Visconti
This beautiful deck takes the Reader back to Renaissance Italy, providing a vivid link with the beginnings of Tarot's history.
Recreating the Deck
Today, the Visconti cards have been painstakingly restored for use by modern Tarot Readers. Lo Scarabeo entrusted the task of reproducing the deck to renowned Bulgarian miniaturist Atanas Alexander Atanassov, an expert in Renaissance painting.
No details were overlooked - the colours, symbols and poses of the characters faithfully reflect the original figures. Unfortunately, over the centuries, four cards from the original deck have been lost (including Major Arcana cards the Devil and the Tower - see Missing Cards below).
Fresh Start
The Visconti Tarot cards can be a great first deck for beginners. A good exercise is to look at the cards one by one, trying to imagine their meaning based solely on what the picture suggests.
With a notebook to hand, the beginner can jot down every new meaning that comes to mind. After a while, they will have a list of personal meanings for each card. As well as being useful when reading the cards, the list is an excellent way for beginners to chart their progress and insights.
Major Benefit
The Visconti deck is helpful when ou only want to use the Major Arcana. Because the deck is sol old, it includes early Tarot card symbolisems that c;early express the essence of the Arcana and tehir original meanings. Such cards allow Readers to travel back in their minds to a time before all of the transformations that Tarot has been through over the centuries.
The 22 Major Arcana cards are considered by many Tarot experts as 'archetypal'. This means that they feature archetypes that date back to the most ancient of times and diverse of cultures, presented in the Visconti Tarot in their purest expression. These images are closely linked to a religious view of the world. Every card is the allegorical representation of easily recognisable Christian moral concepts. An expert Reader can try to associate a religious meaning to each card. For example, the High Priestess represents Faith, one of the theological virtues.
A Historic Trail
The original deck of the Visconti-Sforza is truly one of a kind - a real Renaissance work of art. Today, the 74 cards still in existence are kept in three museums - the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, Italy (26 cards), the Morgan Library & Museum in New York (35 cards) and a private collection belonging to the Colleoni family (13 cards), also in Bergamo.
In the archives of the Visconti and Sforza families, there is ni information about the cards. This is almost certainly owing to the repeated detruction that the city of Milan has undergone over the centuries. The earliest evidence of the cards goes back to the 17th century, when Count Ambivini gave 74 illuminated cards to the Donati family. The Donatis, in turn, sold them to Count Alessandro Colleoni from Bergamo at the end of the 19th century, who, after a brief analysis of the heraldic symbols on some of the cards, named them the Visconti Tarot cards.
Later, in exchange for some pieces of art, Count Colleoni offered 26 cards to a friend, Count Francesco Baglioni. These included five Major Arcana, seven Court cards and 14 numeral cards. When Baglioni died in 1900, he left his entire collection to the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo.
The 15 Major Arcana (eight Court cards and 12 number cards) were sold by the Colleoni family in 1911 to the Morgan Library Museum in New York. Colleoni's descendants still own 13 numeral cards today.
Playing Cards
In the 1450s, when the Visconti-Sforza deck was created, tarot cards were not yet used as a divinatory tool. Instead, the 22 trump cards (or Major Arcana) were used to play a game, whic dates back to around 1440. The trumps were then combined with number cards, which had been widespread in Italy from at least 1370. This is how the Tarot game, a test of memory and strategy more than luck, waborn. Only at the ned of the 18th century did Tarot decks begin to be used for looking into the future and exploring the self.
The Missing Cards
Unfortunately, the original Vsconti deck, which is now held n Bergamo, Italy, and New York City, is incomplete. It lacks four cards - the Devil, the Tower, the Three of Swords and the Knight of Pentacles.
To recreate the missing cards, inspiration was taken from other 15th-centruy Italian artisitc traditions.
For example, the Devil and Tower cards were based on the so-called 'Rosenwalk Sheet', which was printed in Bologna in northern Italy at the end of the 15h century. This invaluable resource for Tarot historians depicts an almost complete print of the trump cards.
The Cups
The Pentacles
The Wands
The Swords
Updated
29 January 2025 at 22:04:11