Another lovely deck from Lo Scarabeo, this deck is artfully rendered in watercolors with a superb delicate texture to them.  As opposed to Brian Williams' Renaissance Tarot, which expertly captures the thought-forms of that time period in regards to styling and symbolism, this deck by Giorgio Trevisan depicts characters from that time period, many of which resemble fairy-tale and folklore characters dating back to that period.

It also looks more English in style than Italian, which is not as big of a surprise when you realize that yes, the Renaissance affected the entire known world at the time, not just Italy.  Some of the cards are quite intuitive, though this is mostly what is called an art deck.

Like other Lo Scarabeo editions, there is no little booklet with the deck, but rather a series of cards which explain, in five different languages, the Simplified Cartomancy Method with extremely brief descriptions of each card.  It would not be an easy deck to learn with.

The Major Arcana are pretty traditional in title and the designs are also fairly traditional in a lot of respects.  The Minor Arcana are for the most part pips with court cards.  The suits are Cups, Swords, Wands and Pentacles.  Knave, Knight, Queen and King are the court titles.

The smaller, narrower size of the cards makes them easy to handle.  Shuffling is a little stiff due to the type of card stock used, though you probably wouldn't want to shuffle them much anyway.  They really are nicer for looking at than reading with.  A very nice deck for collectors, though.

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Review Copyright 1998 by Gina M. Pace