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Tarot Decks

Visconti-Sforza

Also Known As Visconti Tarot · Visconti-Sforza Tarot · Visconti The surviving fifteenth century Milanese decks are cited collectively as the Visconti tarots after the family that commissioned them.

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Origin 1440 to 1470

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 gold ground and painted figures, at a cost that put them far outside ordinary use. The painting is traditionally attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, though some scholars have argued for the Zavattari workshop instead, and the sets are not all by one hand.

The most complete of them, usually called the Pierpont Morgan Bergamo deck, survives incomplete and divided between three owners, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, the Accademia Carrara and the Colleoni family in Bergamo. Several cards are missing outright, among them the Devil and the Tower, so the earliest tarot we have does not fully attest the trump sequence later traditions treat as fixed.

Two things follow that matter for comparison. First, these cards carry no printed numbers and no printed titles on the trumps; the order is reconstructed, and it demonstrably varied between Milan, Ferrara and Bologna. The idea of a single canonical trump order is later than the cards. Second, they were made for a trick-taking game, trionfi, and there is no evidence they were used for divination. Cartomantic and occult readings of the tarot begin in eighteenth-century France with Court de Gebelin and Etteilla, three centuries after these cards were painted.

What survives, exactly. The Pierpont Morgan Bergamo set is 74 cards of an original 78 (20 trumps, 15 court cards and 39 pips): held as 35 at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, 26 at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and 13 in the Colleoni family collection, also in Bergamo. Four cards are gone. Two of them are trumps, the Devil and the Tower; the other two are a court card and a pip, given in the standard published inventories as the Knight of Coins and the Three of Swords. The Morgan's own list of its 35 and the surviving card-by-card photography together confirm the trump losses and the missing pip directly; the identification of the missing court card rests on the published inventories rather than on a collection record this atlas has been able to check, and is flagged here rather than asserted flatly.

Six of the surviving trumps (Fortitude, Temperance, the Star, the Moon, the Sun and the World), are usually assigned on stylistic grounds to a second and later hand, and are understood as replacements painted for cards already lost in the fifteenth century. They are old, but they are not evidence for the deck as first made. The attribution of that second hand is unsettled: an older ascription to Antonio Cicognara has been revised, with Franco dei Russi among the names since proposed. Separately, the Devil and the Tower that appear in modern published facsimiles are twentieth-century paintings made to fill the gaps. They are not fifteenth-century evidence and nothing in this atlas describes them as though they were.

No card in this deck carries a printed number or a printed title. The names used here (The Juggler, The Popess, Time, Love, The Last Judgment), are cataloguing conventions, mostly the Morgan's, and the atlas files each card under its Rider-Waite-Smith name so that the decks can be compared at all. Where a card's place in the trump sequence is given anywhere in this atlas, it is reconstruction.

