catboxer
In our search for the Ur Deck we've looked closely at the various Visconti decks, the few surviving early cards from Ferrara, and the early Marseille prototypes.
The problem with the Italian hand-painted cards is that none of them are numbered, and there are, in addition, serious questions concerning how many trumps these various decks originally contained. There is fairly strong evidence that the Cary-Yale Deck had only 16 trumps, following the pattern established by the earlier gods-and-birds pack -- a true tarot predecessor -- commissioned by Filippo Maria Visconti in the early part of the 15th century. At least one of our resident experts has theorized that the Visconti-Sforza Deck was a 14-by-five production (14 trumps plus four suits of fourteen cards each), and has put forth strong evidence in support of that argument. I have reservations about accepting that conclusion, for reasons I'd rather not go into right now. But the fact remains that we don't know precisely where the pattern for the tarot we use today came from, or when and where it first came to light.
It seems to me that we've neglected a couple of very valuable pieces of evidence that might help us answer these questions. These are several uncut sheets of very early cheap Italian tarots, printed from woodblocks and colored with stencils. Their provenance is not precisely known, but they came from somewhere in northern Italy, and were made in the late 15th or early 16th century. Locating them right around 1500 is as good a guess as any.
These cards are crude and ugly, but they deserve very close scrutiny and analysis. They are the earliest decks I know of that have numbered trumps. They are also, I believe, the earliest decks that we can say of for certain that they consisted of 22 trumps and 56 suited cards.
There are several uncut sheets, all of them composed of one or the other of two decks by two different hands. All of these sheets are either in the New York Metropolitan Museum or the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. They seem to follow the same unusual trump order, or, at the very least, there is no overlap. Together, they contain all 22 trumps, in whole or in part. They also include some of the pictorial elements that later show up in the Marseille decks, and are the earliest instance I'm aware of for some of those elements.
Robert O'Neill has theorized that cards like this preceded the luxurious hand-painted items we've discussed at length here. Personally, I'm skeptical about that possibility, but I do think these cards may have been more instrumental in influencing the ultimate development of the tarot we know today than the various Visconti packs, or the so-called Gringonneur deck.
I've found that study of these images is made easier by separating them from the uncut sheets, and arranging them in order, and have done so on my web site at http://www.tarotseeker.com/UrDeck.html
The problem with the Italian hand-painted cards is that none of them are numbered, and there are, in addition, serious questions concerning how many trumps these various decks originally contained. There is fairly strong evidence that the Cary-Yale Deck had only 16 trumps, following the pattern established by the earlier gods-and-birds pack -- a true tarot predecessor -- commissioned by Filippo Maria Visconti in the early part of the 15th century. At least one of our resident experts has theorized that the Visconti-Sforza Deck was a 14-by-five production (14 trumps plus four suits of fourteen cards each), and has put forth strong evidence in support of that argument. I have reservations about accepting that conclusion, for reasons I'd rather not go into right now. But the fact remains that we don't know precisely where the pattern for the tarot we use today came from, or when and where it first came to light.
It seems to me that we've neglected a couple of very valuable pieces of evidence that might help us answer these questions. These are several uncut sheets of very early cheap Italian tarots, printed from woodblocks and colored with stencils. Their provenance is not precisely known, but they came from somewhere in northern Italy, and were made in the late 15th or early 16th century. Locating them right around 1500 is as good a guess as any.
These cards are crude and ugly, but they deserve very close scrutiny and analysis. They are the earliest decks I know of that have numbered trumps. They are also, I believe, the earliest decks that we can say of for certain that they consisted of 22 trumps and 56 suited cards.
There are several uncut sheets, all of them composed of one or the other of two decks by two different hands. All of these sheets are either in the New York Metropolitan Museum or the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. They seem to follow the same unusual trump order, or, at the very least, there is no overlap. Together, they contain all 22 trumps, in whole or in part. They also include some of the pictorial elements that later show up in the Marseille decks, and are the earliest instance I'm aware of for some of those elements.
Robert O'Neill has theorized that cards like this preceded the luxurious hand-painted items we've discussed at length here. Personally, I'm skeptical about that possibility, but I do think these cards may have been more instrumental in influencing the ultimate development of the tarot we know today than the various Visconti packs, or the so-called Gringonneur deck.
I've found that study of these images is made easier by separating them from the uncut sheets, and arranging them in order, and have done so on my web site at http://www.tarotseeker.com/UrDeck.html
