The Cary-Yale Visconti Tarot

Before the Visconti-Sforza tarot there was this one. Painted in Milan in the 1440s, probably in the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo, the deck scholars call the Cary-Yale or Visconti di Modrone is very likely the oldest surviving tarot in the world, and it is also the strangest. The cards are enormous, nineteen centimeters tall, every one on a ground of punched and gilded gesso, and the deck they belonged to was not the 78-card pack anything else descends from. The courts hold six figures per suit, king, queen, and a knight and page in both male and female form, ladies riding armed beside the men. And among the trumps stand Faith, Hope and Charity, the three theological virtues, which no other tarot ever kept.

Sixty-seven cards survive at Yale: eleven trumps, seventeen courts and thirty-nine pips. The Love card, with its canopy hung with Visconti heraldry and its blindfolded Cupid, has long suggested a wedding commission; the marriage of Bianca Maria Visconti to Francesco Sforza in 1441 falls exactly in the window, though the argument stays circumstantial. Whatever the occasion, the theology is deliberate: with the cardinal virtue Fortitude among the trumps and the theological three besides, the deck reads as much like an altarpiece dealt into cards as a game.

The experiment did not take. When the same court ordered the Visconti-Sforza deck a few years later, the female knights were gone, the virtues trimmed back, and the structure had settled toward the tarot everyone now knows. This deck is the road not taken, kept whole enough at the Beinecke Library to walk it.