I love this deck!
The Tarot of the Master is a wonderful deck which I have been using since I found it in the New Leaf catalogue last winter. It jumped easily into my collection because most of my working decks are Continental, historical, and harken back to earlier traditions. Since the Vachetta deck was created by someone with a sense of nostalgia who is educated in the esoterism of the 1500's, its quite delightful to me.
The first thing that I saw in this deck is that the images seem to make reference to the style of illustration found in the enigmatic compendium called the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_, which was published very soon after the technology of printing arrived in Europe. This volume set benchmarks for the publishing field in a number of different ways, not the least of which was the inclusion of engravings embedded in the text, rather than just leaving blank spaces that a commissioned artist would fill in for his employer.
The form of the story "is modeled on the idyllic pastoral, bucholic *romanzo d'amore*, a tradition that had peaked over a century earlier with its universally acknowledged master, Giovanni Boccaccio...[The Hypnerotomachia] is an anachronism. It adds nothing new to the amorous imaginary. It brings together all the steriotypcal characters traditionally associated with what was by then a highly stylized genre; the enamored hero and the indifferent heroine, atended by scores of stock characters, -- nymphs, maiads, satyrs, gods, ogddesses, and demigods -- who, all too predictably sing, dance, give advice, and in general eagerly officiate wehnever there is opportunity for the lovers to engage in a rite of union. It settings bow to the invariable formula of verdant glades, babbling brooks, and enclosed gardens. As for the plot, it too conforms to the conventions of the genre's time-worn topoi -- the lover's unrequited love, his quest to win the heart of the heroine, love's triumph, the blissful union." (p. 8 of Liane Lefaivre's _Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_.)
To my eye, Vachetta was mentally "hanging out" with the stream of enthusiasts of this unique production. It had several different editions despite its prodigious size and virtual untranslaltibility. If you can find illustrations of the Hypnerotomachi online, do take the time to just flip through the imagery till you have an "eyefull". Then take out your Tarot of the Master (any edition) and see if you don't see a resemblance.
This deck raises some fascinating questions, since it emerges shortly after the Etteilla decks, which (IMHO) seemto have stylistic relations with the Lazzarelli images (a few of which Kaplan pictures for us at the beginning of his Vol. 1). Lazzarelli's images were given to the Vatican very late in the 1400's, parallel to the time when the Hypnerotomachia emerged (though it is thought to have been written several decades earlier). Might we be seeing a shared aesthetic between the *romanzo d'amore*, the Hypnerotomachia, the Lorenzo images, and the culture-wide "classical revival" that was drawing Europe into the Renassance?
Looking over at Jocelyn Godwin's excellent _The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance_, there seems to be further resonance. Godwin includes the Mantegna imagery in his cataloge of sculpture, engravings, and paintings that demonstrate the desire to "Re-order the World" through art. I feel fairly certain that the Vachetta was created while under the spell of "The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance".
Blessings, C