Medici

Londa Marks completes her catalog trio with the Medici: twenty-two majors under the most loaded name in tarot's actual history, the Florentine dynasty whose banking-and-patronage world overlapped the courts where carte da trionfi were born. Marks's range, the digital Crow's Magick, the operative Alchemist's Spell, here the Renaissance register, sketches a nineties indie maker trying the tradition's doors in turn. The record is thin, but the name does historical work regardless: a Medici deck gestures at tarot's true origin story, princely commissions and humanist allegory, the trumps as court pageant before they were occult curriculum. Majors-only suits the gesture; the trionfi were the invention, the pips mere inheritance. It suits Marks completists assembling her trio, Renaissance-history readers, majors-only collectors, and students of how indie makers reach for the tradition's founding glamour. The documented Renaissance decks, Estensi and kin, hold the scholarly shelf; the Medici name, as ever, opens doors on reputation alone.