The First Tarot Deck

The first intriguing hint as to the identity of the inventor of tarot was glimpsed in a
letter written by a Venetian military captain, Jacopo Antonio Marcello. Dated 1449,
the letter accompanied a gift of tarot cards (carte de trionf) destined for Queen Isabella
of Anjou, the consort of King René I, Duke of Lorraine. Marcello claimed the deck
had been painted by the famous artist Michelino da Besozzo and invented by Duke
Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan. Unfortunately, the deck of cards did not survive
but the letter and an explanatory treatise in Latin written by Duke Visconti’s
secretary, Marziano da Tortono, still do. In his letter, Marcello reported that he had
originally secured a pack of tarot cards for the Queen but was disappointed with
their poor quality. He had heard of the deck painted by Michelino da Besozzo for
Duke Visconti and resolved to locate it. He also described the treatise by Marziano
and stated that the secretary had also been an expert in astrology.
Marziano, in his treatise Tractatus de Deificatione Sexdecim Heroum, claimed the idea
for the deck originated with Duke Filippo Maria Visconti and its creation was
realised by the celebrated artist, Michelino da Besozzo. Marziano’s work was the
first to mention ‘trionfi in reference to a card game. The pack thus described would
have to have been created sometime before 1425, the year in which Marziano died,
and probably sometime between 1414 and 1418. If these dates were correct, then
Duke Visconti could have been as young as twenty-two when this deck was created,
keeping in mind he became the ruler of Milan when he was just twenty, after the
death of his brother, Giovanni Maria.
Writing around 1440, Duke Visconti’s biographer Decembrio, also described a
deck of cards and it seems probable that this deck was the one mentioned in both
Marcello’s letter and Marziano’s treatise. The relevant passage read as follows:

Filippo Maria from youth was in the habit of playing games of various
kinds. Sometimes he exercised with the spear, sometimes with the ball, but
chiefly played that type of game which uses painted images, to which he
was so immensely attracted that he bought a whole set of them for 1500 gold
pieces, the person responsible being primarily his secretary Mariano of
Tortona, who arranged for the images of gods, and figures of animals and
birds dependent on them, with the greatest intelligence.
Marziano divided his manuscript into two sections: the first was a preface or
Prohemiuni which detailed the deck’s structure and the second described in detail the
subject of each of the cards. The deck was described as having ‘sixteen celestial
princes and barons’ (sexdecim coeli pnncipes ac barones) and four kings. Though these
sixteen cards were organised sequentially, they were also divided into four orders,
namely Virtues, Riches, Virginities and Pleasures. The structure was as follows:

Virtues Riches Virginities Pleasures

1. Jupiter 2. Juno 3. Pallas 4. Venus

5. Apollo 6. Neptunus 7. Diana 8. Bacchus

9. Mercurius 10. Mars 11. Vesta 12. Ceres

13. Hercules 14. Eolus 15. Daphnes 16. Cupido

Table 2: The alignment of the ‘celestial princes and barons’

with the four orders.

