Masquerade

The Masquerade Tarot is a costume-and-mask deck credited to a creator surnamed Martin, and the theme earns the note on its own: the mask is arguably tarot's native subject, every court card a persona, every reading an unmasking, and the masquerade ball, identity suspended by agreement for one night, is the arcana's own social contract in miniature. Mask decks recur across the tradition, the Carnivale's failed attempt, the 78 Tarot Carnival's Venetian edition, because the theme keeps demanding better treatment, and this deck belongs to that recurring pursuit. A deck that keeps its own maker half-anonymous suits a masked theme almost too well. It suits collectors of the mask-and-carnival register, provenance hunters who enjoy a deck that withholds its own identity, and readers drawn to persona work. Those who want the theme with a full apparatus have the carnival shelf's better-known residents; this one, in character, declines to remove its mask.