The banner of judgment

I've put together this little historical survey of the banner on the trumpet on the Judgment card of the Tarot.

What surprises me is how consistent the color scheme has been over the years, especially given how much color schemes tend to vary from deck to deck. The gold-on-gold cross is seen in the very earliest extant Tarot and remained almost invariable until the end of the 19th century.

This is particularly surprising considering how heraldically bizarre the standard color scheme -- a cross tenné on a field or -- is. Most decks in the larger Marseille tradition used an eight-color palette: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, gray, and tan. It is very strange that tan -- a color never really used on flags, and associated in heraldry with a "stain" on ones honor -- should have been chosen for the angel's banner.

In 1889, Oswald Wirth broke with tradition and made the angel's banner resemble that of his native Switzerland, and this is perhaps what inspired A. E. Waite to use the colors of England on his own card 20 years later. It is interesting that in his 1927 deck, Wirth made a partial return to tradition, keeping the red field but putting the original flag, like St. Patrick's in the Union Jack, inside the cross itself.

Pre-Tarot iconography associates the Last Trump with no particular flag, and I would have expected this banner to be one of the most variable elements of the Tarot, since it would be so easy to modify the flag to make a political or patriotic statement (as Wirth and Waite appear to have done) or to honor one's aristocratic patrons. Instead, we see this remarkable insistence on a tan-on-gold color scheme corresponding (so far as I have been able to discover) to no flag or arms in the real world.