TAROT Deck - Completely Revised Sola Busca from XV Century

seven stars said:

Pathwalker - I'm open to any advice for sure. I've never made a deck before or dealt with copyrights or anything. If there's a place to write to & ask, I'll write to them & see what they say or see if they want a cut in my millions. I specifically didn't want to use anybody's work who was still alive & trying to make a living off their work, but this was done in the XV century, & I didn't copy & reprint things other people had even copied of this dead artist's work, I manipulated them with a purpose of making the deck into something different than it was in order to make it useable. No idea if that makes any legal difference but I would think it would.

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The crucial point is, what images did you start with?

If you used the coloured versions published by Lo Scarabeo in 1995, as "Ancient Enlightened Tarot" then the copyright of those images belongs to Lo Scarabeo. The colouring of those cards was (I believe) done by one of their artists, who may well still be living. And they will retain the copy for decades yet, even if the colourist passed away. They will have paid fees or percentages I presume for the right o publish them; the original deck is in private hands.

So my understanding is that none of these images is 'free to use'

Just my opinion of course. Others may know better / differently.

Or did you use some other images?

The deck revised by Lo Scarabeo are awful. Just awful. I used nothing out of his art whatsoever - totally destroyed any semblance of interesting vintage looking artwork. Completely useless to what I was trying to do.

So in response to the copyrights, what do we know about the Sola Busca deck? I am absolutely no tarot historian, or copyright attorney, but from what I've been able to deduce:

(1) The author is actually unknown. POSSIBLY Marco d'Antonio di Ruggero also known as Marco Zoppo (Ferrara 1433 - Venice 1478).

(2) It is believed to have been created in 1491.

(3) The deck was owned by the Sola Busca family who had it photographed in 1907 for the British Museum.

(4) The Pinacoteca di Brera museum bought the actual "deck" in 2010.


Me, as a person, a member of the public, a Tarot reader, someone who is not a corporation printing out these things by the thousands and making a huge profit, what I was initially presented with was a deck that is unusable to me "as is", a deck in which the original artist is long dead & even forgotten, whose family is alive but gave images to a museum and sold the deck itself to another museum - - At this point, as far as I can see, the art is so very far removed from the original artist, and such a long period of time has passed, that sure, this big museum can write me a "cease & desist" order if they Really think I'm doing something that I need to stop, but at the end of the day, it would be in Their best interest as a "museum" to get people talking about a piece of history that they have in their posession. There is no artist that I am robbing. If I ever did get a "cease & desist" honestly I would like to open conversation with whoever might even send it in order to possibly expand the whole idea of making a useable Sola Busca deck for real, as in, with a big publisher & sold all over the world & not just my Etsy shop.

Now, if I were to see, the Aquarian deck (as an example), and decide I didn't like how David Palladini did all his imagery & just went in paintshop with his artwork & recolored them & mixed them around & came up with what I called the Aquarian Revisited & put it up on Etsy......THAT would be unethical, no doubt. I don't consider this to be anything like that sort of scenario. This is a piece of ancient history I'm bothering to revive. If big corporations make that impossible to do, it's sad & not to the benefit of any artist.

Greg Stanton said:

Where did you acquire the images? Are they taken from the originals, or the re-drawing by Lo Scarabeo?

Did you get permission to reproduce them from Pinacoteca di Brera or Lo Scarabeo?

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If you compare seven stars's cards with the Lo Scarabeo Sola Busca (I looked it up on albideuter as I don't own it) then you can see her revision wasn't done with the LoS version. The LoS one has been altered; it looks much less painterly. It's easy to see if you compare side by side.

That doesn't answer where seven stars found the images they used. Did they come from here by chance?

So you took the illustrations from the museum, or their literature or artwork?

Did you approach them and say you wished to use their images for a commercial project - I think that would have been the correct way to go?

Anyway, I've given my opinion, and am happy to let it rest here. Each individual makes their own decisions on such matters.

Thank you for the conversation.

When do you expect the deck to be printed? It's very beautiful.

Laura - I wish I'd found that site first when I started, it was really helpful. Some of the images I got from there, and on their disclaimer page they just say use them at your own risk because their images are either free of copyright or they have permission, & the SB page doesn't say either way that I was able to find, so I guess I'm risking it. I didn't keep notes to know which ones exactly were from there. One thing I definitely didn't do was to take images with any sort of copyright/trademark written on them & just erase it...if that's all that was out there I wouldn't have bothered trying to do this project.

It seems kind of absurd to me to write to a museum in another country to *see* if I'm infringing on a copyright & think I'm going to even actually get a response for this sort of thing. How would I even word that? I'm not 'avoiding' the question of where I got the images, it's just that they're not from one place - I mostly just went to google & looked up 'public domain sola busca' & 'public domain tarot' etc & got various things from all over - it wasn't easy, I might find a few here & a few there, never the complete deck like on the site you listed, so a lot of times it was hard to find the best resolution. When I found that site I was like, well hell it's all here! That's a great place to go, though, to see what the problem is with the original deck.

Glitter- I finished the deck & order them individually as people want them. I have them on my Etsy site if you want to see what they look like. I posted "original vs new" images for some of them so you can see what I did.

Some people just might not like my edits either just like I don't happen to like Lo Scarabeo. And btw, Lo Scarabeo isn't the artist. It's a publishing company. I haven't even been able to find who that artist is for the Lo Scarabeo deck. Fat cats always seem to get the money & recognition.

If you scroll to about the middle of this page, it says that the LoS edition is "based on redrawings executed at the beginning of the XXth Century." That's as much as I know, though there may be a thread around here on it. I agree that their version is much less interesting than the original paintings.

If a museum owns artifacts or artwork, you must write and ask permission to reproduce it. If you are going to sell reproductions of art they own, you must get them to agree to it, or license the art for this purpose. It doesn't matter that the artist is dead or unknown. You need permission from the owner.

Also, if the art, or some of it, came from a printed copy, which was presumably licensed and photographed by another entity, you need to obtain permission from them as well. They paid fees, a photographer, color separator, printer, and for advertising and distribution. You can't just take their work, copy and/or alter it and re-sell it. It's illegal.

Doing this for your own personal use is one thing, but selling and proliferating something that doesn't belong to you is wrong and illegal. It's not "absurd" to ask permission to do this. And whether you are actually making a "profit" from your own work on this project is irrelevant.

Greg - I will look into that. Thanks. =)

I understand that it's important to not use copyrighted work, things that aren't in the public domain, without asking. It seems seven stars has checked or maybe I am misunderstanding here? I also understand that whether one makes money from it isn't the issue either, it's using someone's work, work that is under copyright, without permission.
There does seem to be something else perhaps here that I am missing. Part of this seems to be about using work that is someone else's, not original? I know there are tons and tons of decks that are based on other's work. Hopefully they have all checked to make sure they can use the images, manipulated or not. If the images are in the public domain, not taken directly from any other publisher who has reworked the deck, like LoS, is there still a problem?