrones. Death is harvesting five fully-realized people, not just generic heads and hands. His guts on the verge of spilling out are a macabre touch.

The pip cards are painted in blue and gold on silver leaf. The suit of batons is illustrated with arrows; but the court cards of this suit hold ceremonial batons with ornate finials. On the Ace of Swords, a hand emerges from a ruffled sleeve and grips the sword’s handle, exactly like the French Tarot de Marseille two hundred years later.

The figures on the court cards wear Visconti heraldry devices on their clothes. Francesco Sforza adopted all of these devices after marrying Filippo’s daughter and becoming duke himself. This complicates matters when you try to date the deck based on its heraldry.

Dating the deck

Various historians have suggested dates from the 1420s to the 1460s for the deck’s creation. This is based on the heraldic devices, and speculation about the identity of the couple on the Lover’s card. I believe the deck was created in the mid-1440s by the artist Bonifacio Bembo for the Duke of Milan as a gift for his daughter Bianca.

Lombardy experienced an explosion of artistic activity in the 1440s. A small band of artists influenced each other to the extent that it’s sometimes difficult to tell which one created an unsigned work. The following artists were working in Lombardy in the 1440s, and most had commissions from Duke Filippo: the Zavatarri family, Pesellino, Bonifacio Bembo, Antonio Pisanello and Michelino da Besozzo. The deck is a product of this distinct Lombardy style, and has been attributed to each of these artists at one time or another.

 Considering the hair styles, head coverings and clothing, it’s obvious the deck could only have been created in the 1440s. The court card figures in this deck wear late-medieval robes that went out of fashion after 1450. The women’s elaborately plaited hair that often looks like a turban, and the men’s flaring hat are regional styles only seen in Lombardy in the 1440s. I don’t believe the court cards could have been created in any other time or place.

Most art historians agree that Bonifacio Bembo painted the deck. The court cards in this deck were undoubtedly drawn by the same hand that illustrated The Story of Lancelot (seen at left) for the Duke of Milan in 1446. That artist was Bembo.

What was the occasion for creating this deck? Various weddings have been proposed, but I suggest it might have been a birth. Bianca’s first son, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, was born in 1444. Galeazzo was Duke Filippo’s grandson and the future fifth Duke of Milan. I think the duke was so thrilled that his bloodline would continue, that he loaded the cards with Visconti heraldic devices to remind everyone that the new-born Galeazzo Sforza was half Visconti. The child’s father adopted most of these devices after Filippo’s death, emphasizing the continuity from the Visconti to the Sforza families.

The Il Meneghello Deck

The cards are 3.5 by 7.25 inches (the original size), and housed in a handmade box covered in marbled paper with the World card pasted on the cover. Details that stand out sharply when the cards are viewed online are somewhat muted by the matte paper. But there’s something magical about holding actual cards in your hands that you don’t experience staring at a computer screen.

The deck was printed in an edition of 400. It comes with a small booklet in Italian and poorly-translated English that discusses the deck and each trump card.

TarotWheel.net has a well-illustrated, detailed analysis of this deck. The author believes the deck was commissioned for Bianca and Francesco’s 1441 wedding. He links the trump cards with Petrarch’s poem I Trionfi, which was partly written at the Visconti court.

Arnell Ando maintains a website for Il Meneghello with a page dedicated to this deck.

Il Meneghello de Osvaldo on facebook.

Order the deck from tarot retailers or by contacting Il Meneghello’s art director Christina.dorsini@me.com.

I got very excited when I saw this deck (I Tarocchi Serravalle, published by Avondo) in the Belgian Tarot Museum’s video on Facebook. I thought Avondo might still be in business and printing contemporary Piemontese decks.

But I found the deck on Italian eBay and discovered it’s a trumps-only version of the deck sold by Lo Scarabeo as the Ancient Italian Tarot. It’s called a mini deck, but no dimensions were given. I’ve learned that in other languages “mini” often means 22 cards rather than small in size. I’ve seen it listed for sale on other Italian websites, but have never seen the publisher listed.

I wondered if Avondo Brothers is still in business and printing decks. A quick search on Google.it told me Avondo had been a prominent family in Serravalle, and in the card printing business, from the 1700s to the 20th century. The family started acquiring property around Serravalle in the mid-1700s, and by 1800 they owned the local castle and were one of the most prominent families in the region. Throughout the 1800s they operated a huge, electric and steam-operated factory that dominated the town of Serravalle. The deck reproduced by Lo Scarabeo as the Ancient Italian Tarot was printed in 1880 at Avondo’s economic height, after they had incorporated and changed their name from Fratelli Avondo to Cartiera Italiana.

By mid-twentieth century, the company was falling behind the times. They closed in 1982. Was the deck in the Belgian museum re-printed before the factory closed, or is this a Lo Scarabeo production? Since this is one of my favorite reading decks, I’m going to track this edition down.

Here’s an article on Della Rocca’s soprafino tarot design that’s currently reproduced by Lo Scarabeo and Il Meneghello

The second issue of this beautiful quarterly magazine just arrived in my mail box. I thoroughly reviewed the initial issue here, so this time I’ll just run down my favorite articles.

The feature article is an interview with Karen Mahony and Alex Ukolov, the owners of Baba Studio in Prague and the creators of The Alice Tarot (the cover illustration above). I was amazed at how much time and care went into the deck. The cards are not photoshopped collage. Mahony and Ukolov gathered costumes and props and went out on location to photograph each card. Their Tarot de Marseille is scheduled for 2016. I can’t wait.

Cheryl Fair wrote about my favorite topic: non-scenic pips. She pointed out that the only “unillustrated” pip cards are blank cards; so “non-scenic” is a much better designation. It was refreshing to read an appreciation of these cards, rather than the usual reaction: “Eeew! No pictures! How can you read with these?”

Heather Mendel wrote a very thoughtful article on mindfulness, the suit of swords, and detaching from our mental chatter.

Shada McKenzie maintains that the Hierophant is the significator for tarot itself. He’s the intermediary between earthly and spiritual realms, and provides access to higher reality, just as the tarot can do for each of us. Her close reading of the symbols opens up new ways of relating to the card.

In the Art and the Reviews sections, I counted at least thirteen stunningly illustrated decks. Among them was a preview of The Triumph of Life Tarot (shown here), a collaborative deck organized by Andrew Kyle McGregor at The Hermit’s Lamp. Each card is designed to answer the question: “How does this image help us get from a place of loss and suffering to a place of joy and remembering?” All the profits are going to cancer research.

In the Toot Your Own Horn department: The Cartomancer has taken me on as their resident history nerd. In each issue I’ll be writing an article about tarot history and reviewing a historical facsimile deck. This time, I review one of the most attractive versions of the Visconti-Sforza deck in my collection. Then I talk about the historic forces that molded tarot into the structure it’s had since the fifteenth century.

