a guide to tarot art — where the real cards live

Tarot’s images are usually encountered at pocket size, on coated card stock. It is easy to forget that the earliest tarot cards were luxury paintings — commissioned by dukes, layered in gold leaf, made by artists with workshop training and court salaries. This guide covers the major surviving bodies of tarot art, and the institutions where you can see them.

The fifteenth century: cards for dukes

Tarot appears in northern Italy in the 1430s–40s, as a trick-taking card game (the historical record is unambiguous on this; see Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot, 1980 — divinatory use comes centuries later). The earliest surviving decks were made for the Visconti and Sforza courts of Milan.

The Visconti-Sforza deck (c. 1450) — attributed to Bonifacio Bembo — is the most famous. Its 74 surviving cards are split three ways: 35 at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 26 at the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, 13 with the Colleoni family. Gold-ground, hand-painted, nearly A5-sized: these are miniature panel paintings.

The Cary-Yale Visconti deck (c. 1440s) — possibly the oldest surviving tarot — lives in the Cary Collection of Playing Cards at Yale’s Beinecke Library, which is also one of the world’s great playing-card research collections.

The so-called “Charles VI” tarot (Italian, late 15th c., misattributed for centuries to France’s mad king) is at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

The Sola Busca (c. 1490s) — at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan — is the earliest deck with fully illustrated minor arcana, engraved rather than painted. Four centuries later, Pamela Colman Smith studied photographs of it at the British Museum; several of her 1909 minors (the Three of Swords most visibly) descend directly from it.

Now in New York: the Morgan exhibition (through October 4, 2026)

The Morgan Library & Museum is currently showing Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions (June 26 – October 4, 2026): around 380 works tracing the cards from the Milanese courts to contemporary art. It reunites the Morgan’s Visconti-Sforza cards with the Accademia Carrara’s — the first time most of the deck has been shown together in North America — then follows tarot’s afterlife through Pamela Colman Smith’s 1909 deck and artists including Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Niki de Saint Phalle, Betye Saar and Chris Ofili. If one exhibition justifies a trip, it is this one.

Turin: the archive, not a museum

Turin is often mentioned as a tarot city, and the association is real but often misstated — there is no dedicated tarot museum there. What Turin has is the paper trail: the Academy of Sciences of Turin preserves documents and uncut woodcut sheets from the Piedmontese tarot industry, whose “golden age” began around 1826 with manufacturers like Vergnano (Turin was the capital of the Kingdom of Savoy, and its card-makers supplied the tarocco piemontese still played today). And at the Venaria royal complex outside the city, the Centro Conservazione e Restauro — housed in former royal stables — conducts research and restoration on historical decks.

The dedicated museums

Museo Internazionale dei Tarocchi (Riola, near Bologna, Italy) — the world’s dedicated tarot museum, with a large collection spanning historical and artist decks.
Musée Français de la Carte à Jouer (Issy-les-Moulineaux, Paris) — France’s playing-card museum; strong on the Tarot de Marseille lineage, the pattern that carried tarot through the 17th–18th centuries.
Museo Fournier de Naipes (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) — one of the largest playing-card collections in the world.
The British Museum, London — holds early printed Italian sheets and the collection Pamela Colman Smith consulted.

1909: the deck that ate the twentieth century

The classic 1909 deck — A.E. Waite directing, Pamela Colman Smith drawing all 78 images in roughly six months for a flat fee — is the reason most people picture tarot the way they do. Its innovation was artistic: fully illustrated scenic minors (the Sola Busca’s idea, democratized). The 1909 artwork is public domain in the US and EU; Smith’s name, restored to the deck’s title only in recent decades, is now standard usage in scholarship.

Our own deck redraws the 1909 compositions as original line art — which puts it, knowingly, inside this six-century conversation between the game and the gallery.

Sources. Morgan Library — Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions · The Art Newspaper on the exhibition · Smithsonian Magazine on the show · Bologna Welcome — Museo Internazionale dei Tarocchi · World of Playing Cards — Vergnano Tarot, Turin · V&A — A history of tarot cards · Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Helen Farley, A Cultural History of Tarot (2009).