The Sola Busca tarot, the oldest complete tarot deck
Engraved around 1490 and coloured in Venice in 1491, its 78 cards trade virtues for Roman heroes and gave the Rider–Waite–Smith deck its scenes.
Art & Artists
Look closely at paintings and the people behind them. Explore artists, movements and the stories hidden in familiar and unexpected works of art.
Pastoral love: nine paintings of lovers in fields, woods and hay
Under a red parasol by the wheat, in a haystack, on a bench in a birch wood. Nine paintings of country love, from Daphnis and Chloe to the Black Forest.
Pan and Syrinx and the landscape of escape
The river, the reeds and the commentary’s cosmic Pan reveal a landscape shaped by Syrinx’s escape.
Rococo romance: ten paintings of swings, gardens and gallant couples
Fragonard's swing, Boucher's shepherds, and the painters of the 1880s to 1920s who dreamed of powdered wigs and silk. Love in the eighteenth-century manner.
The Visconti–Sforza tarot: the cards of the Dukes of Milan
Painted in gold and tempera for the court of Francesco Sforza, divided between New York and Bergamo, with four cards lost. The story of the most famous tarot deck.
Real couples in art: six portraits of husbands and wives
A honeymoon walk, a painter and his wife on a Danish beach, a picnic by a red canoe. Six real marriages in paint, and what happened next.
What Makes Fable Fable
An archive with a long memory. Artists at Vaxholm Fortress. Original technology, made personal.
Paintings of farewell: eight lovers parting, from Verona to the railway
A soldier at the door, a knight's shadow on a wall, two hands through a garden railing. Eight farewells in art, and the stories behind them.
Le Temple des Muses and the art of transformation
A close reading of the 1749 mythological volume behind Fable’s developing Temple des Muses colour editions.