The Cartomancer available in print and digital editions. This magazine is simply gorgeous and bound to become a collector’s item. Subscribe or get a single issue here.

I’ve just discovered an association for aficionados of antique and collectible playing cards called 52 Plus Joker – The American Playing Card Collector’s Club. (How about a tarot club called 21 Plus Fool?) Their beautifully illustrated quarterly magazine, Clear the Decks has plenty to keep a tarot historian happy. I’m very impressed with the level of scholarship in their articles – this isn’t just a hobbyist magazine.

The club came to my attention when they asked to reprint my blog post about seeing the Visconti-Sforza deck at the Morgan Library (read it here). In the same June 2015 issue there’s a lengthy article on the Ambras Court (Hofamterspiel) deck of @1455 that was reprinted by Piatnik in 1975. This complete playing card deck has four suits representing four different countries. The exquisite, hand-painted images show people engaged in occupations like cook, falconer and chaplain that supported a noble household. It’s a window into the lifestyle when tarot was in its formative period. This deck and other contemporary hand painted playing cards can be seen on this page at tarotwheel.net.

The publication is running a series of articles on the Charta Lusora, a deck-book hybrid printed by Jost Amman of Nurenberg in 1588. One of the club members won a beautifully illuminated edition at an auction and has done extensive research). The images are arranged in four suits of inkpads, books, gold beakers and wine glasses. The images are accompanied by Latin and German verses on the same page, but some people think they were supposed to be cut up and used as cards.

I’ve been so narrowly focused on tarot that I’ve forgotten about seeing it in the context of other decks and games at the time of its invention. Club members get access to all the back issues online, so I’m looking forward to sifting through the articles for 15^th and 16^th century decks.

Learn about this association and join at: www.52plusjoker.org

A Florida double-header for card collectors: The Playing Card Association is having its annual conference in Orlando, Florida October 7-10, 2015. Tarot Con sponsored by the Tarosophy Tarot Association is happening in Palm Beach Gardens October 10 and 11.

Tarocchino Lombardo, the long out-of-print soprafino deck published by Il Solleone, fell into my hands recently. This gave me an opportunity to compare it with soprafino facsimiles by Lo Scarabeo and Il Meneghello. The the cards in the illustrations from left to right are: Lo Scarabeo, Il Solleone, Il Meneghello.

If you need a refresher on this deck style, here’s a page with everything you need to know.

The short version: About 1835, the printing house of Gumppenberg in Milan hired the artist Carlo Della Rocca to create an exquisitely beautiful engraved tarocchi deck. Since then, many of the deck’s unique design elements have been used in other decks printed in Lombardy and Piedmont.

Here’s a run-down of the features of each deck:

Il Meneghello

This is the real deal — a facsimile of the deck as it looks now complete with age marks and stains. A thin white line runs along the right edge where it appears the card was not centered exactly on its backing. The card stock is smooth and sturdy. Card backs are printed with subtle dots and circles in gray on cream. Card size: 2 millimeters shorter than the Il Solleone

Il Solleone/Bordoni

This is a facsimile of a soprafino knock-off printed by Bordoni of Milan in1889. The lines are nearly identical to the Gumppenberg original, but close examination shows subtle differences.

The colors are rich and deep – sometimes so dark they obscure the details. Ink, especially the red, slops over the lines. You don’t see this in the other two decks, but it’s not nearly as bad as many stenciled decks. The intense sapphire blue is unique to this deck. It’s found on the Fool’s pants, the Star card’s water, and the sword blades of the ace and court cards of the swords suit. A few cards have minor cropping: The Fool card lost part of the dog’s front leg and the Fool’s bag. The background is cream with no staining. The publisher either worked from a pristine copy or cleaned the cards up.

A few images differ from Della Rocca’s original: The Ace Coins has a Mercury head instead of a woman. The King Rods holds what I can only describe as a pizza pan enclosing a white shield with a red cross.

I especially like the faces on the court cards. I’ve never liked the soprafino faces with their sickly pale skin and artificial pink spots on the cheeks. In this deck, the skin is a healthy flesh color and the faces look more real and robust. But for some reason, color has been omitted on the lips of some court figures. The Queen of Batons looks especially haggard.

The card backs have the Il Solleone logo of a sun and a crowned lion. Card size: 2.25 x 4.3 inches (5.75 x 11 centimeters.)

Lo Scarabeo

This deck is a bit larger than other two, and the colors are brighter, which makes it easier to see details and lines. The cards have a wider right margin with the card name in four languages, as in so many Lo Scarabeo decks. The background has light speckling and faint discoloration, but it doesn’t match the stains on the Il Meneghello deck. It seems Lo Scarabeo cleaned up the original stains then attempted to give the cards an aged look. Card stock is the same as most commercial decks.

Card backs show the Star card printed upright and reversed in sepia. Card size: 2.5 x 4.75 inches (6.5 by 12 centimeters).

Which deck to get if you can only have one.

Il Meneghello is the most historically accurate but not the most aesthetic, in my opinion.

Lo Scarabeo seems to be identical to Il Meneghello with more subtle stains. It’s best for studying details. The borders ruin it aesthetically, but if you can ignore them, it’s a good, inexpensive deck for shuffling.

Il Solleoni/Bordoni:  If I were going to read with a soprafino, I’d use this deck. It feels good in the hand, is sturdy, has strong colors, and is aesthetically pleasing. It’s the kind of deck I would have owned if I had lived in the 19^th century.

Deck information

Tarocchino Lombardo inciso da Carlo Dellarocca, Milano, @1835. Edizioni del Solleone, a cura de Vito Arienti, Lissone, Italia, 1981. 2,500 printed. (Facsimile of a deck printed by Bordoni, Milan, 1889)

Classical Tarots, Lo Scarabeo, Torino, Italy, 1999. Still in print.

Tarocco Soprafino di F. Gumppenberg, Milano 1835. Edizioni Il Meneghello, Milano 1992. 2,000 printed.

Links

Here’s the article again about the Soprafino style

Here’s an article about another soprafino variant originally published by the Avondo Brothers and reprinted by Lo Scarabeo.

Question: Who is the Spanish Captain, and what’s he doing in a tarot deck?

The Short Answer: He’s a character from the Commedia dell’Arte who substitutes for the Papesse in a type of 18^th-century Belgian deck.

The Long Answer: Read the rest of the article.

What is Commedia dell’Arte?

It’s a type of popular theater with roots in the classical world. It flourished in Renaissance Italy and spread throughout Europe, especially France, in the 14^th through 18^th centuries. An array of standard characters appeared in every play like Harlequin, Pantalone, and Pulcinella, who was the prototype for Punch and Pierrot. The audience instantly recognized these characters by their masks, their walk, costume and regional accent, as well as characteristic slapstick routines, stage business, gestures, jokes, and favorite curse words.

