In my recent post "What's on the Magician's table?" (qv), I mentioned the Marseille-style 1780 deck of Ignaz Krebs and said that it featured a "domino-like object" which I took to be a corruption of what was originally a die or pair of dice.
I don't know how it is that in a post about cards I failed to notice that what it really resembles is not a domino (which would be divided into two parts) but a playing card. I didn't make the connection until, searching for medieval pictures of gamblers to back up my hunch about a dice shaker, I found this picture.
The resemblance of the Krebs object to the cards in this picture is unmistakable, and, whether or not it originated as a miscopied die, I think we must conclude that for Krebs it was a playing card.
Does any other early Tarot have a card or cards on the Magician's table? The case is a tenuous one, but just maybe. Look at the strange parallelograms on the Jacques Viéville card and notice how closely they resemble parts of a deck of cards and a die.
But where's the rest of them? Is it plausible that Viéville would have accidentally printed only one of the three visible faces of the die and the deck of cards? Well, that sort of thing would hardly be unprecedented. Jean Noblet's Magician card, dating from about the same time as Viéville's, is also missing some elements that the block carver apparently just forgot to include. The two cards below are both from Joseph H. Peterson's Noblet facsimile deck. He included two versions of the Magician: an exact replica of the original (left) and a reconstruction restoring the three fingers and half of the wand that Noblet's printer somehow omitted.
Viéville's cards are crude in the extreme -- easily the ugliest Tarot I've ever seen -- and it would not be at all surprising to find that they featured similar careless omissions. At any rate, no other explanation of the parallelograms suggests itself. They certainly look more like sides of three-dimensional objects than like flat objects lying on a table.
1 comment:
You'd need to check to methods by which printing was done at this time and place. From what I know of Japanese methods - from watching David Bull on YouTube - these kinds of errors could quite easily happen in the process of tracing making new copies, or recutting, the Key Block - which tends to wear out after not that many prints, especially when the wood is cheap/ soft. Of course, most European printing was vastly less skilled and careful than Japanese - at least until Bewick.
Post a Comment