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Cagliostro Tarot      1981 Bruno Sigon      USA                                                   Art Medium: Watercolour without obvious outlines. Description: From the documentation by Stuart Kaplan:- "The Cagliostro Tarot deck was first published in 1912 in an Italian edition entitled 'Il Destino Svelato Dal Tarocco.' The publisher, Modiano S.p.A. is one of Italy's leading printers whose operations in the manufacture of playing cards dates back to the 19th century under the name La Concordia. A fire in 1913 and a bombardment in 1944 destroyed part of the Modiano archives. Nevertheless, it has been possible to ascertain that the original card designs for the Cagliostro tarot deck were prepared by Bruno Sigon, an Italian artist in Modiano's employ. Sigon relied heavily upon the work of Papus, pseudonym of Dr. Gerard Encausse, the French occultist and author of le Tarot des Bohemiens (1889) and Le Tarot Divinatoire (1909). Both books contain the twenty-two Major Arcana cards in Egyptian style by Gabriel Goulinat. The illustrations of the fifty-six Minor Arcana cards by Sigon are a stylized version of traditional double-ended court figures and pip cards from the nineteenth century. "