The Historical Tarot: Art and Origins
From miniature masterpieces to a “modern” model
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The first part of this series on the historical Tarot outlined facts and questions about its early history, drawing upon a little evidence and a lot of speculation. Now we can look at something more tangible: the earliest surviving ancestors of our modern Tarot deck, created during the period between 1420 and 1460.
These cards are truly beautiful — radiant miniature scenes on elegant gold-leaf backgrounds, so imaginatively and delicately rendered that some of them compare with the best work of the early Italian Renaissance. There are more than 250 of them extant, apparently from as many as fifteen different packs.
But all are generally referred to as “Visconti-type” since they seem to be connected with the so-named Duke of Milan and his family . . .
It’s Complicated
Let’s start with a historical baseline from Michael Dummett, who gives this account in The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards:
Documentary sources and surviving cards indicate that by the end of the fifteenth century the game of tarot was known in most cities within the quadrilateral formed by Venice, Milan, Florence, and Urbino. The principal centers of the game were Bologna, Ferrara, and Milan, and from these comes the earliest evidence of the existence of tarot cards.
The first certain documentary reference from Bologna is dated 1459. There are several references from Ferrara from 1442 onwards, while from Milan come the earliest surviving tarot cards themselves. These are two hand-painted decks closely related to the Visconti-Sforza deck [the best-known and most complete deck, with seventy-four extant cards].
One, which is known as the Brambilla pack after a former owner, is now in the Pinacoteca de Brera in Milan. It was certainly painted for Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan from 1412 until his death in 1447. The other, the Visconti di Modrone pack, also named after an owner, is in the Cary Collection in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
These three decks are usually referred to as the Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo deck, the Brambilla-Brera deck, and the Cary-Yale deck, respectively.
They are so similar in style that it has been widely believed they were painted by the same artist. But there are various problems with trying to determine exactly who that artist was.
Stuart Kaplan explained it this way in volume 2 of his Encyclopedia of Tarot:
Art historians and researchers of fifteenth-century tarocchi cards face a baffling problem in trying to determine which artist and workshop active in Northern Italy might properly be credited with the illuminated cards. There are no artists’ signatures or initials on any of the cards, and documents, such as letters, court transcripts or manuscripts identifying the artists, are also lacking….
For many years it was thought that the artist of the early tarocchi cards was Marziano of Tortona, a scholar who lived at the court of Duke Filippo Maria Visconti and acted as his secretary. Another artist frequently mentioned was Antonio Cicognara, a painter and miniaturist. A strong case in behalf of the Zavattari brothers was advanced by Giuliana Alger ( 1981 )…
Roberto Longhi (1928) was the first researcher to suggest that Bonifacio Bembo was the tarocchi artist.
Today, Bembo is most frequently named, but Francesco Zavattari also remains a strong candidate. Attribution to Bembo would place the cards after 1440, while an attribution to Zavattari would allow for a date as early as 1420.
It is particularly noteworthy that there are both strong similarities and significant differences among these three decks. The Visconti di Modrone pack, for example, includes among its eleven surviving trumps the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity — cards that are not found in the other two decks and which did not become part of the standardized deck.
The Modrone also appears to have had six court cards for each suit, giving male and female counterparts for each rank. Since none of the extant Visconti-type decks is complete, it’s impossible to know if others followed a similar pattern; but that seems unlikely, since no virtues or additional court cards remain from other packs.
The Visconti di Modrone pack and the Visconti-Sforza pack do share one odd feature: They both have straight swords on the number cards of the Swords suit, while the Brambilla pack has the usual type of curved Italian sword.
But then . . . the Brambilla and the Modrone packs also have something in common. Both have arrows rather than batons on some cards. In the Brambilla pack they are on court cards, while in the Modrone, they are on number cards. Which makes the connection seem even more curious.
As these facts suggest, the composition of the decks must have varied quite a bit at first. All of the twenty-two trump images we are familiar with today (with the possible exceptions of The Devil, Tower, and High Priestess) seem to have been present in all decks from the beginning — but some decks added extra trumps, and/or had more or fewer court cards.
The original images differed considerably in some cases from the standard symbolism with which we are familiar today. The Fool, for example, was typically a tattered beggar, or sometimes a wild man; The Hermit was usually on crutches, sometimes with wings, and sometimes carrying an hourglass to represent the passage of time.
Both these figures were well-known “characters” in early Renaissance art and story, and were depicted elsewhere with similar symbols.
A “Modern” Tarot Emerges
Even though the details of the early Tarot trumps differed from deck to deck, and from then until now, most of the essential iconography was in place from the very beginning and has been passed along intact for several hundred years. By about 1500, the Tarot deck was more or less standardized in its content, for the same images—basically, those listed by the friar—are seen in most sets of trumps from that time on.
Many later decks differed from this “standard” content, but those differences seem to be the effect of political exigencies (the Emperor and Empress became the Grandmother and Grandfather during the French Revolution, for example) or of artistic creativity.
The standardization of the Tarot deck involved more than just the specific images on the cards. There were also such matters as the numbering of the cards, the suits (one type of mid-sixteenth century deck, for example, had peacocks, parrots, lions and monkeys for suit symbols), and the names attributed to the images.
