"A picture is better than a long speech" recalls Jacques Halbronn, and he questions: "for what reasons, during the 16th century, in France, while the majority of the population couldn't read nor write, editors censured most of the pictures of prophetic texts which illustrated the Centuries, the Mirabilis Liber, the Vaticinia…. while foreign editions, especially German, had many of these?"
Free from their images, why do these texts had to become the privilege of an aristocratic elite (which could read) and to break from peasants, to whom these pictures were done ?
Going back to the iconography of the Almanacs from -500 B.C to 1560 A.D (Almanacs which illustrated French people every day's life, peasant, or aristocratic together, and at that cyclic rhythm of seasons), Jacques Halbronn suggests an original analogy: a correlation between the twenty two major arcanas of the tarot and not only the Wheel of the zodiac but also the astrological houses !
Indeed, if the twelve signs of the zodiac or the planets are represented with images, the twelve houses, remained deprived of images. A deprivation Jacques Halbronn tries to restore.
What are the reasons of that censure ?
Do the rapprochement of Planets-Signs and arcanas of the Tarot resist to the comparison of pictures from medieval almanacs (e.g.: the Gemini sign with the planet Venus and not Mercury ?).
Do you want to discover the iconographical continuum Jacques Halbronn suggests with the Magician -> the Aquarius-> the month of February and the medieval almanacs ?
Answers by Jacques Halbronn in this 51-minutes interview by Paul Roland filmed at the Forum 104.
