Five Centuries of Tarot: The Fool Through History
The Fool is the most paradoxical card in the tarot — numbered zero, standing outside the sequence of the twenty-one Major Arcana, simultaneously the beginning and the end of the soul's journey. And because every major tarot deck must depict the Fool, he offers the perfect window through which to trace five centuries of tarot visual history: from the gilded courtly paintings of 15th-century Milan to the woodcut traditions of southern France, the engraved decks of revolutionary Europe, and the esoteric symbolism of the 20th century. The same archetype — the wanderer at the cliff's edge, the soul before its first step — rendered by dozens of artists across six centuries, in styles as different as the cultures that produced them, carrying the same irreducible essence: that the beginning of wisdom is the willingness to step into the unknown. The Fool — Visconti-Sforza deck, Bonifacio Bembo (c. 1451); the oldest surviving tarot Fool; a ragged figure with feathers ...