New Kickstarter Campaign!

"Tarot Minchiate Al Leone di Girolamo revival with golden details"

Hello everybody, today I want to tell you about my new project: it is the publication of a new minchiate deck, a digital recovery work, which aims to clean up the images of an original Bolognese deck of cards from the late 18th century - Al Leone di Girolamo (Fig. 1 and 3) - in order to enhance its beauty, keeping its colours, lines and textures.

At the beginning I referred to this work as a restoration project, but I soon realised that talking about restoration was a mistake: my intervention goes beyond restoration, I grant myself interpretative and aesthetic liberties that do not respect the original, adding gilt lines is the most obvious example of this. I wanted to integrate the gilding elegantly, in the manner of "modern illumination", a tribute to the gold-lit Italian tarots of the renaissance courts, in fig. 2 and 4 you can see the restoration work, but not yet gilded, which is the final stage and which I have not yet reached. It is a project that will take several months of work and that I hope to fund through a Kickstarter campaign that I am preparing to launch in the coming weeks.

One of the things I like about the "Al Leone" decks, is that they have faces on their coins, this makes them different from the other early pattern minchiate decks that have been published so far, as the others have the same flower on each coin (as for example Al Cigno (Lo scarabeo), Al Aquila (, , while the faces of the Al Leone are all different: men and women, young and old, foreigners, military, civilians, and they look at each other or look down, up, left or right, generating different imaginary dialogues between them. As if the Al Leone's were a link between the early pattern and the late pattern, of course I am only speculating without any certainty.

Technical aspects: The new deck is designed to be a treasure that shines wherever it is and at the same time it will have the quality and resistance necessary to be an object of use: 330 gsm German paper with black core, linen texture, heavily pressed, with a matt varnish finish. Easy to shuffle. For me this is important because I use the minchiate a lot to play with my friends, as well as for readings. The idea is to have a hard box, with two drawers, one for the book and one for the cards, and to make a first limited edition of 500 copies, with a numbered certificate, to enhance its quality as a collector's item.

I hope you like the project, and if you want to know more, you can follow the link below: