The Visconti-Sforza Tarot: a Masterpiece of Lombard Miniature Painting
The 74 surviving cards in New York and Bergamo, Bonifacio Bembo, Petrarch's Triumphs and the late birth of the esoteric myth of the tarot.
Long before becoming an instrument of divination, tarot cards were a game for the Italian courts of the fifteenth century. The most famous deck of that period is the one known as Visconti-Sforza, made in Milan around the middle of the century for the family of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti, who married in 1441. Its cards, painted in tempera on a gold ground, are now regarded as masterpieces of Lombard miniature painting.
A deck scattered between two cities
Of the original deck, which must have numbered 78 cards, 74 survive. They are divided between the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which owns the largest share, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and a private collection in Bergamo. Among the trump figures the Devil and the Tower are missing, and their absence has fuelled many hypotheses, although they are probably just accidental losses. Other Visconti decks survive from the same period, such as the so-called Cary-Yale deck, kept at Yale University's Beinecke Library.
The cards measure about seventeen centimetres high by nine wide and are made of thick pasteboard, painted and decorated with gold and silver leaf worked with punches. The figures wear courtly dress, and many bear the emblems of the two houses, such as the radiant sun, the three interlaced rings and the dove, together with the motto «A bon droyt».
Bonifacio Bembo and the question of hands
Most of the cards are attributed, on stylistic grounds, to Bonifacio Bembo, a painter from Cremona who worked for the Sforza. Six cards, namely Fortitude, Temperance, the Star, the Moon, the Sun and the World, show a different style, however, and have been assigned to another artist, perhaps working later. Some scholars have proposed the name of Antonio Cicognara, while others think of an assistant who remains anonymous. Bembo is also credited with the portraits of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti in the Pinacoteca di Brera, useful for stylistic comparison.
Triumphs, not prophecies
In the fifteenth century these decks were called «cards of triumphs», and the triumphs were the picture cards that prevailed over the others in play. The series includes figures such as the Magician, the Empress, the Emperor, the Pope, Love, the Chariot, the Wheel of Fortune, the Old Man, the Hanged Man, Death and Judgement. Their order recalled the allegorical processions of Petrarch's Triumphs, where Love is defeated by Chastity, Chastity by Death and Death by Fame.
Only in the eighteenth century, with the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin, did the idea arise that the tarot preserved an ancient Egyptian wisdom, and from then on the cards were systematically used in cartomancy and occultism. The Visconti-Sforza deck, studied in depth in the twentieth century, has in turn been reread in esoteric terms, but for its patrons it was an object of luxury, play and dynastic celebration.
Seen up close, the cards reveal the culture of a Renaissance court: the cardinal virtues, dynastic symbols and moral and cosmic allegories coexist with the fashion and goldsmith's work of the time. This is why the Visconti-Sforza deck should be regarded not only as the ancestor of modern tarot but as a work of art in its own right, a witness to how images made for play could condense an entire vision of the world.