This is the closest relative the to the Jean Noblet tarot, they are obviously related, possibly one a copy of the other or more likely based on a similar source.  There are details on the Heri deck that I find fascinating, but all I have to work with is this poor quality scan. If anyone can help me out with better versions of the François Heri, I would be very grateful!

The Triumph of Love

The Triumph of Chastity

The Triumph of Death

The Triumph of Fame

The Triumph of Time

The Triumph of Eternity

I think three are easy to match, (here with the “Charles VI Tarot” from the 15th century).

The Triumph of Love with “Love” (or sometimes called “The Lovers”).

The Triumph of Death with “Death” from the Tarot.

The Triumph of Time with “Time” (or sometimes called “The Hermit”) from the Tarot.

By the way, I’m not necessarily trying to match these two sets of images graphically (although by nature there would be some similarity) as much as generally associating the iconography and concept.

Let’s consider matching The Triumph of Eternity with “Judgement”:

Generally, I think this is a pretty good match. It’s easy enough for me to see how “Eternity” would be expressed with the image of the dead rising from the graves on Judgement Day. If we go with this, then I would suggest that The Triumph of Fame would probably be a good match for “The World”:

In this case, the iconography does strike me as somewhat similar, certainly there is something about the posture of the main characters that feels related.

Overall, matching Eternity with Judgement and Fame with The World feels pretty good to me, and I generally feel comfortable suggesting this. Today when I was looking at the image of The Triumph of Eternity shown in this post (there are many, many other versions, just google “Triumph of Eternity”), I realised that this image actually reminded me a little of The World as seen on the Marselle Tarot. This time, I’ll set the image next to the Jean Noblet Tarot from 1650:

The most striking similarity is the inclusion of “the four evangelists“: the Eagle representing St. John, the Bull representing St. Luke, the Lion representing St. Mark, and the Angel representing St. Matthew. There is also some conjecture if the figure on the Marselle Tarot World card might, in some early decks (like the Jean Noblet, Jean Dodal and Jean Payen), might be a representation of Christ. In the Jacques Vieville tarot from Paris, 1650, the figure is even more masculine and most notably has a halo:

So, maybe the Triumph of Eternity is better matched with The World? I think many people would agree. The Triumph of Eternity is the last in the series Triumphs, just as The World is the last in the series of Tarot trumps.

What can we make of Fame then? The most obvious card to assign to The Triumph of Fame would most likely be “The Chariot”, which was also called “The Triumphal Chariot” in early references to the card. Let’s look at this pair:

This image of The Chariot from “Charles VI Tarot” shows what appears to be a war hero dresssed in armor,  carrying a battle  with sword at side. It’s not much of a match visually to the triumph of Fame, I think substantially less so than the match between Fame and The World card. Yet, conceptually it is a pretty good match with the war hero returning home triumphant and we can assume, famous.

My dissatisfaction with this arrangement is that I want to “use” The Chariot elsewhere… I want to match it to the Triumph of Chastity. For this, I’m going to use The Chariot from the “Cary-Yale Visconti” Tarot dated to the mid-1400s.

Several other early decks feature a woman in the Chariot, but  the person is quite changable, through time portrayed as Venus, Mars, Mercury and others. One reason to like this arrangement is that The Chariot almost always follows Love, just as Chastity triumphs Love. To be honest though, when comparing this image with the Triumph of Fame, I’m back to thinking that they might make a better match after all:

No matter how I arrange the cards, I never get a completely satisfactory match. If I were going to suggest a combination, for me the most successful one would be:

