Marco Benedetti's restoration of the Rosenwald Tarot, originally created in the 15th Century.

Here is the information that Marco provided me with, as follows:

Background

The Rosenwald consists of 3 sheets: one with 21 Arcana and 3 queens, and two sheets with a Spanish-type deck of 48 cards of almost equal but not identical size, the engravings of the sheet with the Majors are clearly v older and less refined.

The sheet with the Majors is the most ruined; in addition to the half-erased Wheel. a very clumsy restoration of other cards (probably prior to the use as cover padding) had to be removed and rrmade:

Note the childish front legs of the horse od Death, the central part of the Pope, the horrible face of one of the characters of the Judgment, half face of the Emperor.

On the other sheets, the only intervention of some importance is the Maid of Coins.

Restoration

Where possible, I used self-borrowing, for example I used the Magician's face to reconstruct the face of the Lover and the Hermit in reverse for one of the small characters in Judgment; I obtained the Queen of Wands by mirroring the Queen of Cups with the face changed.

(BTW, if I have 2 frontal Queens and one in profile, it seems obvious to me that the missing one is in profile in the other direction...

This is my Visconti-Sforza imprinting).

The Fool is an original drawing, I wanted there to be no anachronistic dogs or other animals and that the character was a vagabond or a village idiot and not acourt jester; and above all he had to have his underwear down and be fiercely obscene, I imaging he is laughing at the people who look at him in scandal.

My aim in restoring an uncolored deck is to obtain a deck that is usable and possibly beautiful.

Now, I find that the engravings on the wood blocks are often refined and endowed with great
expressiveness which however was mortified by the colours, few and repetitive, and applied with little care, smudges, etc.

Then, having cleaned up the B&W and reconstructed the missing parts, I "simply” applied a palette of 16 colors, very similar to the one I used for my own deck 25 years ago, in turn inspired by the colors of the Visconti-Sforza.

 Orientation

 The Rosenwald sheet with the Mayors has a "brother" (in very bad condition) in a German museum  with the mirror images.

For the record, Heather Rocchi used the orientation of the original Rosenwald, while Hismans preferred to use the mirrored orientation of the German sheet.

I chose for each card the most correct orientation in my opinion, using either the most common orientation for the card in question or common sense (ie swords held in the right hand, ecc.).

Playing freely with orientation, I also decided to invert 2 knights, so as to have 2 to the right and 2 to the left.

Edges

 We don't know what the Rosenwald's back looked like, but we do know that decks of the time generally had very simple geometric designs, like the black and white diamond pattern I used.

We also know that the Italian cards had overlapping edges, so I added a diamond checkerboard border to the front as if there were a reversed back."



 

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