I Tarocchi Dei Colori
by Elena Assante
This beautifully packaged limited,
numbered edition tarot deck is one of the more recent offerings by Italcards,
recent being 1991. It comes in a nice sturdy box with a liftoff lid,
and a plastic tray insert inside to hold the cards firmly in place.
I expected the cards to be larger than they are, but they are a nice size.
I'm not totally sure if there's a name for this kind of art-form, it's
a semi-cubist type of art which uses blocks and shapes of strong solid
colors, mostly primary, to create images. I've seen this art-form
used extensively in the 70's, but never knew what to call it. It's
rather nostalgic and attractive in a bold sort of way. Kind of reminds
me a little bit of the art used in the Masonic Tarot.
The deck appears to follow
classic styling a la Marseille Tarot. The Majors use all the classic
titles and ordering; Justice is 8 and Strength 11. All of the cards
have the titles given in five languages; the Roman numeral appears in the
upper left corner inside a small circle, under which the Italian title
is written vertically. At the bottom the title appears in smaller
letters in German, Spanish, English and French. All the titles and
number are inside a modern-looking frame border, again in bold primary
type colors. I don't know if it's a design thing, or if the deck
is just missing a card, but there was no Fool card with the deck when it
was opened. I suspect it is a missing card.
The Minors are simple in design,
the numbered cards being simply pip cards in accordance with the classical
Marseille style. Due to the blockish style, even the Aces are just
one single suit item on the colored background, overly simplified.
The suits are named with traditional titles of Wands, Cups, Swords and
Coins. Each suit is rendered in the same color throughout the entire
suit, even the court cards. Coins are done in a bright green with
a lighter green and yellow. Wands are done in a lighter green with
a dark green and white. Cups are done in a red with lavender and
purple (my favorite color!) and Swords are done in black with green and
blue. Like I said, very simplistic. Court cards are titled
with the classic King, Queen, Knight and Page.
The cards themselves are standard
in size and comfortable to shuffle and handle. They are printed on
a typical flexible card stock and only very lightly coated. The edges
are buffed evenly and the corners rounded nicely. The back design
is a groovy waved stripe kinda design, which is signed with the artist's
initials on each end so you can sort of reverse the design. If you
pay attention, you can see whether it is upright or reversed, but it's
not readily obvious. There is no little white booklet with the deck,
only a single card with front and back printed in Italian. I can't
read enough Italian to know what it says, but the little I can make out
seems to be either a biography of the artist, or a story of how she came
to be painting these tarot cards, or both. It does not have any divinatory
meanings or explanations of the cards themselves.
All in all, I'd have to say
this is a nice deck for collectors. I don't think it's tremendously
useable, although if you are accustomed to working with Marseille style
decks, you can generally use just about anything, since Marseille decks
are typically not illustrated much to begin with. This deck is an
Italcards edition, that means that when it was published, it was only run
in a series of 5000 decks, and only 1000 of those would have been available
for sale in the USA. This makes the deck extremely rare, having been
out of print since 1991. Another note, when Italcards editions are
new, they generally retail for $50, so you can expect this (and other decks
of theirs) to be quite expensive if you should encounter one anywhere.
For that reason alone, if you *should* somehow come across one, I'd recommend
grabbing it!
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Review Copyright 1999 by Gina
M. Pace