Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards

• Give every trump one emblematic subject, a single figure or a small frozen group (the Lovers, the Sun's two children), standing or seated, mostly frontal or three-quarter (the Emperor in profile), held in a ruled black frame, with an additive roman numeral (IIII, VIIII) in a band at the top and its title in carved roman capitals in a band at the foot. Leave the Fool unnumbered and Death (XIII) untitled. Give each court card a single figure with its title at the foot ('ROYNE·DE·COVPES'; up the side on the Valet de Deniers) and no number.
• Cut the key block in wood with thick, even contours and a few rows of parallel hatching for folds, ground and water, and stand the figure on a strip of ground with a few tufts of plants against the bare card instead of modelling depth.
• Colour through stencils in a small set of flat colours, red, yellow, pale or dark blue, green and flesh, with violet in 17th-century decks such as Vachier's, on cream card, and let them overlap and often stray past the outlines rather than register them tightly.
• Copy the pattern, not an author: recut the same 22 trumps and four suits (Bâtons, Épées, Coupes, Deniers, each with Valet, Cavalier, Dame and Roi) from older cards, keep the copyists' spellings ('LE CHARIOR'), and sign the deck chiefly in the banderole of the 2 of Deniers and the cartouche of the 2 of Coupes.
• Treat each card as an emblem with fixed attributes, the wheel, the eagle on the Emperor's shield, the Moon's crayfish, dogs and towers, the flames between the Tower and the Sun, so it reads at a glance in play and, for the occultists who took it up, as a symbol to interpret.

France: card-makers (cartiers) in Paris, Lyon, Avignon, Dijon and Marseille recopying a standard tarot pattern that stems from Milan; flourishing in the 17th and 18th centuries, perhaps first in Lyon, with Marseille the main producer in the second half of the 18th century and the sole one in the 19th. Spread to Switzerland (Fribourg, Solothurn, Mümliswil, Neuchâtel) and to Piedmont, Lombardy and Liguria. Depaulis (2013) splits the pattern into an older Type I (LE FOL, the Pope with a crosier; arising before 1700 and still made in the 18th century) and Type II (LE MAT, the Pope with a papal cross, all after 1700), IPCS pattern sheets 1 and 2. Read as an occult book of symbols from Court de Gébelin (1781); Grimaud's 1930 'Ancien Tarot de Marseille' and later restorations keep it in print.

