Mona Lisa

Mark McElroy wrote Tarot of the Elves and the Lo Scarabeo Tarot; Paolo Martinello drew the Universal Fantasy Tarot. The Mona Lisa Tarot pairs them across renaissance and classical painting, which places it in the well-populated category of decks that borrow the authority of art history rather than build their own images. The approach carries a built-in tension. Using existing masterworks gives every card an immediate visual weight the deck did not earn, and it constrains the symbolism to whatever the original painter happened to depict, which was rarely tarot. Decks in this mode succeed or fail on how honestly they handle that mismatch. Read as a curated encounter between two traditions rather than a systematic tarot, it has a clear reason to exist. It suits readers who want art-historical reference in a deck, followers of either creator, and collectors of the Lo Scarabeo literary line. Readers who need the image to serve the card, rather than the reverse, should be wary.