About THE LOST TAROT
Being a treasury of mysterious providence in the pursuit of arcane knowledge
Originating from a chance encounter with the Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci, resulting in The Great Work.
The whole splendidly enriched with seventy-eight cards of medieval imagery, including emperors, empresses, kings, queens, knights and their retinues, also a mage, a hierophant, the lovers, and the common folk of feudal England at the time of Henry VIII.
Replete with the esteemed images The Fool, Justice, the Queen of Coins, The Star, Death, the Six of Cups, and The World.
Including, recently discovered, a reproduction of the English wool merchant William Bradford’s 1555 Last Will and Testament detailing The Lost Tarot’s origins and history.
The Great Work created with the cooperation of the good citizens of Nottingham under the direction of the former wool merchant William Bradford.
On occasion continuing the work of esteemed calligraphers, vaunted miniaturists, deceased painters and anonymous engravers, but deriving primarily from the mind and eye of the photographer Hansjurgen Bauer.
Genesis
The Lost Tarot is a labor of love. I have long had an interest in photo-based art. Once, it was my desire to create a portfolio of highly distressed, antiqued photographs depicting well-known historical personages (Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc), as if they had simply shown up at my door requesting that I make their portrait. For several reasons (the difficulty of finding suitable models and period appropriate costumes), those first attempts were unsatisfactory and, in time, I moved from Los Angeles to a rural Texas town, where I soon forgot about the project.
After several years, during which I sporadically attended a local Renaissance faire, a friend reminded me of the earlier project, and suggested that most of the heavy lifting had already been done by the wonderful characters encountered at the faire, with their fantastic costumes, armor, and period accessories. My friend further suggested I try my hand at a Tarot deck, about which I knew little at the time.
I decided to experiment with a single card, The Fool, and, if pleased with the result, would continue. To my great delight, The Fool far exceeded my expectations.
Through trial and error I was able to create a 22-card deck of Majors giving the impression of an authentic medieval tarot. Clearly, such vintage decks were already in existence, but mine would be different: The Lost Tarot would consist entirely of photographs, the idea being they were created with a crude prototype box camera nearly three and a half centuries before the actual invention of the first cameras in 1839.
In 2017, I released the 22 images of the Major Arcana + the 4 aces of the Minor Arcana first, in order to sample the public's appetite for my creation.
The 22 Major Arcana cards for 2017 Lost Tarot Limited Edition
Continuing my experiment, one card led to another, until several years and thousands of hours later, I had created the 78-card Lost Tarot.
Hansjurgen Bauer
A complete view of the 78-Card Edition of The Lost Tarot, with two bonus mono cards