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Sabio Tarot · History and curiosities

By Sabio Tarot

How early tarot cards were printed and coloured

A Visconti-Sforza card of around 1450 may show opaque paint on card and an intricately worked gold background. Another card, printed centuries later, has repeatable outlines with colour applied over the print. Both may be sold today as “old tarot”, but they were not made the same way.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's description identifies the materials used for luxury Milanese cards; the V&A holds four painted and gilded Italian playing cards from around 1490. These catalogue records let us discuss specific techniques without imagining that every fifteenth-century player handled gold-covered cards.

Hand painting and the value of an individual card

On a painted card, line, colour and detail may vary from one piece to another. Attribution to a workshop places production in an artistic setting; it does not tell us with certainty whose hand painted every centimetre. The Met links several Visconti sets to Bonifacio Bembo's workshop. Their decorated backgrounds, pigments and size show an investment that helps explain why those objects were preserved.

That survival creates a bias. A courtly object may be saved for its beauty or provenance; an ordinary deck is handled, bent and discarded. Museum displays cannot give us a production statistic for everyday cards. Answering “what was tarot like in the fifteenth century?” therefore takes more than looking at its most lavish deck.

Printing outlines, then adding colour

A printing block or plate can reproduce the lines of an image. The Met documents fifteenth-century European cards made with woodcuts, engraving and applied colour. Woodcutting, which uses a wooden block, should not be confused with metal engraving. They are different techniques, and each museum record should specify the method used for its object.

Colour needs equally careful description. Some cards were coloured after printing, either by hand or by methods that allowed areas of colour to be repeated. “Colour-printed” and “hand-painted” are not interchangeable terms. Two copies with the same outline but small colour differences may reveal different stages of production.

The British Museum holds a cartomancy tarot attributed to a late-nineteenth-century Paris edition. Its record distinguishes hand-coloured etching, a box and an instruction booklet. It is a different object from a fifteenth-century Milanese tarot even if both contain 78 cards. Its material record stops us from compressing six centuries of techniques into one sentence.

A reproduction is not an original

The British Museum catalogues another deck as a late-nineteenth-century chromolithographic reproduction of Nicolas Conver's 1760 tarot. The design refers to an earlier model, but the physical deck was not printed in 1760. The catalogue even warns that its surviving box belongs to a different deck.

This matters when a shop offers a “1760 Marseille tarot”. The phrase may mean it reproduces a design dated to that year, not that the cards you buy are more than two centuries old. A reproduction may be perfectly useful for interpreting images. To tell its history, name the model, edition and date of the physical copy.

A short guide to reading a museum record

Look for five fields before repeating a claim: attributed date, place, material, technique and curator's note. The date often says “around” because it is not an exact birth certificate. Check whether the museum is discussing an original, a later printing or a reconstruction. Then see whether the image supports your description: colour filling uniform areas, a metallic background, traces of use or worn lines.

Technique does not determine a card's meaning, but it helps us ask better questions. A colour difference may result from the printing process or an edition's history, not a deliberate esoteric message. For a comparison of present-day visual systems, read what Tarot de Marseille means and Marseille versus Rider–Waite–Smith.

Wear is information too

A broken line may result from wear on a printing plate or block, damage to the particular copy, or a later reproduction of an already damaged print. We should not automatically turn an irregularity into a “hidden symbol”. The British Museum's record of the Conver reproduction mentions gaps in lines caused by wear on earlier engravings. That gives a material explanation for something that might otherwise invite imaginative interpretation.

The back of a card and its box can tell another story. For the British Museum's Etteilla deck, the record describes a printed reverse, a box and an instruction booklet. For the Conver reproduction, it warns that the surviving box belongs to another set. Investigating production does not stop at the card fronts. Ask whether the case, instructions and cards were issued together or assembled later.

Photography adds another layer. A screen may change how gold and pigments appear; a cropped image may hide worn edges. If you compare technique or colour, consult the complete record and, where possible, high-quality images of the same object. Do not attribute a colour shade to a printer's intention when you do not know how the object was photographed.

Three questions for distinguishing techniques

First, what support and process does the museum state? “Paper”, “cardboard”, “opaque paint”, “woodcut” and “chromolithography” name different things. Second, when was the physical copy made? A 1760 design reproduced in 1880 carries traces of two historical moments. Third, who applied the colour, and at what stage? If the catalogue does not know, do not fill the gap by looking at a photograph.

Try these questions with a painted V&A card and the British Museum's Conver reproduction. Write a short record for each without relying on “old” as your only description. You will see that a painted card and a later print can share iconography while calling for different technical histories.

This material perspective does not require a tarot reader to use only originals. A well-printed modern edition may be more convenient for studying images. What changes is how you describe it: “reproduces a historical design” is a claim you can check; “is the original object” needs different evidence.

Sources consulted