Sola Busca tarot
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The Sola-Busca tarot is the earliest known example of a 78-card Tarot card deck. It was created by an unknown artist and engraved onto metal in the late 15th century. Photographs of a complete version of the deck were donated to the British Museum by the Sola-Busca family of Milan in 1907.[1] The scholar A.M. Hinds described seeing the original Sola-Busca cards in his 1938 "Early Italian Engravings", but these cards are now lost. [2] What remains are the original engravings, which are in remarkable condition.
Composition
The Sola-Busca deck comprises 78 cards including 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana cards. It is the earliest known tarot deck to be structured this way, a structure which most contemporary tarot decks emulate, including the Rider-Waite and Thoth tarot decks. It is also the earliest known Tarot deck in which the Major Arcana cards are named and numbered, and the earliest known deck to include rich artwork for all 56 Minor Arcana cards.
The characters depicted in the Sola-Busca cards include Nebuchadnezzar and Gaius Marius, the uncle of Julius Caesar. The Major Arcana cards loosely follow the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, but also include members of the Roman Pantheon such as Bacchus.
Impact
The similarities between artwork of the Minor Arcana of the Rider-Smith-Waite deck and Sola-Busca's Minor Arcana, some scholars have suggested that artist Pamela Colman Smith drew inspiration from the earlier work.[3] Smith created the art for the Rider deck two years after the acquisition of the Sola-Busca deck by the British Museum, and could very likely have been directed by Rider to emulate the photographs on display there. Notable similarities include the Three of Swords card and the Ten of Wands card in the Rider deck, which is almost identical to the Ten of Swords card in the Sola-Busca deck.
A full version of Sola-Busca Tarot was re-issued in 1998 by Wolfgang Mayer in Germany.
