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Oracle de Giselle Flavie      1997 Marina Makovsky      France                                                   Art Medium: Oil paintings. Description: Giselle Flavie was one of the most famous clairvoyants in France in the late 1990s. She has written many books and taken part in radio and television programmes. In 1997 she issued her 'key of life' or the Oracle de Giselle Flavie. This is not an oracle deck but a true tarot with 22 cards. Being a clairvoyant, Giselle Flavie has of course 'channelled' the text of the little white book that goes with the cards. The art on the cards is by a Russian artist Marina Makovsky, the daughter of the famous Russian academic artist Konstantin Egorovich Makovsky (1839-1915). His daughter, who appears to have lived on into the 1950s, seems to have become one of the Russian émigrés who located to France after the Russian Revolution. Her art is not so technically accomplished as her father's wonderfully detailed oils but is strongly Russian in tone, reflecting Russian illuminated manuscripts and Icons. I doubt whether these were originally conceived as a tarot, though they seem to have been created as round paintings and not merely cropped to that shape.