Jun 13
One of the most attractive Visconti-Sforza decks on the scene is offered by Race Point Publishing. This is not a facsimile deck — the cards have been touched up. The images are very faithful to the original; and mercifully, there are no distracting numbers or titles on the borders. The faces are livelier and more expressive than in the original deck, the lines are sharper, and details are easier to read. Read more
Deck collectors have three versions of the fifteenth-century Sola Busca deck to choose from: decks published by Lo Scarabeo, Il Meneghello, and Wolfgang Mayer. My hands-down favorite is the Mayer deck, currently sold by Giordano Berti, so I’ll describe it first, then compare it to the others. Read more
The Sola Busca Tarocchi was created about 1490 in Northern Italy, and is named for the family who owned the deck until 2009, when they sold it to the Italian government and it was placed in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.
There are two theories about the deck’s creator: either he was an artist named Nicola who had connections to Florence and Ancona; or he was an unknown Ferrarese artist living in Venice; or perhaps it was printed in Ferrara and colored in Venice. We don’t know if the artist created the deck himself, or if it was a commission. A small number of decks were printed from the plates, and a handful of unpainted examples from four different decks are scattered about in museums and private collections. The 78-card Sola Busca in the Pinacoteca di Brera, which was painted a decade or so after it was printed, is the deck that Mayer and Il Meneghello used as the basis for their recent facsimile publications. Read more
For years, I’ve puzzled over what to call decks like the TdM, Swiss 1JJ, Rolla Nordic, and Visconti-Sforza that have suit symbols instead of pictures on the number cards. Here are some generic names I’ve seen recently: Read more
Tarot collectors now have the opportunity to acquire rare and historic Tarot de Marseilles decks thanks to Yves Reynaud of Marseilles. He has access to the tarot collections of various European museums and private collections, and is gradually putting out high-quality facsimile editions of these decks.
You can see the trump cards from twelve decks in his online gallery. So far, he’s produced facsimiles of the 1736 Chosson deck and the Pierre Madenié deck published in Dijon in 1709. He only shows the 22 trump cards in his gallery, but his decks have all 78 cards.
I intended to buy the Chosson deck, since it’s the template for today’s standard TdM, but after looking over all the decks in his gallery, I changed my mind and got the Madenié. It’s the oldest complete TdM in existence, and I’m a pushover for the first, the original or the oldest of anything. Also, the rich colors really grabbed me – Deep ruby, forest green, dark royal blue and antique gold. Read more
Like most amateur tarot historians, I’ve often fantasized about entering the inner sanctum of a museum to see, and perhaps even handle, those magnificent gold-embossed cards from the 15th century. So you can imagine how magical and mind-blowing it was to find myself quite unexpectedly face-to-face with the Morgan Library’s portion of the Visconti-Sforza deck.
It happened in 2006 during a trip to New York City where I hoped to immerse myself in abstract art at the Guggenheim, the Whitney and MOMA. A musty old institution like the Morgan Library wasn’t even on my radar until a friend of my traveling companion offered to get us in for free. Off the main lobby, in a large, very dim room, I discovered a special exhibit of illuminated manuscripts. Quite by accident, I stumbled over two very long glass cases running the width of the room where the Visconti-Sforza cards from the Library’s collection emitted a heavenly glow in the room’s dim light. Read more
How did a luxurious tarot deck rendered in gold leaf and paint made of crushed malachite and lapis lazuli find is way from its birth place in Milan to New York City? The Visconti-Sforza Tarot was commission by Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, about 1450 and created in the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo. Precious, gold-leaf decks were all the rage among the aristocracy of mid-15th century northern Italy, and were given as gifts, or brought out to amuse and impress dinner guests.
We know the deck left the Sforza family by the late 15th century; and that the complete deck (minus the four missing cards: Devil, Tower, Knight of Coins, and 3 of Swords) was in the hands of the Colleoni family in the late 19th century. The deck’s travels in the intervening centuries are shadowy, although there’s evidence the deck had been owned by both the Ambivero and Donalli families, who may have been relatives of the Colleoni. Read more
Even if you’re not interested in the Tarot de Marseille, Enrique Enriquez’s Tarology video is worth having for the bonus interviews with a dozen contemporary taroists like Rachel Pollack, Donnaleigh de la Rose, Marcus Katz and Robert Place. Enriquez’ video inspired me to dust off my VCR and pop in the VHS tape of interviews produced by Gary Ross in 1988. Ross was a fixture on the San Francisco tarot scene for three decades and was the editor of Tarot Network News, which he published a few times a year in the ’80s and ’90s. Read more
Gertrude Moakley is my tarot history muse and the wise and magical aunt I wish I could have had. We never had an image of her until the late Michael J. Hurst found her yearbook picture from Barnard College. I always imagine her in the 1950s as a gray-haired librarian in tweeds and sensible shoes, a Waite Smith deck hidden in her purse, slipping away from her colleagues at the public library to have lunch with Eden Gray.
After graduating from Barnard College, then the Columbia School of Library Science in 1928, Moakley began a 40-year career with the New York City Public Library. In the 1950s, she published two articles in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library: on the Waite Smith deck’s influence on T.S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland; and on the relationship between the Visconti-Sforza trumps and Petrarch’s poem I Trionfi. Read more
A few weeks ago, I saw the Metropolitan Opera’s HD broadcast of their stunning new production of Parsifal. The name means “Pure Fool,” and the story takes us on a fool’s journey from ignorance to transcendence. I couldn’t resist looking for other tarot archetypes in the opera, and I wasn’t disappointed. Every major character reminded me of a tarot trump. Read more
Tarot Heritage 