Though there was never one set of “rules” followed by all decks, a general pattern—now known as the Tarot of Marseilles—did evolve, beginning in the late fifteenth century. By the eighteenth century, most decks were of the Marseilles type. The styles of the cards and minor details might differ, but the basic iconography was that established by the cardmakers of Marseilles.
The Marseilles deck introduced changes that resulted in images we are familiar with today. The Fool became a carefree fellow with a pack and a dog or cat, while The Hermit traded his crutches and hourglass for a staff and lantern. The Star, typically represented in early cards by a stylized star (sometimes viewed by a group of astronomers) was for some reason changed to the figure of a nude woman pouring water from two pitchers into a stream or pond.
Similarly, The Moon began as a simple astronomical object, but its image changed as other elements were added during the development of the Marseilles-type deck. The crayfish and towers appeared in the mid-sixteenth century, the dogs were added in the seventeenth century.
Clearly, some of the images which are now seen as puzzling and mysterious may once have been simple references to science, history, or politics. A classic example is The Hanged Man, the card that has provoked perhaps the most speculation of any Tarot image. Is he a pagan symbol, perhaps a sacrifice to Odin? Is he Peter, the disciple who, according to legend, wished to be crucified upside down?
His face is calm, sometimes smiling. Is he a Tantrist, his position — with one leg crossed to create a triangle — symbolic of suspension?
Michael Dummett offers one historical explanation of The Hanged Man’s position:
The hanged man was sometimes called I’impicato and sometimes il traditore. He is shown hanging upside down by one foot, a posture in which traitors were depicted. The walls of the Bargello in Florence were often adorned by such paintings, and the pope ordered the condottiere Muzio Attendolo, Francesco Sforza’s father, to be so represented on all the gates and bridges of Rome; Ludovico Sforza gave a similar order concerning the treacherous governor of Milan, Bernardino da Corte, who surrendered the Castello to the French.
That connection was first pointed out by Gertrude Moakley, another Tarot scholar, in her pathbreaking book The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo. She explains a second mystery — the unlikely presence of the “Papess,” or “Female Pope” — by this means:
The Popess in the Visconti-Sforza tarocchi is not one of these legendary women [such as Pope Joan]. Her religious habit shows that she is of the Umiliata order, probably Sister Manfreda, a relative of the Visconti family who was actually elected Pope by the small Lombard sect of the Guglielmites….
The most enthusiastic of her followers believed that she was the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, sent to inaugurate the new age of the Spirit prophesied by Joachim of Flora…. Naturally, the Inquisition exterminated this new sect, and the “Popess” was burned at the stake in the autumn of 1300.
These historical references are persuasive, and suggest to scholars of the exoteric Tarot (Michael Dummett most notable among them) that the trumps, with their distinctive images, were “invented” in one of the courts of northern Italy, then quickly spread among the nobility.
Origin Stories
A plausible scenario is that some imaginative prince — perhaps one of the d’Estes, who patronized such romantic and fantastical writers as Ariosto and Tasso — decided to add more complexity to the popular games played with four-suited cards. Once the notion of “trumps” was born, the prince may have commissioned a court painter to create suitably intriguing pictures for the new cards.
And since the pastimes of the rich are often eagerly adopted by the not-so-rich, it would at first glance seem reasonable to suppose that the trumps were quickly incorporated into inexpensive printed decks, and so was born the Tarot tradition.
But it may not be that simple — and the paint-to-print scenario raises some questions that will be discussed in the next part of this series.
It was long assumed, however, that the tarot trumps began at court. Gertrude Moakley advanced an influential origin story, arguing that the trump images were derived from floats which made up popular Renaissance parades called “triumphs.” These floats represented virtues, and they were accompanied by walking attendants meant to symbolize the faults or vices over which a particular virtue “triumphed.”
Moakley’s reasoning is that this festival event — particularly as it was allegorically depicted in Petrarch’s late-fourteenth-century poem “I Trionfi” — was translated into a card game, wherein certain cards could “triumph” by taking tricks.
One problem with Moakley’s thesis is that the trump cards don’t seem to fit very exactly the pattern of virtue-over-vice. Moreover, while there are some very definite parallels between Petrarch’s triumphs and the early Tarot trump images (for example, Petrarch’s Cupid, Time, Fortune, Death, and Eternity can be seen as very similar to the cards Love, Father Time, The Wheel of Fortune, Death, and The World), other cards — such as The Fool and The Hanged Man — don’t seem to correspond at all to the triumphs.
And even where there are obvious correspondences, they are not exact. Moakley accounts for this lack of fit by suggesting that the card game was in the nature of a parody or lampoon of the triumph. But it is really very difficult to see the humorous connections that would make the joke a successful one.
So . . . did the Tarot trumps simply turn a popular public entertainment (something like our own holiday parades) into a game that could be played indoors by courtiers in search of amusement?
Were the trumps borrowed from an allegorical play or story that has long been lost?
Or did the Tarot trumps arise from certain ideas and interests that were part of the cultural milieu of Europe, during the transition from late Middle Ages to early Renaissance?
The last question brings us to part three of this series on the historical Tarot.
It will explore some philosophical and imaginative backgrounds that may have shaped the early Tarot.
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