The plays were improvised from brief sketches. Favorite story lines included thwarted lovers, stolen children, scheming widows, cross-dressing, and mistaken identity. Physical comedy and slapstick carried the action. If an actor ran out of inspiration he could fall back on stock bits of comic business called lazzi that featured chamber pots, bowls of pasta, pig bladders and enemas. Audience members would eagerly anticipate their favorite lazzi.

Who was the Captain?

He was a bombastic soldier who constantly boasted of his exploits in love and war, but was actually a coward. He would strut and preen in his splendid clothes, challenge rivals to duels, seduce princesses and pretend to be an aristocrat. The Captain was depicted with a huge plumed hat, flowing cape, oversized sword, silly mustache and an affected Castilian accent. His mask had a very long, phallic nose. He had many regional names: Capitain Fracasse (or Ercasse), Spanish Captain, Le Spagnolo Capitano, Capitan Cocodrilo, or Scaramouche. He was the prorotype for Cyrano de Bergerac, Captain Spavento and Ralph Roister Doister.

The Captain was originally Italian. The height of his popularity was the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the age of the condottiere, who were universally despised as they pillaged their way across the countryside. Once Spain got control of most of Europe, the Captain morphed from an arrogant conqueror into a cowardly Castilian, the victim of gratuitous violence and embarrassing mishaps.

Some lazzi associated with the Captain:

• He tries to break up a fight between two armed men. They turn on him and beat him to a pulp.
• The Captain is on one knee serenading a lady under her balcony when a servant accidentally empties a chamber pot on his head.
• A lazzo that has direct bearing on this card: someone describes a beautiful woman to the Captain. The dagger hanging from his belt comes to life, simulating an erection.

The tarot card’s designer was obviously familiar with this last bit of stage business and knew his fellow card players would be too; so he copied the Captain from an engraving and modified the sword handle.

Why a Spanish Captain on a Belgian Deck?

In 1604, Spain seized Belgium and oppressed the people for the next century with heavy taxes and the Spanish Inquisition. When the King of Spain died in 1700, the Bourbons and Hapsburgs fought the War of Spanish Succession from 1700 to 1714, mostly on Belgian soil. The Hapsburgs won and got control of Belgium, which was known as Austrian Belgium until 1795.

In a deck printed by Antoine Jar of Brussels, “Laborne” is printed in large block letters on the Captain’s thigh. Laborne was a Parisian card printer in the very early 18^th century, so it’s possible he designed the Spanish Captain card just as Spain was losing its grip on European politics and it was becoming less dangerous to mock the Spanish overlords.

Belgian Decks

In some places, card makers were ordered to replace the Popesse and Pope with something less controversial, because they were considered either sacrilegious or too Catholic. They were usually replaced with something pagan like Jupiter and Juno or Moorish Kings.

In 18^th century Brussels a group of card makers, including Vandenborre, used the Spanish Captain to replace the Papesse, and replaced the Pope with Bacchus astride a wine barrel. The decks that still exist were printed from 1770 to 1790 at end of Austrian rule; but there may be earlier decks that are lost. These nearly identical Belgian-style decks were printed in Brussels and France by various print shops. See them in Stuart Kaplan’s Encyclopedias referenced below.

The Spanish Captain and Bacchus weren’t the only unique cards in Belgian decks. The Tower was called La Foudre (The Thunderbolt) and showed a shepherd under a tree that’s being hit by lightning. The Devil is in profile breathing fire, with faces in his chest, knees, and stomach. The Star card depicts a man seated in front of a tower holding calipers, while The Moon shows a woman holding a spindle. The court cards and other human figures have short, stumpy legs giving them a slightly squashed appearance.

These cards have predecessors in two decks printed in Paris: Jacques Vieville from about1650 and the slightly earlier Anonymous Parisian deck. This unique imagery also appears on 15^th century decks from Ferrara, and may be evidence of an alternate tradition that eventually lost out to the standard TdM pattern. The Vandenborre deck, the only facsimile Belgian deck on the market, was published in Belgium by Carta Mundi as the Flemish Tarot (Vandenborre Bacchus Tarot) in 1983.

References

Duchartre, Pierre Louis. The Italian Comedy. New York: Dover Publications,1966. (Originally published by George G. Harrap, 1929).

Dummett, Michael. The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City. Duckworth, 1980. p. 204-210.

Gordon, Mel. Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia dell’Arte. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983.

Kaplan, Stuart R., Encyclopedia of Tarot Volumes I, p. 147-152 and Vol. II, p. 320-330. Stamford CT: U.S. Games Systems, Inc., 1978 and 1986.

Olsen, Christina. The Art of Tarot, New York: Abbeville Press, 1995. (Ferrarese and Parisian decks).

www.wopc.co.uk/Belgium/vandenborre-tarot (World of Playing Cards)

Youtube has numerous videos introducing Commedia characters and showing comic routines.

A special thanks to my good friend and tarot colleague Lady Lea who inspired this article when she presented me with two books on the Commedia dell’Arte.

I associate the Reader’s Digest with seeing copies in a basket in my grandparents’ bathroom. Tarot just doesn’t seem to be aligned with the Reader’s Digest’s market niche; so I was intrigued when I learned that a Tarot de Marseille published by Reader’s Digest was on Ebay. Since it was only $11, I decided to satisfy my curiosity.

I’m very pleased with the quality of the cards and book, a collaboration between Czech artist Jindra Capek and writer Vlasta Duskova. The twenty-two cards are set into a niche at the bottom of a sturdy box which holds a 110-page hard-bound book that’s extensively illustrated in color.

Unfortunately, the book starts with a cringe-worthy history of tarot. Ancient Egypt, Kabbalah, alchemists, witches and Italian tarocchi are mentioned on the same page and given the same weight. The author states that tarot’s purpose is occult initiation into Kabbalistic mysteries. Twentieth century Czech and French esotericists are quoted as being the authority on tarot’s ancient origins. We’re also told that medieval tarot users were burned at the stake for being heretics.

The deck uses the European system of assigning the Hebrew alphabet to the cards. The Magician is Aleph, with the alphabet running up the cards and ending with the Fool as Shin. (In the Golden Dawn system the Fool is Aleph, displacing the letter attributions by one card).

Each card gets two double-page spreads displaying a full-page reproduction of the card, a poem, and a general interpretation. This is followed by a discussion of the number, the Hebrew letter, and two sets of astrological associations. Each card is also assigned an abstract geometric symbol called a Pentacle.

The cards are lovely, with clean lines, bright, pleasant colors, and the associated Hebrew letter on the bottom border. They are a bit larger than most cards — 3.5 by 5.5 inches.

The deck sticks closely to mainstream TdM imagery, with these notable exceptions:

• Le Bateleur has a temple façade behind him and a cactus growing between his feet.
• La Papesse shifts toward occult imagery with pomegranates on the curtain and a crescent Moon on her turban.
• The Emperor’s eagle is carved on a stone block instead of being on his shield.
• The three figures on the Lovers card stand at a crossroads. The younger woman is naked.
• Judgment has flaming wings.

