The Jean Dodal Tarot

Seventy-eight woodcut cards, colored by stencil in red, yellow, blue and flesh, each about twelve centimeters tall. Jean Dodal, a master card maker in Lyon, published them between 1701 and 1715, and the opening date is unusually firm: a 1701 tax reform had every card maker's old printing moulds destroyed so the trade could be re-registered, so these blocks were cut fresh after that. The engraving is usually attributed to Jacques Mermé of Chambéry, whose workshop also seems to stand behind the near-identical Payen tarot of Avignon. Two complete copies survive, this one at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, given in 1966 with the collection of the card maker Paul Marteau, and another at the British Museum.

It is a deck built for the border. F.P. LE TRANGE, fait pour l'étranger, made for abroad, is printed on the four knights, the Valet of Bâtons, Force and Le Monde; according to the historian Thierry Depaulis the mention exempted export decks from French duty. On the Two of Deniers the maker even Italianizes himself, FAICT A LYON PAR IEAN DODALI, while the Two of Cups keeps plain IEAN DODAL. Tarot was fading as a game in most of France by 1700; the market was over the Alps.

For historians this is the standard-bearer of the Tarot de Marseille Type I, the older-looking of the pattern's two branches: the Fool is Le Fol, a numeral 4 floats before the Emperor's face, Cupid comes blindfolded to the Lovers, the Devil keeps a face on his belly, the Moon stares straight out, and the World stands in a leafy skirt. The titles wander happily, LA PANCES for the Popess, LE CHARIOR, LE TOILLE, and Deniers is spelled three ways across four court cards. Justice is VIII and Force XI, the old order; this archive files them by meaning in the later Waite arrangement. The backs carry a field of small black chevrons.

Put this deck beside the Conver tarot of 1760 and the resemblance is the point. A Marseille tarot was not a design to improve but a standard to reproduce, and workshops copied the images stroke for stroke as moulds wore out and trades changed hands; a card maker sold accuracy, not invention. Sixty years and a branch of the family tree separate the two decks, Dodal on the older Type I side with the Noblet, Conver on the Type II side that became the standard, and the visible differences add up to spelling, drapery and the set of a face. That two shops two generations apart printed near-twins is exactly what a pattern that owned a whole trade looks like.