Historical Tarot & Oracle Decks
A structured catalogue of 35 historical tarot, oracle and cartomancy decks, spanning 1442 to 1920. Free to use, including commercially, with attribution.
35 rows · 32 with open scans · CC BY 4.0
What this is
Tarot's documentary history is scattered across museum collections, library catalogues and out-of-print scholarship. The Visconti-Sforza alone is split between the Morgan Library in New York, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and the Colleoni family. This pulls the basic facts of 35 decks into one machine-readable place so they can be searched, cited and built on.
It is also a corrective to a common assumption: tarot was a card game in Italian courts for roughly three hundred years before Etteilla popularised its use for fortune-telling in the 1780s. Both eras are here.
Every row links to its full catalogue entry, which carries the provenance and a card-by-card gallery.
Fields
| field | meaning |
|---|---|
slug | stable identifier, matching the catalogue entry |
name | the deck's common name |
archive_no | its position in the catalogue, oldest first |
approx_date | date or period as the sources give it |
year_from | earliest year, as a number, for sorting |
century | century of production, colloquially reckoned |
kind | tarot or oracle |
cards_total | cards in the complete deck |
cards_surviving | cards known to survive |
cards_lost | cards recorded as lost |
maker | maker or workshop, where known |
origin | where it was made, and where it is held now |
description | what the deck is, in a sentence |
holding_source | the institution whose scans the entry uses |
source_url | that institution’s record |
scans_available | yes, or no where no open scans exist |
url | the full catalogue entry |
An empty field always means not recorded, never zero. Survival counts are given only where a source states them, and are left blank for the decks with no open scans.
Preview
| name | date | kind | cards | description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Cary-Yale Visconti Tarot | c. 1442-1447 | tarot | 67 of 68 | Very likely the oldest tarot cards in existence: sixty-seven gilded giants from the Visconti court, with female knights in the suits and three virtues no later deck kept. |
| The Visconti-Sforza Tarot | c. 1450s | tarot | 74 of 78 | Painted and gilded for the dukes of Milan around the 1450s, this is the oldest tarot that survives nearly whole, and the pattern five centuries of decks descend from. |
| The Charles VI Tarot | c. 1460 | tarot | 17 | Seventeen gilded cards once sold to history as the first tarot ever painted, for a mad king in 1392; the truth is later, Italian, and no less splendid. |
| The Mantegna Tarocchi | c. 1465 | engravings | 50 | Fifty engravings from Ferrara around 1465 that are not by Mantegna and were never a tarot: a printed ladder from the beggar to God, with the Muses, the liberal arts, the virtues and the planets in between. |
| The Este Tarot | c. 1473 | tarot | 16 | Sixteen gilded survivors of a Ferrarese court tarot from about 1473: eight trumps and eight courts on punched gold, with the century's cruelest Fool. |
| The Sola Busca Tarot | c. 1491 | tarot | 78 | The oldest complete tarot deck in the world, and the first with a picture on every card. Its trumps are Roman soldiers with names, its minors are scenes, and one of them became the most copied card in tarot. |
| The Cary Sheet | c. 1500 | tarot | 7 | One uncut sheet from Milan, about 1500, and on it the Marseille tarot being born: the oldest known ancestor of the pattern, crayfish and all. |
| The Tarot de Paris | c. 1600-1650 | tarot | 78 | The oldest complete French tarot, and the strangest: an early 1600s Paris pack whose maker signed FAICT A PARIS PAR and never filled in his name. |
First 8 rows of 35, oldest first.
Licence and citation
Released under CC BY 4.0. Use it freely, including commercially, as long as you credit it.
Historical Tarot & Oracle Decks catalogue, compiled from The Archive at https://foolmade.art/archive, licensed CC BY 4.0.
The catalogue text is ours to license. The deck photographs it points at belong to the institutions listed in holding_source, each under its own terms.
Compiled from The Archive, where every deck has a full entry.