This is a good beginner’s deck if you’re curious about esoteric tarot. It’s also a nice, inexpensive collector’s item.

The third issue of The Cartomancer just landed in my inbox, and it’s a beauty.

My favorite section contains luscious full-page layouts of decks. I love the black background that intensifies the colors and makes the cards sizzle. One deck caught my attention: the Tribal Secrets Tarot where the creator photographed belly dancers interpreting the cards in their own way.

Some of my favorite articles:

• Bonnie Cehovet, Mindfulness in a Reading, counsels us to take our time and let the cards reveal their story rather than jumping in and imposing our canned interpretations on them.
• Jay DeForest gives some gentle reminders about how to be a good member of the tarot community.
• A review of Giordano Berti’s oracle deck, The Sibyl of the Heart, based on 17^th century Rosicrucian imagery.
• It was interesting to see Major Tom Schick’s deck based on Lotería cards which are used in a game like bingo. After seeing several Lotería decks in a local museum, I became intrigued by the possibilities of reading with them.
• Nancy Elle shares a spread that addresses how your parents’ relationship influences your own.
• The important but confusing topic of trademarks, copyright law and intellectual property rights is explained by Cheryl Fair.
• My contributions: an article on 15^th century aristocrats’ mania for real gold decks, and a review of the Tarot de Marseille facsimiles produced by Yves Reynaud.

This is only a fraction of the articles and reviews in this 62 page magazine.

Get it here at www.TheCartomancer.com

I’ve been wanting an oversized Tarot de Marseille for a long time but wasn’t sure one even existed. When someone on Facebook posted a link to such a deck on Amazon, I clicked the “buy now” button sight-unseen.

When the deck arrived, I was delighted to discover it’s a facsimile of a 1760 Conver deck originally printed in Marseille and reproduced by Bounty Books.

Before Yves Reynaud, Osvaldo Menegazzi and others started producing facsimiles of rare TdMs, the gold standard for historic facsimiles was another deck printed by Conver in 1760 published in France by Heron. (The Heron box dates their deck to 1761, but 1760 is stamped on the Two of Coins).

Both the Heron and the Bounty Books decks were printed by Conver in 1760 using the same woodblocks. Let’s compare the two.

The Heron cards have faint, delicate lines. I used to think this was from old, worn woodblocks; or perhaps the deck itself had faded. But it appears that’s how the blocks were inked. The delicate lines show details on the faces clearly. The colors were stenciled on more carefully than on the Bounty Books deck. The delicate lines are often completely obscured by the colored ink — see the red bowl of the Knight’s cup.

On the Bounty Books deck, the inked lines are much darker and heavier. Sometimes they run together and obscure facial details. The colors are more intense, and it appears an effort was made to juxtapose sharply contrasting colors. The stenciling is sloppier than on the Heron deck — see the horse’s hooves and the Knight’s red shoe. In this deck, the hair is left uncolored on all the court cards and many trump figures.

I often do three-card readings with just the suit cards then take their sum to get a trump card as the theme of the reading (see this article on reading trump and suit card combinations). With two deck sizes the trump card from this oversize deck can loom over the smaller cards like a guardian. I used my smallest deck in this illustration, a Claude Burdel TdM published by Lo Scarabeo. See this article for putting layouts in card holders.

Same year, same woodblocks, same print shop; two decks with an entirely different look.

The Bounty Books deck is 5.75 x 3.25 inches; the Heron deck is 4.25 x 2.25 inches; the Burdel is 3.0 x 1.75 inches. The Bounty Books deck comes in a sturdy box with a removable top. The LWB is useless. The few paragraphs of history are execrable, and they give no information about the original deck.

• The Tarot Deck. Bounty Books, London, 2007.
• Tarot de Marseille Conver 1760. Heron, Bordeaux, n/d. (@1980 according to Kaplan)
• Tarot of Marseille, Lo Scarabeo, Torino, 2008

Luxurious playing cards from the 15^th and early 16^th centuries, including two tarocchi decks, are on exhibit at the Cloisters in New York City until April 17, 2016. This is a unique opportunity to see Visconti Sforza and Visconti (Carey Yale) cards side-by-side.  If you can’t make it to New York, you have alternatives for seeing these cards.

The exhibit catalog has 130 lavishly illustrated pages. Larger-than-life card illustrations dominate the explanatory text. The exhibit focuses on German playing cards, while the catalog shows images shared between German block printed and engraved cards, Italian playing cards, easel painting and book illumination. For example, all the suit symbols in the Cloisters hunting-themed deck (dog collars, tethers, horns and nooses) appear together in a breviary page decorated with a hunting scene painted about 1510.

Every artist’s workshop came equipped with pattern books of animals, flowers, and people of all ranks doing various activities. Apprentices copied figures from the master’s book to take when they left to work elsewhere. It’s fascinating to see the same figure pop up in several places.

For instance, a man facing left, his weight on one foot, the hand furthest from us held out, while the other arm is hidden by his cloak appears as the Visconti Sforza Page of Coins and in three German block printed decks from the same decade. The same pair of hounds appears with the Zintilomo V engraving of the so-called Mantegna Tarot, the 2 of France in the Courtly Household Cards, and the Four of Hounds in the Stuttgart hunting deck. I’m going to stay alert for more repetitions as I look at art from this era.

The earliest German block printed cards to survive are the Italian-influenced Liechtenstein Playing cards from @1450. They have Italian suits and the batons look like polo mallets, possibly a lingering Mamluk influence.

The stars of the show are four exquisitely painted decks: The Cloisters (also known as Flemish) playing cards, the Courtly Household deck and the Stuttgart playing cards. My favorite is the suit of Herons from the Courtly (Ambras) Hunting Cards with its exquisitely detailed landscapes. The catalog points out stylistic similarities with Konrad Witz, a painter active in Basel in the mid 1400s. Several of the court cards in this deck are very similar to figures in his religious paintings, so it’s almost certain the deck came from his workshop.

Tarot is a minor part of the exhibit. Only ten of the 35 Visconti Sforza cards held by the Morgan Library are displayed, with only five of the 69 Carey Yale (Visconti) cards. My spy at the scene tells me this latter deck is stunning because the heavily-textured gold glitters in the light.

The most unique deck in the show was printed by Peter Flötner in Nuremberg about 1540. The cards show scenes of peasant and bourgeois life, some bawdy and scatological. Musical notation in four-part harmony appears on the card backs. Each suit is notated with a different part (alto, soprano, etc.) making it possible to sing the music while holding a suit of cards.

A lucky friend who can walk to the Cloisters from her home has seen the show twice and plans to go back at least twice more — the exhibit is that fabulous! Here are other ways to see these cards if you can’t make the trip to New York.

