Bosch Tarots

Atanas Atanassov's fourth deck in this catalog, and the wildest assignment of his sampling career: Hieronymus Bosch, the fifteenth-century master of populated nightmares, whose paradise gardens and monster-thronged hells the review rightly calls surrealist five centuries early. After Leonardo's grace, the icons' gold and Botticelli's line, Bosch hands Atanassov an inexhaustible bestiary, and the longer-you-look quality the review notes is pure Bosch: every card a crowd scene with secrets. Bosch suits tarot uncannily well because his panels were already moral allegory, souls, temptations, judgments, the arcana's own subjects painted at apocalyptic scale, so the deck reads as excerpting a cosmology rather than decorating one. It suits Bosch lovers, surrealism's historians, Atanassov completists crowning the quartet, and readers who want their draws to include monsters with fruit for heads. The tidy-minded should visit the Botticelli instead; this garden has exits in unexpected places.