Iconographic Sources: definition

Tarot images did not appear in isolation. They are inscribed in a vast iconographic context comprising medieval art, religious representations, moral allegories, popular traditions and the imagery of the Renaissance.

Certain figures of the major arcana find parallels in medieval iconographic cycles, the dances of death, the representations of the cardinal virtues or the images of royal and imperial power. The Pope, the Emperor, Justice or Death draw on this shared visual repertoire.

Understanding the iconographic sources of tarot makes it possible to restore the cards to their historical and cultural context, long before the occultist interpretations developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It helps distinguish what belongs to the material history of the cards from what comes from late symbolic re-readings.

The study of iconographic sources rests on documentary comparisons: contemporary engravings, illuminated manuscripts, frescoes, altarpieces, almanacs and other card games. It is today a field of research in cultural history in its own right.

Attending to the iconographic sources protects against anachronism: it helps not to read into a fifteenth-century card esoteric intentions only attributed to it centuries later, and to appreciate the images in their own cultural and artistic context.

In this way, the iconographic sources anchor tarot in art history: behind each major arcanum lies a long lineage of images that the cards gathered and recomposed in their own way.