Resources

• Exhibit page of the Metropolitan Museum. Most cards in the exhibit can be viewed from links on this page. There’s also a link for purchasing the catalog.
• Guinevere’s Games makes reproductions of three decks in the exhibit. Here’s a link to my review of the decks with purchasing information.
• Tarot Wheel.net displays cards from three decks in the exhibit (plus a round deck not in the show) with links to high resolution images.

Cards illustrated above

• Page of Coins, I Tarocchi Visconti Sforza, Il Meneghello, 2002
• Five of Herons, Courtly Hunting deck (also called the Ambras Court Hunting Deck), Guinevere’s Games reproduction.
• Three of Bells, Peter Flötner Playing Cards, from the exhibit catalog.

Congratulations to Jadzia and Jay DeForest, Bonnie Cehovet, and everyone else involved with this beautiful publication. The latest edition of the Cartomancer celebrates their first anniversary of publication.

Here are some highlights from this issue:

• Katrina Wynne’s discussion of counseling skills summarizes the essence of her life-changing counseling skills certificate program. She also talks about how to get out of the tarot bubble and integrate with the larger community.
• Linda Marson is in the early phase of developing a radically new set of tarot tools for navigating through life which will be distributed on a flash drive. In the article, she shares her process and a few spreads for understanding yourself and your life journey.
• Cynthia Tedesco presents a vision of Pamela C. Smith painting the Waite Smith cards under the influence of the Sola Busca deck and the orisha Ogun.
• Monica Bodersky’s meditation on the Wheel of Fortune looks at the card from many viewpoints and is illustrated with historic and modern cards.
• My contribution is an article about the first tarot book written in the U.S. in 1915 by a husband and wife team of Christian mystics with Theosophical inclinations.

As always, there are luscious images on every page, plus an entire section devoted to some of the most stunning tarot art being created today.

Links to my reviews of previous issues:

Summer 2015

Autumn 2015

Winter 2015

Get The Cartomancer in print or electronic format at TheCartomancer.com

Historic deck aficionados now have two versions of the legendary Noblet deck to enjoy. The only original in existence resides at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The late Jean-Claude Flornoy’s 2007 restoration of this deck with its clean, crisp lines and deep colors has become a popular reading deck. Now Joseph H. Peterson has just released a facsimile of the deck, allowing us to study the original imagery up close at our leisure.

The two decks are nearly the same size. The Peterson facsimile is 6.3 cm wide x 10 cm tall (2.5 X 4.0 inches). The Flornoy deck is one millimeter narrower and 2 millimeters shorter. The Flornoy deck is on thicker, less bendable paper. The most noticeable difference is the white background on the facsimile and the cream background of the Noblet.

Flornoy made some consistent changes to the color: the terra cotta of the original becomes flesh colored, and lemon yellow becomes deep orange in his deck. Most of the white areas of the original are filled in with light blue or blue-gray.

Peterson supplies seven extra cards that correct mistakes on the originals. The obsessively Virgoish who can’t tolerate these mistakes may substitute the corrected card. Two pip cards have roman numerals printed backward, three trump cards have misspelled titles, and Peterson rather arbitrarily touched up the shape of World’s head and arms. The six through ten of Swords are missing and have been re-created.

The biggest change is to the Bateleur. Here we see the Flornoy, the original card and Peterson’s corrected card. On the original and the Flornoy, the Bateleur’s wand is truncated, and he’s missing his middle three fingers. There’s not even a ghost of the missing elements on the original. Evidently, the block carver made a serious omission that no one noticed before printing. Peterson restored the fingers and the rest of the wand, as well as changing the second L to an E in the title. Peterson also supplies a third Bateleur card with the restored image but keeping the misspelled title.

The Noblet deck, printed in Paris @1650, is a Type I Tarot de Marseille. Type II, derived from the Conver and Chosson decks of the early 18^th century, is considered the standard pattern today. Type I decks appeared earlier: Noblet in 1650, Dodal in 1714 (also restored by Flornoy), and a few others about the same time. Historians originally thought that Type II evolved from Type I, which then disappeared. Although Type I appeared earlier, it seems the two existed simultaneously and are parallel styles. Actually, only minor differences occur in the imagery between the two types, most notably in the Star, Hanged Man and World cards.

Which deck to choose if you can only have one? I prefer facsimiles because they bring me closer to history. But I find restored decks more pleasing to look at. If you’re going to read with the deck, the restored version gets the message across more clearly, and is probably easier for clients to relate to.

Peterson’s website, esotericarchives.com is a trove of esoteric and magical writings from the Renaissance, with the bonus of an esoteric timeline.

Flornoy’s website, letarot.com has information on the four decks he has restored, a brief history of tarot with an interesting critique of Paul Marteau’s Grimaud deck, and a discussion of each trump as a step on the path of personal development.

Here’s a page about the early development of the Tarot de Marseille.

Giordano Berti, who brought us the historically important Vergnano and Sola Busca decks, has done it again, producing a small print run of a virtually unknown deck. The Tarocchi Perrin, originally printed in Turin, is a delightfully unique deck that’s heavily influenced by Dellarocca’s soprafino design.

Perrin published richly illustrated non-fiction, especially history, in mid-19th century Turin. This venture into deck publishing was probably an experiment that didn’t work out, since the deck is unknown and doesn’t appear in histories or catalogs of playing cards.

This is probably one of the earliest decks to be produced using chromolithography. In this process, the design is applied to a flat stone or a zinc plate with a grease crayon. Color is applied with an oily paint and the paper is run through a press to transfer the color. A separate stone and separate pressing is required for each color. The process is time-consuming and laborious, but once the stones are prepared the image can be mass produced. In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, this was the preferred method of making color prints until it was superseded by cheaper methods in the 1930s.

Unlike most TdMs, the subject of each card in the Perrin deck does not float in a void. The background settings and surrounding hatching create a context which brings the figures to life. The deck is just innovative enough to be delightful, but not so quirky as to seem strange. If you read with a TdM you’ll have little trouble adjusting to this deck.

Eleven trump cards are based directly on Dellarocca, while a few trumps are unique: The Fool is a carnival jester thumbing his nose. The Pope and Papesse have heavy draperies behind them and the Pope has no acolytes. The Bagatto is a cobbler as in Dellarocca’s design, but he holds a hammer instead of a wine glass and is in a fully realized workshop. The Hanged Man is suspended from one overhanging tree branch and has a landscape behind him. The Wheel of Fortune, Temperance, Star and World have details that are noticeably different. Although the deck was created in Piedmont, it has none of the details associated with the local tarot style, like the Fool’s butterfly and the Hermit’s rosary. Shown here are three Bagatti: Perrin, Dellarocca and Vergnano.

The pip cards follow the soprafino style with some differences. The foliage in the suits of coins and batons is more stylized and rendered in rich gold, amber and burnt orange. The cups are narrow like Dellarocca’s, but are brighter gold. The swords are entirely silver with minimal vegetation, giving them an austere feeling.

