In the Colleoni-Morgan Tarot, the style of Bonifacio
Bembo unifies most of the deck, but his handiwork is
absent from six cards (Strength, Temperance, Star, Moon,
Sun, World). The secondary artist could have been either
an assistant or a successor to Bembo. Bembo died c.1480,
and the anonymous cards are of a style from that time.
They have been carefully studied, but no one has remarked
on a startling feature: Some of the costumes ( the gowns for
Temperance and the Star) are decorated with pseudo-
lettering meant to be archaic Hebrew. The characters have
the dots and strokes typical of real Hebrew, but the literal
results are nonsense. Note that Temperance was a pagan
Virtue adopted by the Christians. Why would a personi-
fication of the Virtue receive a costume embroidered in
ancient Hebrew, whether genuine or counterfeit? Surely the
pseudo-lettering is a visual clue to the conceptual nature of
the Tarot: It is deliberately syncretist, and this syncretism
alludes to the Hebrew alphabet, only partially understood.
Also worth noting are the many stars on the gown of this
Temperance. In ancient and medieval moralizing, the
Virtues are not necessarily tied to any astrological
program. But a star-studded Temperance suggests that the
Tarot’s syncretism, from the very beginning, has combined
a variety of esoteric themes.
Art and Arcana – p32 – Ronald Decker