Facts
Disputed
Artist
The attribution is contested and more than one hand is present 1
The Morgan Library and Museum's own cataloguing and scholarship on its Visconti-Sforza cards, part of the Pierpont Morgan Bergamo deck, documents why the deck's traditional attribution to the painter Bonifacio Bembo has been complicated rather than confirmed by closer study. No contemporary document names the painter of the cards, so attribution rests entirely on connoisseurship, comparing painting style, technique and handling across the individual cards against securely documented works by candidate painters. That comparison finds more than one hand present in the surviving cards, and specialists have reassigned part of the work away from Bembo to Antonio Cicognara and to the Zavattari workshop on stylistic grounds. Because the method is attribution by eye rather than by document, and different specialists have read the same brushwork differently, the painter or painters of the deck remain a genuinely contested question rather than a documented fact.
Artist
Traditionally attributed to Bonifacio Bembo 1
The Morgan Library and Museum's own cataloguing and scholarship on its Visconti-Sforza cards, part of the Pierpont Morgan Bergamo deck, documents why the deck's traditional attribution to the painter Bonifacio Bembo has been complicated rather than confirmed by closer study. No contemporary document names the painter of the cards, so attribution rests entirely on connoisseurship, comparing painting style, technique and handling across the individual cards against securely documented works by candidate painters. That comparison finds more than one hand present in the surviving cards, and specialists have reassigned part of the work away from Bembo to Antonio Cicognara and to the Zavattari workshop on stylistic grounds. Because the method is attribution by eye rather than by document, and different specialists have read the same brushwork differently, the painter or painters of the deck remain a genuinely contested question rather than a documented fact.
Identity
Publication Year
1450 1
Approximate midpoint of the fifteenth century range already recorded under origin-period-start-year and origin-period-end-year, 1440 to 1470; a hand-painted set of this kind has no single date.
Attributions
Publisher
No publisher; a set of individually hand-painted cards commissioned by the Visconti and Sforza rulers of Milan for court use, decades before printing was applied to playing cards. 1
Tradition
Italian Renaissance (pre-occult) 2
Cult
Attributes and Iconography
Hand-painted on heavy card with gold ground; no card carries a printed number or a printed title, so the trump order is a modern reconstruction, known to have varied between Milan, Ferrara and Bologna. Six trumps, Fortitude, Temperance, the Star, the Moon, the Sun and the World, are stylistically a later second hand replacing cards lost in the fifteenth century, and the Devil and the Tower seen in modern facsimiles are twentieth century paintings with no fifteenth century evidence behind them. 1
Origins
Origin Period
1440 to 1470 2
Place of Origin
Milan 2
Creator / Originator
Commissioned by the Visconti and Sforza rulers of Milan 1
Origin of the Name
Named for the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan, whose emblems appear on the cards 1
Deck
Cards in the Deck
78 1
74 cards survive of the Pierpont Morgan Bergamo set; several are lost and a few were replaced in a later hand.
Pip Cards
Non-scenic pips: the suit sign in geometric arrangement 2
Trump Numbering
Trumps unnumbered 2
Different early Italian patterns order them differently
Method
How the Cards Are Read
No reading method is documented; the set was made for the trick-taking game of trionfi, and there is no evidence it was used for divination, which begins in France three centuries later with Court de Gebelin and Etteilla. 1
Learn More
The Visconti-Sforza Cards

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.

What They Show About the Origins of Tarot

These cards are the primary evidence for what tarot was before it was anything esoteric. They show a court game deck: heraldic devices of the ruling family, courtly figures, and a set of trump images drawn from the ordinary visual vocabulary of fifteenth-century Italy, the wheel of fortune, the theological and cardinal virtues, the triumph procession, the danse macabre, the last judgement. There is no Egyptian content, no Kabbalah, no astrological scheme; the numbering and titles are not even fixed, and different early Italian patterns order the trumps differently. Michael Dummett used exactly this material to establish that the trumps are a fifteenth-century Italian invention with an intelligible iconographic context. Anyone told that tarot descends from ancient Egypt or from the Kabbalah can be pointed at these cards, which are the earliest ones there are.

The variation between the Cary-Yale deck's expanded trump set and the more standard structure of the Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo cards is itself part of Michael Dummett's documented evidence that early Italian tarot had no single fixed canonical form even within one court's own commissions, let alone across the different regional patterns, A, B and C in Dummett's own classification, that competed across fifteenth-century Italy before something closer to a standard trump order and count settled. This variability is difficult to reconcile with any claim of a single ancient esoteric source transmitting one fixed, authoritative sequence of trump images and meanings from antiquity, since the earliest surviving physical evidence shows exactly the opposite: regional experimentation and gradual convergence.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

France, Countries

This source names France directly: "the tarot begin in eighteenth-century France with Court de Gebelin and Etteilla, three centuries after these cards were painted. What survives, exactly."

Source Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition
Milan, Cities

This source names Milan directly: "sets made for the ducal court of Milan around the middle of the fifteenth century, on heavy card with gold ground and painted figures, at a cost that put them far outside ordinary use."

Source Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition
New York, Cities

This source names New York directly: "the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, the Accademia Carrara and the Colleoni family in Bergamo."

Source Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition

Disciplines That Use This

Cartomancy, Disciplines

Cartomancy is divination by cards of any kind; these are the decks the atlas holds.

Source A History of the Occult TarotRonald Decker and Michael Dummett
Tarot, Disciplines

The decks the atlas records in full.

Source A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult TarotRonald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett
Sources
1. Visconti-Sforza tarot cards (Pierpont Morgan Bergamo deck)
The Morgan Library and MuseumCollection record for the surviving cardsView the Source
2. The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City
Michael Dummett, Duckworth, 1980Part I, on the fifteenth-century Italian cards and the game of trionfiView the Source
The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume I
Stuart R. Kaplan, U.S. Games Systems, 1978Volume I, the Visconti-Sforza and related Milanese setsView the Source
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