The Visconti-Sforza cards are the oldest substantially surviving tarot: a group of related hand-painted sets made for the ducal court of Milan around the middle of the fifteenth century, on heavy card with tooled gold grounds and painted in tempera, of a size and quality that make them luxury objects rather than playing equipment. The best known set, sometimes called the Pierpont Morgan Bergamo deck, is divided between the Morgan Library in New York, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and the Colleoni family; several cards are missing and a few were replaced in a later hand. The painting is traditionally attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, though the attribution is contested and more than one hand is present. They were made for the family of Filippo Maria Visconti and of Francesco Sforza, whose emblems appear on them.
Two of the surviving Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo trump cards, the Devil and the Tower, are missing from the original fifteenth-century set entirely and were supplied later, in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, by a different hand working in an evidently later style, a gap and replacement noted by essentially every art-historical study of the deck. A separate and earlier related set, the Cary-Yale Visconti deck, held today at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, shows a still more elaborate trump structure, including cards for the theological virtues Faith, Hope and Charity alongside the cardinal virtues, evidence that the trump sequence had not yet standardised into the fixed twenty-two-card structure later tarot decks would inherit.