FLizarraga
I wasn't planning on reading about the actual paintings; that's an interesting way of going about it, though! I didn't want to learn about the actual paintings because I thought it might interfere with the meanings I wanted to associate with the cards, if that makes sense. For example, if a certain card to ME was a positive, joyful card but then I learned it was really about a tragic love story, I would have a hard time not reading it as a sad, tragic card and love stories gone awry.
I didn't plan on learning the names for the paintings, hence my thoughts about numbering them!
Now that you've brought up the idea of reading about the paintings and the artist's intent, I'm kind of interested in doing that...but one of the reasons I bought this deck was I loved the idea of an oracle that truly became my own, where I came up the meanings based on just what I saw and not what anyone else intended.
I think that there are two ways of going about it. You can easily forget all about the mythological, literary or historical subjects of the paintings, and just read the images intuitively, the way they speak to you. Interestingly enough, a lot of times you can get a lot of the real story just by looking at the picture, even if you don't know what it is about.
Or you can learn what each painting is about. That might give you a few surprises. For instance, this gorgeous, luminous image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Circe_Invidiosa_-_John_William_Waterhouse.jpg. Or these two, apparently so sweet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia. There are also about three cases, IIRC, in which a painting has been split into two different cards. This is one of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_and_Narcissus_(Waterhouse_painting).
I personally took the second route, because I find it enriches my readings. But in the end, you know, it's your deck. It's not like the Oracle Police are going to go to your house and take your cards away because you are reading Narcissus as happy and St. Eulalia as a girl who is sunbathing....