Tarot of Inspiration

Four hundred years of painting, sorted into seventy-eight slots. Berenika's premise is that art and inspiration feed each other, and the deck assembles classical, baroque, romantic and pre-Raphaelite works into the tarot structure rather than commissioning images for it. The method raises the question every appropriated-image deck raises: a masterwork brings its own subject, and that subject was almost never the card it is now being asked to carry. Sometimes the match illuminates both works and sometimes it is a caption. A deck like this is best read as an argument about which paintings belong to which archetypes, which stays interesting even where you disagree with it. It suits readers with an art-history background, people who want a deck to look at rather than through, and collectors of appropriated-image tarots. Anyone learning the system from scratch will find the images arguing with the lesson.