Where Tarot Actually Came From

The standard story goes like this. Tarot is the lost book of the Egyptian priesthood, smuggled out of the temples as a pack of cards so that its wisdom would survive in the hands of gamblers and fortune tellers.

The documented story is shorter and has better paperwork. Tarot was invented in northern Italy in the fifteenth century as a card game for people who could afford gold leaf. Nobody is recorded treating it as an ancient oracle until 1781, in Paris, and the man who did so was guessing.

A game for dukes

By the middle of the fifteenth century, Italian card players already used a four-suited pack of Cups, Swords, Batons and Coins. Tarot began as an addition to that pack: a run of picture cards that outranked everything else, called trionfi, or triumphs.

Tim Husband, writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016, notes that the earliest references to tarot all date from the 1440s and 1450s and all come from a patch of Italy bounded by Venice, Milan, Florence and Urbino. The earliest record usually cited, summarized in Wikipedia's survey of the evidence, is from Florence in 1440 and concerns two packs sent to the lord of Rimini, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. Some historians push the invention back a little further, to around 1430. The name is later still. For most of the century the cards were simply trionfi, and the word tarocchi does not turn up until about 1502, in Brescia.

What survives from those first decades is the luxury end of the market. Husband counts three great hand-painted sets, all made for the rulers of Milan. One, made for Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, who died in 1447, is now in the Cary Collection of Playing Cards at Yale's Beinecke Library. A second, the Brambilla deck, is in the Brera in Milan. The third is the Visconti-Sforza deck, associated with Francesco Sforza, who became duke in 1450.

What the surviving cards say

The Visconti-Sforza cards are split three ways. The Morgan Library in New York has 35. The Accademia Carrara in Bergamo has 26, and 13 belong to the Colleoni family of the same city. The Morgan's catalogue describes them as illuminated paintings on heavy cardboard, each about 17 centimeters tall, carrying the emblems of both ruling families.

The details are less settled than a museum label suggests, and the institutions say so. The Met's essay gives all three Milanese decks to the workshop of the painter Bonifacio Bembo, the traditional attribution. The Morgan's own catalogue entry dates its cards to roughly 1450 to 1480, credits most of the painting to Francesco Zavattari, and assigns three replacement cards to Antonio Cicognara around 1480. Yale describes its deck as 67 cards. The Met's essay says 69.