The Tarot Cards "Sola Busca"
The images are the originals from the "Sola Busca" collection, a Tarot series created in 1491, the oldest complete deck in the world. They consist of 78 Minor Arcana, designed and painted by anonymous painters of the time.
Sola-Busca is the family that was the last owner, and who donated the deck to the library at the end of the 1800s after decades of passing from hand to hand in ecclesiastical circles.
The series consists of 78 cards, 22 "triumphs" and 56 cards of the four traditional Italian suits (coins, swords, sticks and cups): originally they were prints on paper from burin engravings, which were then coloured with tempera and gold colors. Ours cards are lithographic prints mechanically cut into dies and protected by a matte lamination, details that reproduce the effect of ancient paper.
The traditional images of the fifteenth-century "triumphs" are replaced by figures of warriors from Roman antiquity and heroes of biblical history. The numeral cards, generally reserved for the reproduction of the four suits, are enriched with very complex figures, which deciphering has allowed us to interpret the deck as a living testimony of alchemical-hermetic knowledge. Among the depicted characters there are some that are difficult to identify, also due to homonyms and probable cripples. The Roman characters are those linked to the conspiracy of Catiline and the civil wars, with a possible allusion to internal political events that are difficult for us to specify today, at least until will be carried out a more in-depth investigation of the classical sources of the fifteenth century and of the Middle Ages.
The classic tarot cards are encoded in meaning, while the Sola-Busca are shrouded in mystery, full of power and charm.