The court cards maintain the same postures as in Dellarocca’s deck, with a few exceptions. The Page of Coins has just pulled a coin out of an open chest, the Page of Batons strikes an arrogant pose with his baton held aloft, while the Queen of Swords looks pensive with her chin on her hand. The men’s striped pantaloons, the women’s tight bodices and the heavy robes give the cards a late Renaissance/Baroque feel.

The box was designed by Letizia Rivetti, who created the boxes for the Vergnano and Sola Busca decks. The box is made of very sturdy corrugated cardboard that opens like a book. Antique gold paper lines the inside cover, and the box is lined with red velvet. The exterior is covered with paper marbled in warm brown with large gold flecks. A card is pasted to the cover and the box closes with a satin ribbon.

The cards are the same size as the Vergnano deck, a bit under 4.5 x 2.75 inches. They have a smooth, silky feel and the corners are slightly rounded, making the cards very pleasant to handle and shuffle.

I have only two minor problems. The extraneous white border is a distraction, and the hatching and stippling blur details, especially in the faces; at least to my aging eyes. The enclosed booklet gives information on Perrin, and juxtaposes images of Perrin’s and Dellarocca’s trumps.

Berti has dropped tantalizing hints that he has access to more rare Piemontese decks. If you’re a collector who needs to narrow down your acquisitions (and I couldn’t possibly be referring to myself) consider focusing on Piemontese decks or decks related to Dellarocca’s designs.

The deck is in a very limited edition of 600 and is sure to sell out soon, as Berti’s other decks have.

See more images and purchase the deck here:  Rinascimentoitalianart.wordpress.com/

Here are articles on the Dellarocca/soprafino style, and Tarot in Piedmont.

The Museo dei Tarocchi’s new online bookstore makes it very easy to order their books and decks using Paypal. I celebrated their grand re-opening a few months ago with my usual lack of self-restraint and ordered a pile of books and one very interesting deck. Ordering was a breeze, and it took less than three weeks for my loot to make its way from Italy to California.

Most of their books are in Italian, but there was one bilingual book in my order: Alla Corte Dei Trionfi (In the Court of the Trumps). It has a somewhat dicey history section that spends too much time on Egypt, Gypsies and Cabala for my taste. But there was a very intriguing section associating trump cards with scents using cabalistic references. This differs from Mary Greer’s 1993 book, The Essence of Magic, that uses traditional astrological associations. It’ll be fun to sit down with both books and compare olfactory attributions.

The back of the book has 48 pages with color photos of decks the museum has printed or commissioned. This is worth the price of the book.

The Literatarot decks are an ongoing project where artists in a particular region of the world associate the trump cards with works of literature. The American deck has cards by well-known names like Arnell Ando, Diane Wilkes, Chris Paradis, Marie White and Julia Cuccia-Watts.

A more recent purchase is the Sunrise/Sunset Tarot by Giovanni Monti, published by the Museo in a limited edition of 100. Two sets of collaged trump cards reflect the clarity of sunlight and the mysteries of the night.

Some Italian books that caught my eye:

Tarocchi in Pentola has twenty-two recipes and a witty discussion of why the author associates certain foods with the trumps. The Wheel of Fortune is matched up with beans which were used in many cultures for casting lots. Spinach goes with the Strength card because it contains iron and was Popeye’s favorite.

Their travel books focus on magical places to visit in cities from Turin to Bologna to Ferrara. Be sure to consult them if you’re planning a trip to Italy.

Browse the bookstore here: museodeitarocchi.net

Arnell Ando has set aside a section of her ArnellArt website for information about the Museo and links to their shop. Americans can order some decks directly from Arnell and avoid postage costs from Italy. ArnellArt.com/Museodeitarocchi

Illustrations:

Cover: Alla Corte dei Trionfi

Literatarot America, Museo dei Tarocchi:

Magician by Leslie Cochran based on the book The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Justice by Julie Cuccia-Watts based on The Egyptian Book of the Dead

U.S. Games Systems has just reissued their facsimile of the Pierpont Morgan Bergamo Visconti Sforza Tarocchi, originally produced in 1975 and still in print. They’ve added bonus cards with portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Milan, probably by Bonifacio Bembo, who most likely created the original deck in the 1450s. Both editions are the same size as the original cards: 3.5 x 7.0 inches. Let’s compare the two decks.

• Overall, the newer deck has lighter tones, which better approximates the shimmering gold backgrounds of the original cards. In the older deck, the background and the gold embellishments seem nearly brown. The gold on the sword tips and the cups in the newer deck almost shines.
• The 1975 deck shows the original cream border that extends beyond the blue inner border. In the new deck this border has been obliterated and merged into the tan edge. It gives a cleaner appearance but loses authenticity.
• The colors of the foreground figures are not as deep as in the 1975 deck. There’s a loss of richness, and the cards appear a bit washed out.
• Since the colors are lighter, the red smears where the clay matrix bled through the gold leaf are more obvious.
• Much to my dismay, the newer deck retains the same psychedelic and anachronistic Devil and Tower cards as the older deck. These two cards have darker tones than in the 1975 deck.
• The newer deck improves on the Knight of Coins replacement card. Using the Knight of Cups as a template, they flipped the figure horizontally, put a coin in his hand and gave him the same robes as the other three coins court cards.
• The backs of the older deck are solid dark red. In the newer deck they’re red-brown with subtle streaks and tan spots to give the illusion the paint has worn off. The nail holes show through to the back, giving a more authentic feel.

The deck comes in a sturdy fliptop box. The enclosed booklet is essentially the same as the 1975 edition, except it’s printed on sturdier paper and the illustrations are in color. The booklet contains charts with card titles in three languages, plus several variant names for many cards. There’s a history of the Visconti and Sforza families, and a discussion of the heraldic devices that appear on the cards, along with a chart giving the location of all known handpainted cards. In the short discussion on who painted the cards, the booklet goes along with the general consensus that Bonifacio Bembo produced the cards; but some of his contemporaries have their promoters. The upright and reversed divinatory meanings for each card owe much to the Waite Smith tradition. The booklet ends with the inevitable Celtic Cross.

Dal Negro also produced a facsimile deck that’s the same size as the U. S. Games decks. There’s no date, but I believe it was produced in the 1970s or 80s. There are subtle differences in coloring. The gold in the dal Negro deck is lighter than the U. S. Games 1975 version but not as light as the 2015 deck. The colors on the foreground figures are slightly richer, which helps the details stand out. The background on the pip cards is white rather than tan, so the floral decoration pops out. Cards that were originally highlighted with silver leaf, such as the robes on some court cards, are shiny rather than dull dark gray as in both U. S. Games decks. The Devil and Tower are in the same anachronistic Tarot de Marseille style as the U. S. Games decks, but the colors are not as lurid.

