Hello,
mikeh wrote:As to the relative dates of the Vievil, Noblet, and Tarot de Paris, Flornoy says of the Noblet,
The back of the cards exactly conforms to the design employed by Viéville. The same motif occurs on the back of the Anonyme Parisien tarot (cat. n° 33).
He then gives pictures:
http://www.tarot-history.com/Jean-Noble ... age-2.html
Does that at all suggest that they had the same publisher around the same time?
From my guesses and understanding, the backs were possibly not produced by the cardmakers but bought from the dominotiers (I don't know the english term).
A late but possibly signifying clue about that is that when dominotiers changed their jobs from creating repeating patterns by blockprinting to painting marbled papers, the backs of the cards chanded in a similar fashion.
As the three known tarot deck from different cardmakers in Paris in the 17th century share the same back, it is highly possible that the backs were made by someone else, a dominotier or several dominotiers creating the same local pattern.
There are no documents I know about that, but it may be an usage adopted locally to use a similar pattern for that type of deck, as we know the cardmakers were organised together and used to discuss together regarding the legslations and taxes - so we can suppose that they agreed on the usage of the backs, for the Tarots.
(I have a very ridiculously small doubt here because of a bad fac simile of Vincent Goyrand's (attributed to) standard deck which uses the same back, but he was from Lyon and as far as I know the back of his cards should have been white, as is alas not visible here
http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/Visualiseur?D ... &O=7919598 I guess the back is simply chosen randomly within the patterns from the approximate same period - thanks in advance if anyone can confirm this deck originally had a standard white back)
The decks using the "sol fama" word are particularly puzzling regarding the temperance allegory - Vieville, Hautot and the Belgians. The Paris deck is close but different with the Atrempance representing a woman pouring water - to temper a fire ? or maybe is she pouring oil ... or maybe is she making a quenching ("trempe" in french).
The "temperance" thread doesn't propose anything close.
As a side note, regarding the "sol fama" in Vieville, an hypothesis that might interest in particular Mike H. (and might irritate some other fellows here) is that it is a reference to the FAMA from the Rose-Croix - this is developped in Charly Alverda's book "trois figures hiéroglyphiques" which proposes an alchemical lecture of the Vieville's deck.
Bertrand