The Triumph of Love with The Lovers

The Triumph of Chastity with The Chariot

The Triumph of Death with Death

The Triumph of Fame with The World

The Triumph of Time with Time

The Triumph of Eternity with Judgement

What do you think?

~~~

Please feel free to comment below, or join the thread to discuss this in the Tarot History Forum.

I’ve mentioned it before elsewhere, but I think it’s worth bringing up again. Let’s take a look at the Lovers card from the Jean Noblet Tarot, (Paris, 1650):

Notice the area that contains the cupid? The shape of this area has always bothered me. It seems erratically drawn, why isn’t the shape more circular or evenly distributed?

We find a similar design on the Jean Dodal Tarot, (Lyon, early 1700s):

The Dodal strikes me as less odd, but still somewhat strange.

I would have left it at this, but noticed something very interesting one day when examining a set of cards illustrated in Kaplan’s Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume II.

The deck that caught my eye was one created by François Heri, a Tarot of Besançon style deck (where the Pope and Popess are replaced with Jupiter and Juno). Like the Jean Dodal Tarot, it was created sometime in the early 1700s. This deck is particularly interesting because it is the only deck I have ever encountered which is similar in proportion to the Jean Noblet Tarot. The deck is shorter and wider in proportion to other Besançon decks just as the Noblet shows the same relationship to other Marseille tarots. The two are obviously related somehow. There are little differences on nearly every card, most of these of a typical Besançon style; (as an example, the Devil is slightly different than in Marseille Tarots, he has hairy legs and his minions are shown in profile).

Because the Heri and the Noblet are so similar, I find it very exciting to compare where they “agree” iconographically, and where they differ. Unfortunately, I’ve only the enlarged black and white images from the Encyclopedia to use for comparison; but it is the best that I have at this time to work with. It was in such a comparison that I first noticed a striking difference between the Heri and the Noblet on the Lovers. The Heri has clouds about the Lovers.

For me, the Heri depiction makes much more sense.

And that’s odd because in almost every way, the Heri is a generally cruder. Why would Heri add the clouds?

Perhaps the answer is that the clouds are just a typical detail that appears in the Besançon decks, but not in the Marseille decks? It’s true they do appear on other Besançon decks. Here for example is the Marseille Tarot by Jean Dodal, and the Besançon Tarot by J.B. Benois:

Notice how poorly the wings of the cupid are drawn on the Jean Dodal; and also the way the upper leg is disconnected from the body? Even though the Jean Dodal is the older of the pair, again I feel that the Besançon Tarot makes more “sense”. It’s interesting as well to note that both the Heri and the Benois Besançon Tarots follow the same “TdM I” style exemplified by Noblet and Dodal. Even the character’s feet which are missing from the Dodal are also missing on the Benois.

The “TdM II” style associated with the François Chosson and Nicholas Conver portrays the Lovers card very differently. Here is the François Chosson:

Here the Cupid is reversed and without a blindfold, the feel is entirely different.

I’m not sure what to make of this. I’m inclined to think that the card “should” have the clouds on it. The depiction in the Besançon Tarots makes more “visual sense” to me than their cousins in the Marseille Tarots.

To be fair, it’s very possible that when the Besançon style was first being developed, a cardmaker also felt that the cupid could be improved and redesigned the Marseille card to have the clouds.

I’m not so sure though.

I’m more inclined to think that the Besançon Tarots “retain” a feature that probably existed in early Marseille decks, but was “lost” in the Marseille “bloodline” by the time of the Noblet.

There is another possibility that I have been considering ever since I first noticed this years ago. Is it possible that the Noblet and the Dodal are actually modified Besançon Tarots, adapted to meet the style of the Marseille? Is the “TdM I” really a modified Besancon to take on traits of the “TdM II”? I think it unlikely, but worth mentioning.

What do you think? Are there clouds above the Lovers?

Feel free to comment here, or join a discussion on the topic in the Tarot History Forum.

I mentioned in the post about the BN Molds that the old fashioned method of producing Tarot cards was to print the Black lines with a block, and then to hand-stencil each of the colors one-by-one.

Amazingly, hand-stenciled cards are still available from cartier-enlumineur Jean-Claude Flornoy, the same craftsman who has published the very successful 78 card edition of the Jean Noblet tarot.

I first encountered these cards almost five years ago on the recommendation of my friend Jean-Michel David. I had asked which cards he recommended for the study of the Marseille Tarots, and he highly recommended the Flornoy editions of the trumps of the Jean Noblet and Jean Dodal decks.

On the Atelier page on Flornoy’s site, you can see the steps taken to reproduce these cards.

Here are examples of the existing cards, and the hand-stenciled Flornoy restoration:

Jean Noblet Tarot, Fool

Jean Dodal Tarot, Fool

The new 78 card version of the Jean Noblet is a delight, but nothing produced in the mass market fashion on a printing press can equal the look and feel of these limited production editions.

The work to produce these cards is extremely labor intensive. I’ve heard unconfirmed rumor that Flornoy will cease producing these decks, if he hasn’t already. I highly recommend obtaining copies while they are still available. They will almost certainly become treasured heirlooms.

Jean-Claude Flornoy’s special 22 card editions of the Jean Noblet Tarot and Jean Dodal Tarot are available on his website on the Tarot Boutique page.

read more: Tarot Card Comparison

http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=95246

These were my favorites:

#1 Jean Noblet

#2 Jean Dodal

#3 Nicholas Conver

I’m delighted that the Jean Noblet Tarot is not only my favorite, but seems to be the most popular so far. Make sure you vote!

The Tarot of Jacques Vieville is a unique and intriguing deck. It was created in the same time and place as the Jean Noblet Tarot, (Paris, around 1650); but is clearly from a different tradition. As far as I know, there is no other deck like it, yet it has similarities to a wide range of tarot “families”.

When trying to determine the intention of artists , I find the Jacques Vieville often provides the key to unlocking the tarot’s secrets when comparing iconography between several historic decks.

Read more: The Jacques Vieville Tarot