Hi, folks --
For those who are interested, here is a link to a great article which I found on James Revak's site (
http://jwrevak.tripod/com). It concerns a Russian Etteilla deck from 1861 with illustrated minors.
I'm not that knowledgeable about these things, but from what I understand, Etteilla was the first person to create Tarot decks specifically for fortune-telling purposes. He used his own numbering system and changed much of the Marseilles symbology, and several Etteilla-type decks were published. However, the pip cards were unillustrated.
The exciting thing about this Russian deck is that, unlike other Etteilla-type decks, the minors are actually illustrated with scenes which embody Etteilla's divinatory meanings for those cards. This is important, because if this is true, then the Rider Waite deck is *not* the first Tarot deck to have minors with scenes which illustrate divinatory meanings. (I'm not counting the Sola Busca we discussed in earlier posts, because I don't think those scenes were specifically meant to illustrate divinatory meanings).
Here's the link to the article (unfortunately the scans of the cards are only in black and white, because James Revak only had access to someone's scans of a photocopy):
http://jwrevak.tripod.com/ett/ett_in_1.html
-- Lee