The Master of the Playing Cards

The first personality in engraving

The Master of the Playing Cards (German: Meister der Spielkarten) was the first major master in the history of European printmaking. He was a German or possibly Swiss engraver, active in southwestern Germany — probably Alsace — from the 1430s to the 1450s. Art historians have called him "the first personality in the history of engraving." We do not know his real name. Various attempts to identify him have not been generally accepted, so he remains known only through his prints. His 106 surviving engravings include the set of playing cards in five suits from which he takes his name. The majority of these card impressions are unique; most are held in the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Another 88 engravings are close enough to his style to be the work of his pupils.

An artist, not a goldsmith

Most early engravers were trained as goldsmiths or armourers. The Master of the Playing Cards seems to have been different. His style is closely related to paintings from southwestern Germany and Switzerland between 1430 and 1450, especially the work of Konrad Witz. The Alpine cyclamen, a flowering plant native to that region, appears often in his engravings. These details suggest he was trained as a painter rather than as a metalsmith. His prints show an engraving technique close to drawing. Forms are conceived in three dimensions and delicately modeled, with shading done mostly through parallel vertical lines. Cross-hatching is rare. The result has a crisp, calligraphic quality that sets him apart from his contemporaries. The art historian Arthur Hind described his style as "incisive and individual." The start of his activity can only be dated indirectly. A print by his presumed pupil, known as the "Master of 1446," is dated before that year. Because that pupil already works in a mature style, the Master himself must have been active for many years by then.

A deck without numbers

The Master's deck is strange by modern standards. It has five suits: flowers, birds, deer, beasts of prey, and wild men. Each pip on a card is a different engraving, so the sheer quantity of work is enormous. There are no numbers on the cards. That made rapid play difficult, and it suggests the deck was valued as much for looking as for playing. The cards were engraved on copper, not carved in wood. That made them far more expensive than woodcut cards and limited the number of impressions. Some cards were printed from several small plates — one per pip — held together in a frame. This technique is unusually close to movable type, and some scholars think the Master may have known the experiments of Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz. Many of the Master's motifs also appear in illuminated manuscripts made in Mainz between 1452 and 1482, including at least one copy of the Gutenberg Bible now at Princeton. Some scholars have suggested that he painted parts of these miniatures. More conservatively, both the prints and the manuscripts may derive from a shared model-book, the kind of pattern collection that painters kept in their workshops.

The mystical reading

Beyond the facts, tarot legend has claimed the Master of the Playing Cards as a shadowy ancestor of the tarot image. The claim is not documented. No record links him to the invention of the Major Arcana, the triumph cards, or the Tarot de Marseille. Yet the romance persists, and it is worth understanding why. The Master's five suits feel like an early draft of tarot's symbolic vocabulary. His wild men anticipate the Fool, wandering at the edge of the ordered world. His beasts of prey echo the Strength card. His birds suggest the airy messengers of the Swords, or perhaps the Star. His deer, with their lunar gentleness, drift toward the Moon. His flowers, blooming and fading, recall the roses on the Empress's dress. These echoes are not genealogy; they are resonance. They show that the visual language of tarot was already in the air before anyone named the cards. Some mystical readers go further. They imagine the Master as an anonymous adept who hid esoteric teachings in plain sight, trusting that the right eyes would recognize them. The lack of a name becomes a sign of initiation. The multiple plates become a metaphor for divisible souls. The absence of numbers becomes an invitation to read symbolically rather than literally. None of this is history. It is a way of saying that the images were too potent to be only a game.

From engraving to archetype

Whether or not the Master influenced tarot directly, his work sits at a turning point. Before him, most printed images were crude woodcuts made for a mass market. He treated the copper plate like a drawing surface, modeling forms in three dimensions and using fine parallel lines for shading. The art historian Arthur Hind characterized his style as "incisive and individual." His religious engravings were probably pasted into manuscript devotional books. His playing cards traveled with soldiers, merchants, and pilgrims. In both cases, the image became portable, repeatable, and emotionally direct. That is the precondition for tarot. A deck of cards becomes a mirror only after the images have been copied enough times to feel familiar. The Master helped invent that familiarity.

The Queen of Flowers

On 20 September 2006, Christie's London auctioned a print by the Master titled Queen of Flowers for £243,200 — about $450,000 at the time. It is now in the print collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The price is a reminder of how rare these prints are. Most survive as single impressions. Yet their influence is outsized. A handful of small copper plates helped establish the idea that a picture could be both beautiful and reproducible. That idea is the ancestor of every tarot deck in your hands. The cards are mass-produced now, but they still carry the ambition of the first engraver: to make an image that survives its own copying.

Reading the Master today

When you look at the Master's cards today, you are looking at a frontier. The images are still wild, still unnumbered, still refusing to settle into a single meaning. That is exactly what tarot asks of you. The cards do not come with instructions. They come with pictures, and the pictures ask you to finish the story. The rational reader can love the Master without believing the myths. His real achievement is technical and artistic: he made the first great engravings in Europe, and he made them on playing cards. The mystical reader can love him as a hidden source, the unnamed craftsman who poured the first images into the stream that became tarot. Both readings are true in their own way. The deck has always belonged to the eye that holds it.

Sources

1. Shestack, Alan. Fifteenth century Engravings of Northern Europe. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1967. (Catalogue), LOC 67-29080.
2. Lehrs, Max. Geschichte und kritischer Katalog des deutschen, niederländischen und französischen Kupferstichs im XV. Jahrhundert. Vienna: Gesellschaft für vervielfältigende Kunst, 1908-1934, vol. I, pp. 63-207.
3. Hind, Arthur M. A History of Engraving and Etching from the 15th Century to the Year 1914. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1923; reprinted Dover Publications, 1963.
4. Mayor, A. Hyatt. Prints and People. Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton, 1971, nos 115-117.
5. Van Buren, Anne H., & Edmunds, Sheila. 'Playing Cards and Manuscripts: Some Widely Disseminated Fifteenth Century Model Sheets.' The Art Bulletin 56 (March 1974), pp. 12-30.
6. 'Master of the Playing Cards - The Queen of Flowers.' MetMuseum.org. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 29 March 2017.