*Tarot Art Nouveau* Pietro Alligo and Antonella Castelli Artwork by Antonella Castelli 78 Tarot cards with divinatory instructions - 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana  Published by Lo Scarabeo Measurements: 2.6 x 4.72 inches, or 66 x 120 mm. Back of card: The backs are the mirrored images type favoured by Lo Scarabeo of late. The backs are purple and depict a reversible image of The Fool ...... the background of this page shows the reverse of the card.  Booklet included:  64 pages, 2.6 x 4.67 inches, or 65 x 119 mm. Instructions in English, Italian, Spanish, French & German.  Publisher: Lo Scarabeo. Printed in Italy, imported by Llewellyn Worldwide. Publication Year: 2002  ISBN#: 0738700088  Spirit, grace and beauty, soft and elegant lines become a means for interpreting the future. These cards are alive with movement - the delicate curves, the sweeping lines, the bright yet gentle colour - all serve to draw the mind around and into the pictures. Taken together in a reading, these cards almost effortlessly weave a story. Taken individually, there is plenty for the eye to feast on. This deck, a work of art in itself, will also serve as a powerful divinatory tool.

 

Floral images with soft and elegant lines created by modelling colour, form, and time. New styles and images are added to those which we already have in our imagination, causing us to re-experience the spirit of revival of the twentieth century and to recall spring-like atmospheres of colour and rebirth.

Art Nouveau ('New Art') was a style of architecture and decoration, as well as an art movement, developed in Europe and the USA in the late nineteenth century. The style was characterised by ornate stylised patterns of leaves, flowers and vines. Art Nouveau was not limited to paintings - it was aimed at removing the barriers between 'major' and 'minor' arts, unifying art, and centring it around people, and influenced graphics, architecture, furniture and even jewellery design.

This deck very closely follows the classic Art Nouveau style with which many of us are familiar, through the commercial art of Alphonse Mucha and others.  The Tarot Art Nouveau was influenced and inspired by the Art Nouveau movement, and its coloured ink drawings on the cards are elegant, flowery and ornate. Every scene is adorned and decorated with floral wreathes and symmetrical, natural arrangements. People are the focus of the deck and are shown in close-up on almost every card. The colours are soft and spring-like: greens, blues, pale pinks, and yellows, inset into a white border. The main title, in Italian, is purple; other language titles are pink. Circles are an integral part of each image, as are vines and flowers. The art is very good with a lot of detail and wonderful colours.

The cards themselves are standard sized. A thin but flexible card stock makes the deck comfortable to handle and easy shuffling. There is a slightly slippery protective coating on the cards. There is a little white instruction booklet which accompanies the cards. A spread or reading key is also given for use with the cards, and it is different from others in different decks, so that when you collect all the decks you have a variety of reading spreads to use. Explanatory meanings for each card are also given, and there is a questionnaire at the end to fill out and send back to LoScarabeo.

This is not the same deck as the Art Nouveau Tarot by Matt Myers. While drawing on the same artistic period for inspiration, the Tarot Art Nouveau by Antonella Castelli has an Italian influence, where the style was known as Liberty, and is less representative of stained glass design.

This deck is recommended for intermediate to advanced readers who already have a liking for art nouveau styles. If art nouveau is up your alley, it's a gorgeous deck and a pleasure to use.

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Tarot Art Nouveau

By Pietro Alligo and Antonella Castelli
Artwork by Antonella Castelli

Tarot Deck - 78 Cards - Published by Lo Scarabeo

This fully illustrated 78-card deck by Pietro Alligo and Antonella Castelli was published in 2002, and is a wonderfully attractive and pretty deck. The people, mostly women, in the deck are uniformly young and attractive. The occasional men are muscular and virile, the women pale, bare-breasted, longhaired and languid. Everyone is so gorgeous, and gorgeously drawn. The art relies on nuance for understanding and conveys meaning with the expression and position of the human figure and face, rather than with the traditional set of tarot symbols.

The suits are Chalices, Pentacles, Wands and Swords. The Major Arcana retain their original names except for The Lovers and The Star, which have been renamed "The Lover" and "The Stars." Justice is VIII and Strength is XI. In the Minors the card number and name are in the top border in English, French, Spanish and German. The suit name is in the bottom border in Italian. In the Majors the card name and number are arranged the same way - Italian in the bottom border and the other languages in the top border. The Minor Arcana Two through Ten also have the suit symbol in the requisite number in a band in the lower right side of each card. The backs are purple and depict a reversible image of The Fool.

The majority of the card images have one person in them, with maybe a third of the cards featuring two people. An unusual aspect of this deck is the predominance of women in it. There are Knights and Knaves, rather than Prince and Princess or Knight and female Page; but the Kings all have women beside them who appear to be consorts, whereas the Queens are alone. Most of the minor arcana cards have only women in them; the majors mainly adhere to the genders usually assigned them, although Death is female and Strength is male. Many cards feature pairs of women, sometimes posed in a way that suggests, but does not insist upon, intimacy. Some cards that tend to have a male-female couple in them in other decks - Two of Swords, Three of Swords, and Ten of Cups are some examples - have female pairs/couples instead. (The Lovers and Two of Cups are male-female, however.) The femaleness of the deck could merely be because the Art Nouveau style focused so thoroughly on women; regardless, it is an interesting and fresh change of pace.

 

Lo Scarabeo are international leaders in terms of research, elaboration and production of playing and divination cards. All of these are offered as complete decks with descriptions and instructions.

Tarot Art Nouveau

Tarot Class: Boutique / Classical

Images © 2002 Lo Scarabeo

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Review material on the Tarot deck has been taken in part or whole from amongst the following websites :
Lo Scarabeo  Tarot Passages  Aeclectic Tarot  Wicce's Tarot Collection