Arranged below these cards were four Birds which corresponded with the four
orders’ meanings, hence the Eagle was associated with Virtues; the Phoenix with
Riches, the Turtle with Virginities; and the Dove with Pleasures.40 Marziano stated
that no order of Bird had any power over any other in play, probably inferring that
none had any trick-taking power over another during the game. Marziano explicitly
mentioned just twenty-four cards but his comments about Birds ‘taking power’
implied the presence of other cards. He remarked that this power was direct for
Eagles and Turtles and reversed for Phoenixes and Doves. He probably intended
that cards in the Eagle and Turtle suits ascended in order of value (i.e. a five was
ranked above a three) while cards in the Phoenix and Dove suits followed a
descending order (i.e. a five was less valuable than a three). This was a common
practice in fifteenth-century Italy and Spain. If the Bird suits had a forward or
backward order, there must have been several cards in each suit group, not just a
single King. On the basis of this evidence, Pratesi believed that the deck possessed
numeral cards, although neither Marziano nor Marcello explicitly mentioned them.
In this unique deck, the deities were ranked higher than the orders of Birds and
Kings, resembling the trumps of a traditional tarot deck. The deities belonged to
one or another of the suits even though they followed a strict order of one to
sixteen. Elsewhere in the manuscript, Marziano stated that there were several
gods of the same name. For example, he said that there were three Jupiters: two
from Arcadia and the other from Crete. The exact meaning of these statements
was probably obvious when the treatise was read while having access to the deck,
but when considered without it, it is difficult to ascertain the exact composition
of the deck. In the second section of Marziano’s treatise, he described each of the
sixteen classical figures, providing detail about their genealogy, the sphere of
human activity governed by each and the attributes which distinguished them.
The emphasis on certain attributes such as dress, physique and setting was
intended to correspond with the cards painted by Michelino.
There is little doubt that the deck described by Marziano differed markedly
from that which became standardised as tarot. However, it could have represented
an intermediate stage between playing cards and cartes da trionfi. Though the
sixteen deities were not represented as trumps in later tarot decks, there was some
resemblance between the suits of Virtues, Riches, Virginities and Pleasures with
those of both the regular tarot deck and regular playing cards. Pratesi concluded
that the denari (Coins) corresponded with Riches; spade (Swords) inspired Virtues;
coppes (Cups) inspired Pleasures; and bastoni (Batons) inspired Virginities.
In his letter to King René of 1449, Jacopo Marcello admitted he had augmented
Michelino’s deck with some high cards, seemingly to make it compatible with
games played with the seventy-eight card tarot deck. As only high cards were
mentioned, Pratesi speculated that the deck already contained pip and court cards,
needing only six trumps to equal the seventy- eight-card deck. Interestingly, it
was on this basis that Michael Dummett denied that the deck belonged in the
genealogy of tarot as it had fewer than twenty-two trump cards and its trump
subjects were not those of the later, standardised deck.
The administrative documents of the Northern Italian courts indicated that there
were a plethora of hand-painted decks produced between the time of Marcello’s
letter and the end of the fifteenth century; with about twenty incomplete packs
surviving. The earliest extant packs were from the court of Milan. Apart from a
general similarity in structure confined to pip cards distributed across four (non-
standard) suits and an additional ‘suit’ of trump cards, they did not closely resemble
the pack described in Marziano’s treatise or Marcello’s letter. Of the twenty
fragmentary packs, three are of particular interest, being the oldest and most
complete. All of these decks featured pip cards distributed through the traditional
Latin suits of Coins, Swords, Cups and Batons, though the depiction of the suit signs
varied between the decks. All were believed to have been painted by Bonifacio
Bembo though other artists have been nominated. Two of the decks were created
for Duke Filippo Maria Visconti and the other for Francesco Sforza, who
subsequently ruled Milan and married Filippo’s illegitimate daughter, Bianca
Visconti.
The first of these, the Visconti di Modrone pack named for a former owner, is
believed to be the oldest extant deck.51 Its structure differed markedly from the
newer, standardised tarot decks so that it can be supposed that a regular form had
not yet been established. Sixty-seven cards survived including eleven trumps: the
Empress, the Emperor, Love, Fortitude, Faith, Hope, Charity, the Chariot, Death,
the Angel and the World. The Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity were
not usual subjects for tarot trumps. It is also reasonable to suppose that as the
sequence contained the Cardinal Virtue of Fortitude, it may have also contained
Temperance, Prudence and Justice as the remaining Cardinal Virtues. Though fifty-
six pip cards survived, they were somewhat unusual in that there were male and
female counterparts for each court rank, resulting in six court cards for each suit.
This deck featured straight blades on the cards of the Swords suit, arrows replaced
the Batons on some of the cards of that suit and imprints of Filippo Maria’s gold
florin were seen in the Coins suit. The second deck made for Duke Filippo Maria
Visconti is known as the Brambilla pack after a former owner, and was thought to
have been painted between 1442 and 1445. Of the trump cards, only the Emperor
and the Wheel of Fortune have survived. This deck featured arrows rather than
Batons on the court cards and imprints of Duke Visconti’s florin on the Coins suit.
The third pack, known as the Visconti-Sforza deck, was painted for Francesco
Sforza and his wife Bianca. It is the most recent and most complete of the three
decks. The Fool, nineteen trump cards and fifty-four pip cards survive. The Devil
and the Tower were missing from the trumps and six cards were obviously later
additions. These were Temperance, Fortitude, the Star, the Moon, the Sun and the
World.59 The suit of Swords in this deck featured weapons with straight blades as
with the Visconti di Modrone pack. As with the Brambilla pack, the Visconti
emblems were found on the Cups and Coins suits but the Sforza emblems were
found on the other two suits. It was thought that the original deck was painted by
Bonifacio Bembo, though the identity of the artist who painted the later cards
remains unknown. Interestingly, it was the Visconti-Sforza deck that has been the
model for most subsequent decks.
It seems probable that tarot was invented at the Court of Milan either for or by
Duke Filippo Maria Visconti as stated by Jacopo Antonio Marcello in his letter to
Queen Isabella. It is unimportant that the identity of tarot’s creator cannot be
confirmed. The deck, if not invented by Duke Visconti, was certainly crafted for
him and the symbolism displayed on the trump cards undoubtedly was devised to
be of particular relevance to him. The oldest extant tarot decks come from Milan
and the earliest documents that mention the pack also come from the court of that
northern Italian city as well as Ferrara. The progenitor of the standard tarot deck was
that painted by Michelino da Besozzo depicting gods and birds, described by
Marcello in his letter and detailed in Marziano da Tortona’s explanatory treatise.
The Visconti di Modrone pack, again from the Milanese court, was a further
experimentation with an ordinary playing card deck augmented by trump or
‘triumph’ cards, before the tarot pack became standardised as the ViscontiSforza
deck with the familiar trump subjects.