The art history of tarot: from Milan to 1909

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Tarot cards are small paintings and prints, and their history is a genuine chapter of art history. Any deck you shuffle today is the end of a story that starts with gold leaf in fifteenth-century Milan. On this page I walk you through that story, from the courts of northern Italy to a London studio in 1909, and show you how to look at your own cards with an art historian’s eye.

I keep three layers apart, as I do everywhere on this site:

• Historical What surviving cards and documents show.
• Later tradition The meanings occult writers added from the eighteenth century onward.
• Modern How readers use the cards today.

A card game first

Historical Playing cards reached Europe from the Islamic world in the late fourteenth century. In northern Italy, in the first half of the fifteenth century, a new kind of deck appeared with an extra series of picture cards called trionfi, triumphs. They were used to play a trick-taking card game, later called tarocchi, in which the triumphs beat the ordinary suits. The game is still played in parts of Europe today, especially in France, Austria and Italy.

The idea that tarot began as a divination tool, or that it came from ancient Egypt, has no historical basis. The cards were made for play. That does not make them less interesting. Early trump cards mixed allegory, social types and moral personifications: Love, Death, Fortune, the Emperor, the Pope. They were a picture of how a Renaissance court saw the world.

The structure was already the one you know. As the Morgan Library describes it, a complete pack had seventy-eight cards: twenty-one trumps, one wild card called the Fool, and fifty-six suit cards in four suits of fourteen. The suits were cups, staves, coins and swords, and each had ten number cards and four picture cards: page, knight, queen and king. Modern decks keep that shape, though the names of some suits have changed.

The Visconti-Sforza cards

Historical The most famous early tarot cards were painted by hand, with gold and silver leaf, for the ruling families of Milan. The card at the top of this page, the Popess, comes from the best known set, usually dated to about 1450 to 1480. Dates vary between sources. The set is traditionally attributed to the painter Bonifacio Bembo, though some scholars now give it to Francesco Zavattari. A few cards in a different style were added later, around 1480 to 1500, probably as replacements for lost ones.

The Morgan Library’s catalog explains why the family name is attached. The emblems of both the Visconti and the Sforza appear mixed together on the cards, such as the three interlinked diamond rings of the Sforza and the ducal crown of Milan. The deck may have been made for Francesco Sforza, who married Bianca Maria Visconti in 1441 and became Duke of Milan in 1450. Each card is about 17 by 9 centimeters, painted on heavy card, so these were larger than most modern decks.

Its surviving cards are divided between three owners:

An earlier set, the Cary-Yale Visconti deck, which Yale dates to between 1442 and 1447, has 67 surviving cards and is at the Beinecke Library of Yale University. These cards show courtly figures in rich fifteenth-century dress: the Lovers under a blindfolded Cupid, the Wheel of Fortune lifting and dropping its riders, Death as a skeleton with a bow.

Look closely at the Popess. She sits in a plain habit with a papal crown on her head and a closed book in her hands. The background is not a landscape but a field of gold, tooled with a pattern. That gold tells you what these cards were: luxury objects for a wealthy household, as much for display as for play. Scholars still debate who the Popess represented to the Visconti family, and that question belongs in the later tradition layer until a document settles it.

Printed cards and the Tarot de Marseille

Historical Hand-painted decks were for the rich. By around 1500, printers were making tarot cards with woodcuts and stencils, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds an uncut sheet of Italian tarocchi printed at about that time, a woodcut colored with stencils in red, blue and brown. The cards on such a sheet were meant to be cut apart, pasted onto card and played until they wore out, which is why so few printed decks survive. Printing made decks cheaper, and regional patterns grew up in France, Switzerland and beyond.

What English speakers often call the Tarot de Marseille took recognizable form in France across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rather than in a single year. Its bold black outlines and flat colors come from the woodcut process. The deck by Jean Noblet of Paris, around 1650, is one of the earliest surviving examples of the type, and the deck printed by Nicolas Conver in Marseille in 1760 became a standard model that was copied for two centuries.

Those Marseille decks set much of the order and naming of the trumps that readers still use. One small difference is worth knowing: in Marseille decks, Justice is VIII and Strength is XI. The 1909 deck swapped them.

A rare experiment: the Sola Busca deck

Historical Most early decks showed the minor cards as simple arrangements of suit symbols, the way a modern playing card shows five hearts. One Italian deck, the Sola Busca tarot, engraved around 1491, gave every minor card a full scene with figures. A set of photographs of it reached the British Museum in 1907. Several of Pamela Colman Smith’s later minor cards closely echo Sola Busca designs, which is why many historians think she saw them.

The occult turn

Later tradition In 1781 the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published, in the eighth volume of Le Monde primitif, the claim that the tarot preserved the wisdom of ancient Egypt, a “Book of Thoth.” He had no evidence. Hieroglyphs had not yet been deciphered. Soon after, the Paris card reader known as Etteilla published one of the first decks designed for divination, with new images and meanings printed on the cards.

