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Sabio Tarot · History and curiosities

By Sabio Tarot

Where and when did the first tarot decks appear?

A card painted around 1450 and preserved in a museum shows that someone made and used tarot cards at that time. On its own, it does not show that tarot was invented there and then. This distinction is the most honest place to begin a discussion of its origins.

The earliest known references cluster in the 1440s and 1450s in a part of northern Italy that includes Venice, Milan, Florence and Urbino, according to research published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The game's complexity by that point suggests earlier development, but it does not let us date a first game precisely. Surviving decks offer a different kind of evidence: physical objects whose images, techniques and provenance can be studied.

Before looking for “the first tarot deck”

Playing cards existed before the earliest tarot records. The Italian suits of Cups, Swords, Wands and Coins were already part of that world of games. The new feature we recognise in tarot is the addition of pictorial trumps and the Fool to the suited cards. The Met explains the usual structure of 56 suited cards, 21 trumps and a Fool, while warning that some early decks do not fit the model without qualification.

There are therefore at least three different questions:

  1. What is the earliest written reference known to us today?
  2. What is the oldest physical card that has survived?
  3. When was the game first devised?

These questions are not interchangeable. A written reference may have been lost; a deck may have circulated long before anyone described it; and keeping one card does not mean keeping the whole box or the rules used by its players. The V&A identifies four painted and gilded Italian cards from around 1490 in its collection, while the Met describes older Milanese sets. Each object illuminates part of the story, not the exact moment it began.

Workshops and courts in northern Italy

Among the luxury sets of the fifteenth century are those associated with Milan's Visconti and Sforza families. The Met attributes three surviving decks to the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo, although attributing an object to a workshop does not tell us who painted each card. One deck linked to Filippo Maria Visconti has 69 cards preserved at Yale's Beinecke Library. Another, the Visconti-Sforza, is now divided between Bergamo's Accademia Carrara and New York's Morgan Library & Museum.

These sets show a courtly setting able to commission elaborate painted cards with gilded backgrounds. They do not prove that every fifteenth-century tarot deck was a luxury object reserved for one family. The surviving sample is skewed: valuable pieces are more likely to reach a museum than cards worn out through everyday use.

The Met also documents European playing cards made with engraving and woodcuts. Different techniques existed alongside one another, so the history of lavish images should be distinguished from the wider circulation of the game.

What we can say about divination

The early evidence presents tarot as a trick-taking game. A trump had a place in the game's hierarchy; its image might be familiar to players without serving as a prediction. Tarot's association with cartomancy grew centuries later. The V&A dates divinatory uses to the late eighteenth century, and the Met describes their broad spread in the nineteenth. These claims do not conflict: the earliest known use and later popularisation are different milestones.

“Tarot was created for divination” projects a later practice back into an original intention that the cited sources do not support. “Tarot was never used for divination” would also be false of its later history. The more accurate statement is more interesting: the earliest evidence belongs to a game, and cartomancy subsequently changed how those cards were used and understood.

A check you can make yourself

Find a card in a museum catalogue with a description, approximate date and provenance. Write down which details can be observed—material, image, number and inscription—and which are hypotheses, such as who used it or what they thought when looking at it. Then compare that record with the corresponding card in your current deck. You may find similarities of form without finding an unbroken chain of meaning.

To understand what the trumps did, continue with tarot before divination. If you want to study a contemporary deck, the history of tarot guide provides a map, while a manual for your edition can explain how it uses the images.

Why “first deck” has no single answer

When a museum dates a card “around 1450”, it makes an attribution based on the object's properties and the documentation available. It does not establish the day on which someone first played with it. A card may also have belonged to a set that no longer survives in full. If a general article calls an incomplete deck “the first ever”, ask whether it means first documented, first surviving, first complete or the first modern reconstruction of an older pattern.

The Visconti examples let us practise asking these questions. Some sets can be linked to particular people and workshops; their dates are approximate, and their surviving cards are held by different institutions. Attribution to a court or workshop gives a plausible production context. It does not prove that the idea of a trump was invented there or that nobody played outside that circle. The concentration of known references across several northern Italian cities, noted by the Met, suggests studying a network of circulation rather than a single founding scene.

It also matters that tarot cards are not the same thing as all playing cards. Suits came first in the gaming tradition, and the addition of trumps changed the rules. An image of an early Cups card therefore does not automatically establish the existence of a complete tarot deck. To identify the set, we need a connection to trumps, records of the deck or a reliable inventory. The word “tarot” on a modern shop listing cannot fill gaps in what we know about an old object.

How to read a claim about tarot's origins

Make a three-column check. Write the claim you found, the object or document that supports it, and what that evidence actually allows you to conclude. For example, “there were tarot decks in Milan around the middle of the fifteenth century” may be supported by catalogued Milanese cards. “One person in Milan invented tarot in an exact year” needs further evidence that those cards do not provide. If the second column is empty, keep the idea as a hypothesis or tradition rather than an established date.

This exercise does not make tarot less appealing. It sharpens what we do know: over centuries, its images changed hands, production techniques and uses. For a reader today, this explains why a book about a modern edition can be helpful without pretending to recover the original thoughts of a painter in 1450.

Sources consulted