Jean Noblet: definition

Jean Noblet was a master cardmaker active in Paris around the middle of the seventeenth century. His tarot, generally dated around 1650, is one of the oldest surviving decks belonging to the family of the Marseille Tarots.

The Jean Noblet Tarot presents an iconography still close to the ancient traditions, with certain graphic and orthographic particularities that testify to an early stage in the evolution of French tarot.

For tarot historians, the Noblet deck is a major source for understanding the ancient forms of the arcana and the transmission of the images before later models such as that of Nicolas Conver.

Because of its antiquity, the Noblet deck preserves archaic features that later disappeared or were modified: drawing details, spellings and graphic solutions that bring it close to the earliest sources of French tarot.

Its small format and its workmanship distinguish it from later decks, larger and more standardised; studying it allows observing a state of the Marseille Tarot prior to its fixing in the eighteenth century.

Restored and reissued in recent times, the Jean Noblet Tarot today arouses great interest among readers and historians, who value its freshness, its details and its closeness to the origins of the Marseille tradition.

For all that, the Jean Noblet deck remains a reference piece for the study of the origins and evolution of French tarot.