In the mid-nineteenth century the French occultist Éliphas Lévi tied the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Kabbalah. In 1888 the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London and built tarot into a large system of correspondences with astrology, the elements and the Tree of Life. That work is why many modern decks print Hebrew letters or astrological signs on their cards.

Historical Tarot imagery also became a decorative motif in its own right. The Art Institute of Chicago owns a glass beaker painted around 1820 by the Viennese artist Anton Kothgasser with tarot cards in enamel and gold. By then the cards were fashionable enough to decorate a drinking glass.

Pamela Colman Smith and the 1909 deck

Historical In 1909 the London publisher William Rider and Son issued a new tarot deck designed by the Golden Dawn member A. E. Waite and illustrated by the artist Pamela Colman Smith (1878 to 1951). Waite’s book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot followed. Smith, an illustrator, stage designer and storyteller who had worked in New York and London, drew all seventy-eight cards. She was born in London to American parents, studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and moved in London theater circles. In 1907 the photographer Alfred Stieglitz showed her drawings at his New York gallery, the first exhibition of work other than photography there. You can find her small monogram on many of the cards.

Her crucial innovation was to give the numbered minor cards full illustrated scenes rather than repeated suit symbols, so that every card tells a story. That is why a beginner can look at the Three of Cups and see friends celebrating, or the Five of Pentacles and see two people in the snow outside a lit window. The design, long called the “Rider-Waite” deck, is now often called the Rider-Waite-Smith or Smith-Waite deck to give her credit. It became the template for most tarot decks published since. Smith received little money or recognition for it in her lifetime and died poor.

Later tradition Waite also renumbered two trumps, putting Strength at VIII and Justice at XI, to fit the astrological order used by the Golden Dawn. If your deck numbers them the other way, it follows the older Marseille order. Read by card title and you will be fine.

The 1909 card images are the ones I use on this site. You can see all of them in the card meanings, and the court and pip cards are explained on the Minor Arcana.

The Thoth deck and modern decks

Historical Another influential deck, the Thoth tarot designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943, was first published as a full deck only in 1969, decades after the art was made. Harris’s paintings are still under copyright in many countries, so I do not show them here.

In the second half of the twentieth century, decks multiplied. Accessible guidebooks such as Eden Gray’s Tarot Revealed (1960) helped tarot move from specialist circles into popular practice. New decks widened theme, culture and audience. Motherpeace, for example, was self-published in 1981 with round cards and a feminist vision. Today thousands of decks exist, many by independent artists. When a deck draws on a living culture or tradition, I recommend learning from that tradition’s own voices.

How to look at a tarot card as art

Modern You do not need a museum to practice art history. Your own deck will do. Pick one card and give it five minutes before you think about its meaning in a reading.

• Material. Is it painted, printed from a woodcut, or printed in modern color? Gold leaf, flat stencil colors and smooth digital color each tell you about the age and cost of a deck.
• Line. Marseille cards have thick black outlines from the woodblock. Smith’s lines are fine and flowing, closer to book illustration and the stage.
• Color. Notice which colors repeat. Smith used yellow skies on many cards and a few strong colors against them.
• Composition. Where does your eye go first? Is the main figure in the center, facing you, or turned away?
• Text. Look for numbers, names, letters or signs, and ask when each was added to the tradition.

These questions slow you down, and slowing down is the whole skill. When you come back to the card’s meaning afterward, you will notice details that a quick glance misses.

Three meanings in one card

Here is the point I most want you to take away. The meanings of a single card come from different centuries.

1. The fifteenth-century meaning. What the trump meant to a Milanese court is partly recoverable from the courtly culture that made it, and it is historical.
2. The divinatory meaning. What a reading guide tells you the card means comes from eighteenth- to twentieth-century occultism, and it is later tradition.
3. Your meaning. What the card says to you this morning is modern personal practice.

All three can live together, as long as you know which is which. I explain how I use the cards in a reading on the Major Arcana.

Try it: compare two Lovers

Find the Lovers card from the Visconti-Sforza deck in the Morgan Library’s online collection, and then look at the Lovers from the 1909 deck on The Lovers. Use the five steps from how to look at a painting.

1. Describe each card. List the figures, the setting and every object you can see.
2. List the differences. How do the clothes, the sky, the number of people and the style differ?
3. Find the symbols. The Visconti card has a blindfolded Cupid. What stands above the couple in 1909?
4. Ask what each meant. Write a short paragraph on what “the Lovers” seems to have meant to its first users in each case.

Keep your notes. When you go on to the esoteric in art, you will see the same habit of separating evidence from interpretation at work on paintings, prints and alchemical books.