Bottom line: I probably own every version of the Visconti Sforza deck ever published. If I had to get rid of all of them except one or two, I would keep the Dal Negro deck for studying, along with Volume II of the Kaplan’s Encyclopedia, which has a huge amount of information on the deck and the Visconti and Sforza families. For shuffling and reading, I prefer Lo Scarabeo’s gold foil deck. It has those awful wide borders with the card names in fifty languages, but the borders are more subtle than in many of their decks so I can live with it; and I love the sparkliness.

Get the deck here at USGamesinc.com

Here’s my adventure seeing these cards in person.

Here’s my review of Race Point’s full-sized restored deck.

The August 2016 edition of The Cartomancer contains two weighty, serialized articles, as well as the usual gorgeous artwork and an intriguing range of topics. The article that anchors this edition for me is Marseille Tarot: A Phylosophical Enquiry by three Brazilian tarotists. In this article, the first of two, the authors describe various philosophical approaches to tarot study. Quite frankly, I had a hard time sorting it out; but here’s how I disentangled the threads into four main approaches to tarot:

• Jungian (Carl Jung and Sallie Nichols). Images on the cards are a distillation of archetypes from the collective unconscious.
• Realist (Michael Dummett). The cards were designed for game playing. One should stick to verifiable facts about the social context and use of the decks.
• Spiritualist (French and English occultists). There is a spiritual reality independent of our minds which manifests in the world through mediums and enlightened masters who see through the illusion of material reality. We can share that vision by purifying our minds, using Tarot is a map of initiation. The deck is designed to convey spiritual truths.
• Sensuous Intuition (Henri Bergson). Focusing on the object itself (card image) opens circuits in the brain that unfold layers of reality. The viewer’s memory and pre-conceptions influence the nature of what is seen. We don’t “rise above” material reality to transcendent realms.

Part 2 in the upcoming issue of The Cartomancer will elaborate on Bergson’s theories. I’m looking forward to this as it seems to agree with my view that the cards are magic carpets to other levels of reality which are implicit in the imagery and our minds; not out there in a separate spiritual realm.

Part 2 of a 3-part article by Eric K. Lerner on the Justice-Strength switch is important for anyone reading with Waite Smith decks. Since they began putting numbers on trump cards in the 16^th century, Strength has been trump 11 and Justice has been trump 8. I knew the switch was made by the Golden Dawn in the late 1800s and enshrined in the Waite Smith deck of 1909. I also knew the switch had something to do with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet assigned to the cards. But, truthfully, I was never interested enough to inquire further about the implications.

The first two articles give a concise background on French occultism of the 18^th and 19^th centuries; how tarot got mixed in with Qabala, the Hebrew Alphabet and the Tree of Life; and what Waite was thinking when he made the switch. There’s a discussion of why Oswald Wirth and Aleister Crowley disagreed with the switch. The next issue will go into the implications of all this for tarot readers.

In my not so humble opinion, if you want to delve into the wisdom behind your deck, rather than just flipping cards for fortune telling, you need to go beyond uncritically accepting the card meanings in your latest how-to-read book. This series of articles is a good start in educating yourself about the deep structure of the tarot deck and the meaning it conveys.

In the Tarot Art section, along with decks based on Maori themes, goddess magic and nineteenth century cabinet cards, we find Tarocchi di Marcelo Inciso. This redrawn TdM is designed to look like woodcuts and stone rubbings, while staying close to traditional imagery. I’m excited to announce that its creator has re-discovered the Happy Squirrel card, which was evidently lost from every known historic TdM.

Decks:

Force, Tarot de Marsella Robledo, Iskander, 2016

Strength, The Rider Tarot Deck, US Games Systems, Inc., 1971

Scoiattolo della Felicità (Happy Squirrel), Tarocchi di Marcelo Incisco, Lynyrd-Jym Narciso, 2015

The Museo dei Tarocchi near Bologna, Italy has given us many highly creative art decks. Now they have produced an historically significant bolognese tarocchi based on an original that rests in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

Bologna has its own unique tarot tradition that dates back to the early sixteenth century, and possibly earlier. The order of the trumps is slightly different, and pips two through five of each suit have been removed to make a shortened deck that was very popular for card games back then. Some trump cards have distinct imagery: the Fool as a street musician playing a drum and horn, the Three Magi on the Star card, and a woman with a spindle for the Sun are just a few examples. The Aces are very distinctive as well. In the early 18^th century the deck took its present form when the Empress, Emperor, Papesse and Pope were changed into the four Moors and the trump and court cards became double-headed.

Fine dalla Torre is a transition deck from the 16^th century. It’s a shortened deck, but not yet double-headed. Trumps two through five are the same as the standard Tarot de Marseille, but there’s something odd about the Pope and Popesse. The Pope has a feminine face and holds a book, while the Popesse holds large keys and raises her hand in a blessing.

Bolognese imagery has remained constant through the centuries and persists on small, double-headed decks used for game playing today. Here are two Star cards: the Fine dalla Torre and a modern playing card.

Artists at the Museo touched up the cards to make the images clearer, and did a remarkable job in keeping the look and feel of the original cards. Two missing queens and several swords cards were re-created using other tarocchino decks as examples.  The Museo re-created the lower-numbered pip cards that were never part of the deck in case you want to pretend it’s a Tarot de Marseille. A previous owner evidently did just that, as the deck in the Bibliothèque Nationale has the Tarot de Marseille trump numbers written near the top of each card in small Arabic numbers.

The unique backs are in landscape orientation show two cherubs, one of them shooting at a heart that’s hanging from a tree like fruit.

The cards are 2.7 by 5.9 inches, somewhat smaller than the originals, but retaining the original tall, thin proportions. They are housed in a wooden box with a sliding lid decorated with the World card and a wax seal on the lid. The cards are accompanied by a signed and numbered sheet of paper that describes the deck and the methods used to touch up the images.

The Museo is also offering a deluxe edition: the same sized cards  in a fancier box accompanied by ten postcards and a large print. Only thirty of these are being made.

The Tarocchi Fine dalla Torre in Bologna can be purchased directly from the Museo Internazionale dei Tarocchi at their Mutus Liber bookstore.

North Americans can save some shipping costs by ordering through Arnell Ando on this page.

Read more about Bolognese tarot on this page at TarotWheel.net

See the original cards in the Bibliothèque Nationale at this link.

A collector recently discovered a trove of uncut sheets of tarot and playing cards that have been sitting in Turin’s archives of since the mid-19^th century. Giordano Berti has given new life to one of these forgotten decks by transforming the black and white uncut sheets into the beautifully colored Tarocchi Orientali.

The deck was created by Claudio Foudraz, a lithographer working in Turin in the mid-19^th century. As an all-purpose lithographer he printed business cards, invitations, ads and art prints. Foudraz’s tarot deck was useless for game playing because of mistakes in the numbering, which the current edition corrects, so it probably never reached the market.

