Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Fifteenth Century Tarot’

Jul 29

2 Comments

Marco Benedetti’s Personal Madrone Deck

Marco Benedetti’s restored Visconti di Modrone deck is a magic carpet ride to a late medieval world of elegant lords and ladies and knights in shining armor. A world where fabulously wealthy aristocrats commissioned trionfi decks drenched in silver and gold from the greatest artists of the day.

The Modrone deck was most likely a wedding gift, and is one of most romantic and feminine decks of the fifteenth-century. The cards have pink borders filled with delicate blue flowers, and the six court cards in each suit are arranged in three male/female pairs.

What remains of the original deck is too fragmented to be useful for divination. Benedetti’s vision was to produce not only a beautiful work of art, but to bring the deck to life in a version useful for shuffling and reading. To accomplish this, he is offering the deck in two sizes: the original large size in a custom-made wooden box, and a smaller deck designed for ease of shuffling. Benedetti has filled out the missing trump and court cards beautifully, retaining the aristocratic elegance of the original International Gothic style.

Let’s take a close look at the deck and at Benedetti’s choices for replacement cards.

Read more

Oct 24

2 Comments

Journey Through the Trump Cards

Announcing the completion of “Journey Through the Trumps,” a section of this website that traces the 600-year history of each trump card. During this three-year adventure with my co-author Iolon, we looked at how the imagery of each card evolved through the centuries, and how these changes influenced the card’s interpretation.

Read more

Apr 1

Budapest Bounty: Three Recreations of an Ancient Tarot

I’ve always been intrigued by the few remnants of fifteenth-century block-printed decks that still exist. They hold tantalizing clues to the early days of tarot, so I’m thrilled that there are three versions of the block-printed Budapest deck on the market. Shown here from left to right are the Fool and Judgment cards by Robert Place, Sullivan Hismans and Marco Benedetti.

Read more

Mar 19

Agnolo Hebreo Devil Tarot Card
4 Comments

The Agnolo Hebreo Devil Card

The most unique single reproduction card in my collection is the Devil card printed by Agnolo Hebreo (Angelo the Jew) shortly after 1500 and now residing in the British Museum. It was undoubtedly part of a complete tarot deck; but no other cards by this individual exist anywhere, and there is no trace of him in the records. This Devil card is the only clue we have that the printer Agnolo Hebreo may have existed. It’s possible the name is a pseudonym borrowed from popular culture by an anonymous deck designer.

Read more

Feb 27

Ace of Swords Budapest Tarot by Sullivan Hismans
2 Comments

The Budapest Tarot Second Edition by Sullivan Hismans

Introduction

One of the most exciting events in my twenty years of collecting historic decks occurred in 2017 when Sullivan Hismans (Tarot Sheet Revival.com) introduced the Budapest Tarot. He meticulously recreated a very important fifteenth-century deck that only exists in museum collections as partly damaged uncut sheets of cards. This limited edition of 250 decks sold out quickly and has become a favorite reading deck of the lucky few who own one. Hismans just released another edition of 450 Budapest decks with some changes that I’ll illustrate below. But first, I want to put the deck in its historic context. Read more

Oct 31

Il Bagatto from the Rosenwald Deck
4 Comments

The Rosenwald Deck

Sullivan Hismans, at Tarot Sheet Revival, has worked tarot magic again by creating an actual deck from sheets of tarot cards printed @1500 and housed in the Rosenwald collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Read more

Aug 10

Book cover with portrait of Malatesta

From My Bookshelf: Sigismondo Malatesta and the Italian Renaissance

Sigismondo Malatesta, bad boy of the Renaissance, gave us our first documented evidence for tarot. Researcher Franco Pratesi discovered a note in a Florentine account book dated September 16, 1440 saying a deck of naibi a trionfi had been sent to Malatesta that was beautiful, expensive and decorated with his arms. In 1452 he surfaced again in connection with tarot. Bianca, the Duchess of Milan, sent a note to her husband Francesco saying Malatesta was asking for the trionfi cards that were made in Cremona. Read more

Jul 30

Tarocchi Carey-Yale deck
1 Comment

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

Nov 3

2 Comments

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 5

Cover of All Love Goes Before me by Stewart S. Warren
4 Comments

Two Tarot Poetry Books by Stewart S. Warren

Opening these evocative books of poetry based on the 15th-century Visconti Sforza and Sola Busca decks releases a gentle magic into the air. The tarot figures speak for themselves in these elegant, imagistic poems, opening up surprising revelations about each card. Energy hums between the poems and color photos of their cards on the facing page.

All Love Goes Before Me: Poems on the Sola Busca Tarot

Tarot historian Giordano Berti sets the mood in his preface by invoking the muses and a lineage of alchemist-poets, while telling us the poems are “access portals to another dimension.” In the introduction, Il Meneghello’s art director, Dr. Cristina Dorsini, conjures up the special magic of this deck. Read more

« Older Entries