1. International Playing-Card Society, Pattern Sheet 001, 'Tarot de Marseille, Type I' (Thierry Depaulis, 03/2018): the pattern stems from Milan (Dummett's tradition C), flourished in France in the 17th and 18th centuries, perhaps first in Lyon, then in Switzerland and Piedmont, Lombardy and Liguria; Marseille the main producer in the late 18th century and sole producer in the 19th; the name coined in the 19th century by scholars and occultists; roman numbers and French titles; Type I (LE FOL, an Arabic 4 before the Emperor, the Pope with a crosier, the Tower's flames coming out of the tower toward the Sun, a face on the Devil's belly, the Moon full face, the World in leaf trunks and cape) clearly pre-1700; 78 cards with single-figure court cards and '21 single-figure numbered trumps' (single-ended, not double-headed); plates of Payen's 1713 deck (Reynaud facsimile) show titled, unnumbered court cards ('ROYNE·DE·COVPES', 'VALET·DESPEE', the Valet de Deniers titled up the side) and stencil colours of red, yellow, dark blue, green and flesh; makers incl. Jean Noblet, Paris (ca. 1670), Jean-Pierre Payen, Avignon (1713), Jean Dodal, Lyon (c. 1715): https://i-p-c-s.org/pattern/PS001.pdf
2. International Playing-Card Society, Pattern Sheet 002, 'Tarot de Marseille, Type II' (03/2018): LE MAT, the Pope with a papal cross, the Tower's flames going from the Sun to the tower, the Moon in profile, the World a naked dancing woman with a red scarf; all Type II packs after 1700, the earliest Pierre Madenié, Dijon, 1709; makers incl. Nicolas Conver (1760), François Bourlion (1760) and Joseph Feautrier (1762) of Marseille and Swiss makers in Solothurn, Mümliswil, Fribourg and Neuchâtel: https://i-p-c-s.org/pattern/PS002.pdf
3. Thierry Depaulis, Tarot, jeu et magie, exhibition catalogue, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, 1984 (digitised from Gallica, bpt6k6532698n): introduction 'Le tarot de Marseille et ses avatars' (French makers added titles to the trumps, except Death, and to the court cards; French players called it 'tarot italien' and used it until the early 20th century; occultist exegesis from Court de Gébelin, 1781; the Besançon variant); no. 35 Noblet (Paris, mid-17th century, 73 of 78 cards, stencil-coloured woodcut, 92 x 55 mm, Death named, 'I.N.' on the Chariot's shield, the first known example conforming to the pattern); no. 38 J.-P. Payen (Avignon, 1713); no. 39 Dodal (Lyon, recorded 1701-1715, 'fait pour l'étranger', Kh 381 rés. no. 76); no. 41 Conver (Marseille, 1760, colours and pale blue, blocks kept by Camoin, closed 1970, Kh 381 rés. no. 81); nos. 113-114 Grimaud 'Tarot italien' (1891) and 'Ancien Tarot de Marseille' (1930, offset): https://archive.org/details/bnf-bpt6k6532698n
4. Wikipedia, 'Tarot of Marseilles' (pack invented in northern Italy in the early 15th century, introduced into southern France when the French conquered Milan and Piedmont in 1499; Philippe Vachier, Marseille, 1639, rediscovered by Thierry Depaulis and sold in 2023; Noblet's 'LAMORT'; additive roman numerals; the Fool unnumbered; XIII generally untitled; all cards printed from woodcuts and coloured by hand or with stencils; Jodorowsky and Camoin's restored deck of 1998 printed in 11 colours): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot_of_Marseilles
5. Wikipédia (fr), 'Tarot de Marseille' (names at the foot of the cards with slight variations in spelling; trumps numbered I to XXI in roman numerals, with VIIII for 9 in most decks; 17th-century Type I decks by Nicolas Rolichon, Philippe Vachier and Jean Noblet; popularised from 1930 by Paul Marteau's 'Ancien Tarot de Marseille'): https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot_de_Marseille
6. Office de Tourisme de Marseille, 'The Tarot of Marseille' (Philippe Vachier, 17th-century Marseille master cartier; the 1639 deck found complete and sold at auction in Paris for almost 65,000 euros; cartiers' wood engraving and hand-colouring; Philippe Camoin and Alejandro Jodorowsky's restoration in the 1990s): https://www.marseille-tourisme.com/en/discover-marseille/traditions/the-tarot-of-marseille/
7. Sherryl E. Smith, 'Vachier: the oldest documented Tarot de Marseille', Tarot Heritage, 6 January 2025 (Vachier documented as a master card-maker in Marseille 1632-1670; the date hard to read and ambiguous; violet on 17 of the 22 trumps and on all the court cards, a colour that 'fell out of favor after the end of the 17th century due to the ink's cost', for which Payen's later printing substitutes dark blue; bought by Yves Reynaud, who published a lightly touched-up edition): https://tarot-heritage.com/2025/01/06/vachier-the-oldest-documented-tarot-de-marseille/
8. The World of Playing Cards, 'Jean Noblet Tarot' (c. 1650, stencil-coloured woodcut, 9.2 x 5.7 cm, BnF; 'Iean Noblet Dm.t Av Favbovr St Germain' on the 2 of Cups and 2 of Coins): https://wopc.co.uk/france/jean-noblet-tarot
9. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, wood engravings from 'Tarot de Marseille' by Jean Dodal (after 1701-32), e.g. 'La Pances (La Papesse)': https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/979675 ; 'Le Charior': https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/979706 ; untitled Death: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/979184 ; and by Nicolas Conver (early 19th-century printing), e.g. untitled Death: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/979072 ; 'Le Bateleur': https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/979055
10. Wikimedia Commons, Jean Dodal, Lyon, 1701-1715, original cards (public domain), e.g. trump IIII 'LEMPEREVR' with the eagle shield: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_Dodal_Tarot_trump_04.jpg ; trump VII 'LE CHARIOR': https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_Dodal_Tarot_trump_07.jpg ; untitled XIII: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_Dodal_Tarot_trump_13.jpg ; also trumps I 'LE BATELEVR', II 'LA PANCES', VIIII 'LERMITE' and XI 'FORCE' (three-quarter figures), VI 'LA·MOVREV' (three people and Cupid), XVI 'LA MAISON DIEV' (two falling men) and XVIII 'LA LVNE' (dogs, crayfish and towers, no human figure), files Jean_Dodal_Tarot_trump_01, 02, 06, 09, 11, 16 and 18
11. Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City (London: Duckworth, 1980), and Thierry Depaulis with John McLeod, Le Tarot révélé: une histoire du tarot d'après les documents (La Tour-de-Peilz: Musée Suisse du Jeu, 2013), as cited by the IPCS pattern sheets

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