The deck is from a time when Europe’s fascination with the exotic east was at its height. Chinoiserie was the rage among 18^th century aristocrats. By the mid-19th century, it had trickled down to the middle class as a fad for Chinese decorative objects and textiles. Chinese-themed playing cards were popular, but this is the only chinoiserie Tarot deck we know of.

The imagery follows the Tarot de Marseille pattern fairly closely, but a few trumps stand out as unique:

• The Emperor wears a dragon robe and stands outside rather than sitting on a throne.
• The Pope and Papesse hold large fans rather than religious symbols
• The Lovers depict a woman standing between two men. What’s going on here? Is she deciding between two lovers? Husband and lover? Or between obeying her father or running off with a lover?
• The Hanged Man is an acrobat balancing on a large hoop.
• The two boys on the Sun card are standing in water up to their knees. A beach scene instead of a garden?

The 18-page illustrated booklet gives the story of Chinoiserie in Europe, how it manifested in Piedmont, and the fad for Chinese tarock decks. Berti has ferreted out the scant information available  on Foudraz.

This edition of 700 is signed and numbered. The cards are smooth, pleasant to hold and shuffle, have rounded corners and a white border. They are the same size as the original, 4.5 x 2.5 inches. Traditionally, expensive decks were taken to an artist to be custom painted. Berti has replicated this experience for us by commissioning an artist to tint the black and white originals with delicate water colors.

Like Berti’s other productions, the deck is housed in a sturdy box designed by the artist Letizia Rivetti. It’s covered with handmade marbled paper flecked with metallic silver and opens like a book tied with a silver ribbon. The cards rest on a red velveteen lining. The deck and its box are a joy to look at and to handle.

See more images and get purchasing information here

https://rinascimentoitalianartenglish.wordpress.com/catalog/

While 15^th-century Italian aristocrats were commissioning gilded and hand-painted tarot cards, aristocrats further north were doing the same with regular playing cards. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is offering a facsimile of the only complete playing card deck from the 15th century in existence. This deck is unique for several reasons: it’s Burgundian, it’s the oldest known deck of its type, and it’s oval-shaped.

The Metropolitan Museum acquired this deck from an auction house in the 1980s and renamed it the Cloisters Playing Cards after the medieval branch of the museum. The cards are the original size, 5.5 by 2.75 inches, making it a rather small deck for its time. Each card has a small round Metropolitan Museum stamp on the center back with the catalog number written in pencil. The deck comes with a bilingual booklet (English and German) written by the museum’s curator of medieval art.

The deck was hand painted with the same precious materials used in illuminated manuscripts: crushed lapis lazuli, azurite and red ocher. Gold leaf details made this a truly luxurious deck. It’s comprised of four suits numbered 1 through 10 with three court cards: King, Queen, and Page. The suit symbols are items necessary for hunting with dogs: horns for signaling, tethers for restraining the dogs, nooses for suspending birds or small game from one’s belt, and extra-wide collars to protect the dog’s throat from the prey he’s bringing down.

The court cards were drawn freehand in pen and ink then hand-painted. It’s possible the cards were commissioned by a wealthy merchant to satirize the extreme fashions of the Burgundian court. Two fashion victims are shown below with the 3 of Collars between them. The King’s floor length drooping sleeves would have been a nuisance to deal with. The long sleeves of the outer robe were usually tied together in the back to keep them out of the way. The Queen is wearing a tall hennin with a long, gauzy veil trailing behind. This headgear often reached ridiculous proportions resembling tall, pointed witch’s hats that made it a challenge to walk through doorways.

This deck was included in the exhibit of medieval playing cards at the Cloisters in early 2016. The catalog for this exhibit, The World in Play, has the same information as the booklet accompanying this deck, as well as large color versions of the tiny, black and white illustrations in the booklet. Guinevere’s Games used to sell this deck, along with two other hand-painted decks from about the same time period; but this deck has been removed from their website. All three decks were printed by Piatnik in the 1970s, so it seems this is a Piatnik reprint.

The box housing the deck and booklet is sturdy, deep red, with embossed gold lettering and two cards pasted to the top.

Advice for the cautious consumer: First, get the World in Play catalog from the Metropolitan Museum. It’s beautiful, loaded with card images, and gives a thorough education in fifteenth-century playing cards. Check out the Courtly Hunting deck on page 26, the Courtly Household deck on page 49, and the Cloisters/Flemish Hunting deck on page 80. If you want an actual deck, purchase the first two from Guinevere’s Games and the last-mentioned from the museum.

All the links you need:

The catalog at the Met Museum store

The Cloisters Hunting deck at the Met Museum store

Guinevere’s Games

My review of the decks offered by Guinevere’s Games

My review of the Metropolitan’s exhibit and catalog

See more images of these cards and links to high resolution images at TarotWheel.net

The Inglewood Hunting Deck created in the style of the 15^th century decks

I’ve just acquired the tiniest deck in my historical facsimile collection — a miniature version (1-1/8 x 2-¼ inches) of Il Meneghello’s reproduction of a TdM printed in Bologna in 1780 by Giacomo Zoni. Lo Scarabeo also publishes a facsimile. Shown above is a mini card superimposed on the Lo Scarabeo, which is a bit larger than Il Meneghello’s full-size version.

The Lo Scarabeo deck is lighter and brighter than the Il Meneghello. Mercifully, they’ve omitted the card names in five languages that usually clutter their borders. The border is a soft gray-green which blends well with the deck. I’ve heard they also have version with a blue border decorated with blue dots.
Speaking of dots, this deck is covered with them. The cards look like they have chickenpox. I have assumed this was damage from aging, but in some cards the dots are placed too regularly or symmetrically to be random damage. Also, the dots are too round and similar in size; they don’t resemble the usual splotches and stains you get on these very old decks. Compare the random dots on the Three of Coins to the dots marching up the sword blade.

There’s another Bolognese deck, from 1725, with the same type of dots, the Geographia Tarocchi in Kaplan Volume I page 147. I can’t imagine why someone would put those dots on the cards deliberately. Did they really think they were enhancing the deck? Does anyone have a theory about them?

This deck is historically interesting because it comes from Bologna but is not a Bolognese deck with the four Moors and shortened numerical suits. Since the card titles are in French, it was most likely made for export.

There’s a lot I like about this deck. The faces are lively and intelligent. The rich colors are mostly teal blue, green, antique gold and rust. It comes in the usual Il Meneghello box covered in handmade paper and with a card glued to the top. The dots really put me off, but in the tiny deck they’re less intrusive. I’ve been wanting a very small, light TdM to carry around with me, and this might be the one.

Decks illustrated in this article:

Tarocco di 78 Carte, Bologna Sec. XVIII, Il Meneghello, Milano. The deck does not have the usual enclosed card giving the date and the number of decks printed.

Ancient Tarots of Bologna, Lo Scarabeo, Torino, 2000.