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Posts from the ‘Tarot History’ Category

Sep 9

Arthur Hind History of Woodcut cover
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From my Bookshelf: History of Woodcut by Arthur Hind

Before tarot was a gilded status symbol for Italian aristocrats; before it inspired parlor games and poetry; and before it was a repository of occult correspondences, tarot was a set of paper cards printed in ink with wood blocks.

If we want to understand tarot’s formative years, we must understand the printing industry in the first half of the fifteenth century. Hind’s book gives a comprehensive survey of printers and their output, starting in the mid-fourteenth century, with an emphasis on the fifteenth century. Read more

Jul 30

Tarocchi Carey-Yale deck
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Tarocchi Visconti di Modrone (Cary-Yale) from Il Meneghello

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. Read more

Jul 2

Tarocchi Vergnano Fool and Ace of Cups

Piedmont Roundup

Piedmont-style tarot has been on my mind lately, with decks and information popping up unexpectedly. Toward the bottom I’ve listed links to the six blog posts I’ve done so far on Piemontese decks.

I recently saw one of Lo Scarabeo’s reprints of Guala’s 1860 deck for sale online. I was tempted to round out my Piedmont collection, but it was the version with card names in four languages on a wide border at the bottom of each card. This ruined it for me. Since the deck was over-priced, I think the seller was mistaking it for one of the better versions without the extra border. Read more

Apr 28

Etteilla card 16 Opinion and Vergnano Judgment card
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Was Etteilla Influenced by Piedmont Tarot?

Etteilla, tarot super-star of mid-1700s Paris, claimed he studied tarot from 1757 to 1765 at the urging of “an aged Piedmontese”. In his memoirs, a Parisian actor who was Etteilla’s contemporary, describes visiting Italian fortune tellers in Paris. It’s not a stretch to imagine Etteilla learning card reading from one of them.

If this elderly Piemontese teacher was in his 60s in 1757, then he was born a little before 1700. He may have learned to read tarot in his youth in the 1720s from a teacher who could have learned the cards around 1680. This would make Etteilla the bridge to a very old Italian card reading tradition. Read more

Mar 6

Moon and Three of Cups from Madenie Tarot de Marseille
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Tarot History Rant #4: The 22-Card Deck (and why I read the TdM with a full deck)

You may have heard people say the 22 trumps were grafted onto a pack of playing cards for gaming purposes. Actually, the 22 trump cards and the four suits were always a set. You need 78 cards to play the game of Trionfi/Tarocchi/Tarot. The 22 trump cards were never sold separately until occultists put them on a spiritual pedestal while scorning the suit cards (minor arcana) as a vulgar fortune-telling tool.

Many contemporary French and Italian tarot books discuss only the trump cards. If they deal with the minor arcana at all, it’s with a few lines for each card in the back of the book, as if the author were embarrassed to be caught talking about them. Read more

Feb 13

Tarocco PIemontese by Il Meneghello World card

Tarocco Piemontese XIX Secolo by Il Meneghello

I’m totally enchanted by Osvaldo Menegazzi’s latest production, a handcrafted facsimile of a Piedmont-style deck from the late 19th century. The deck was originally printed by Strambo in the town of Varallo on the Sesia River in eastern Piedmont.

The cards have a charming, folk art feel with deep, rich colors printed on smooth card stock that feels very nice to shuffle. At 2.5 x 4.5 inches (6.5 x 11.5 cm) they are a bit smaller than standard cards but not small enough to be called a mini deck.

The deck is housed in a very sturdy, handmade box covered with dark-brown marbled paper. A Fool card is pasted on the cover and finished with red sealing wax. Inside, there’s a folded paper with standard Il Meneghello divinatory meanings. In addition, there’s a very brief discussion of the Piemontese style in English and Italian, and a title card with a handwritten number. Read more

Feb 11

Tarocchi Vergnano Fool and Ace of Cups
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Tarocchi Vergnano: An Historic Tarot from Piedmont

Giordano Berti, creator of a facsimile 15th-century Sola Busca deck, has made another treasure available to collectors — a very beautiful 19th-century Piedmont-style deck.

The Piedmont region of Italy has a vigorous, centuries-long tradition of tarot deck production. Its unique spin on the Tarot de Marseille is documented back to the late 18th century. In 1832, card maker Stefano Vergnano of Turin was honored by the Chamber of Commerce for the quality of his playing cards. Berti’s deck re-creates a Vergnano tarot deck printed at that time. Read more

Dec 31

The New Tarot Deck Magician
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The New Tarot Deck: Jack Hurley and John Horler

Before 2014 ends, I want to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The New Tarot Deck, as well as the “projective” reading technique, and two men who were at the center of the late 20th-century tarot scene in the San Francisco Bay area.

The counter-culture shock waves that rippled up and down the California coast in the 1960s swept Jack Hurley and John Horler into a three-year residency at Esalen in Big Sur. After falling under Joseph Campbell’s spell, they designed a radically new tarot deck and created a new way of reading the cards. Read more

Nov 3

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Tarot in Culture edited by Emily E. Auger

This two-volume book considers tarot from every possible angle: popular culture, occult theory, academic history, literary analysis and artistic commentary. I hope my brief summary of the articles will inspire you to purchase this major contribution to tarot studies.

Volume I offers a good foundation in tarot history.

The late Sir Michael Dummett surveys tarot from its 15th-century beginnings as a card game, to its appropriation by French occultists in the late 18th century.

Robert Place delves deeply into the iconography of the earliest hand-painted decks and discusses the trump sequence as a neoplatonic ascent of the soul. He also describes the first set of trump cards we know of, by the Duke of Milan’s astrologer Marziano de Tortona, which Place is currently re-creating. (Examples can be seen on his facebook page.) Read more

Sep 19

Portrait of a Lady by Diane A. S. Stuckart cover

Portrait of a Lady – Tarot in a 15th-Century Murder Mystery

This book has everything a mystery-loving, tarot history nerd could desire: brisk pace, tight plot, illicit love, murder at the Sforza court, and those four missing cards from the Duke of Milan’s Visconti-Sforza deck.

Diane Stuckart has written three mysteries set at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza in the early 1490s, when Milan was at the height of its splendor and economic power. As artist in residence, Leonardo da Vinci tinkers with his ingenious military machines in between designing costumes and scenery for pageants and masked balls. Whenever a dead body inconveniently appears in the garden or under a tower, Leonardo uses his astute powers of observation to discreetly solve the crime and save the Duke from embarrassment.

Leonardo’s sidekick in these sleuthing adventures is his young apprentice Dino. What Leonardo doesn’t know (or does he?) is that Dino is actually Delphina, a 16-year-old girl who ran away from home disguised as a boy to avoid an arranged marriage with a repulsive old man. Read more

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