Tarot cards look ancient and secret, and part of that look was added after the fact. The cards began around 1440 as a luxury game for the dukes of Milan. The idea that they hid the wisdom of ancient Egypt came only in 1781, from a scholar in Paris, decades before anyone could read a hieroglyph.
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From a Card Game to a Picture Language
Tarot did not begin as a way of reading the future. It began in northern Italy as a card game: an ordinary pack with an extra row of picture cards, the trumps, that beat every other card. The first ones were painted by hand and laid with gold leaf, like the pages of a precious book.
Printing then made the game cheap. By about 1500 the trumps were printed by the sheet, and card makers copied the same figures for three centuries. Fortune-telling attached itself to these pictures only in the 1780s, and most of the meanings read in them today date from then.
That is why tarot has no single style, only the style of whoever made each deck. The cards below were chosen for what each picture says about its maker and its first owner, from a prince's gilded game to a painter's private notebook.
12. Unknown workshop, The Fool, from the so-called Charles VI tarot (about 1475 to 1500)
A giant in a jester's cap grins down at four boys gathering stones around his bare feet. Below a ragged blue cape he wears only a loincloth, and a chain of gold balls hangs across his chest. Behind him there is no sky and no wall, only gold, tooled into a pattern like brocade.
For a long time, this fool was thought to have belonged to a king. Charles VI of France, remembered for the bouts of madness that broke up his reign, was believed to have ordered the deck from a painter called Jacquemin Gringonneur. The card and the other survivors of its deck, kept in Paris at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, came to be called the Charles VI tarot, or the Gringonneur deck.
The appeal of that story is easy to see. A fool painted for a mad king was too good for writers to resist, and each one repeated it. Yet nothing ties these cards to Charles VI. Historians now give them to an anonymous workshop in northern Italy and date them between 1475 and 1500, decades after the king's death.
I like the card better without its royal legend. What remains is one of the liveliest fools of the Renaissance, painted by someone whose name nobody kept. The legend was also the first sign of a wish that never left tarot: people wanted the cards to come from somewhere grander than a card table.
At a Glance
Artist: Unknown workshop, northern Italy
Made: About 1475 to 1500
Medium: Tempera and gold on paper mounted on card
Size: Not published
Where to see it: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
11. Unknown Ferrarese engraver, Saturn, from the so-called Mantegna Tarocchi (about 1465)
Saturn, the god who ate his own children, leans on a sickle with one of them in his hands, about to devour it. Four more sit at his feet. For centuries this print has carried a name that is wrong twice over.