VISCONTI-SFORZA TAROT

The Visconti-Sforza Tarot

Bonifacio Bembo’s Fifteenth-Century Masterwork

78 Cards · Bonifacio Bembo · Milan, c. 1450

The Visconti-Sforza tarot is a collection of hand-painted cards created in Milan between approximately 1440 and 1480 for the ruling Visconti and Sforza families. It is one of the oldest substantially complete tarot decks in existence and a masterpiece of fifteenth-century Italian art.

Curious to read these historic cards yourself? You can learn Tarot online with our faculty of published authors, from the very first card to the entire deck.

In a climate-controlled vault at the Morgan Library in New York, a group of painted cards rests in archival tissue. They are small · roughly the size of a modern playing card, but heavier and stiffer · and their surfaces still hold real gold. Their reds, blues, and malachite greens have survived nearly six hundred years of being dealt, traded, inherited, and very nearly forgotten.

These are the Visconti-Sforza tarot cards: the most complete of the earliest surviving tarots, and the single most important physical reference point for anyone tracing where the tarot began.

Painted by the Cremonese court artist Bonifacio Bembo and his workshop for the ruling house of Milan around 1450, the deck was never an instrument of divination · that idea arrived more than three centuries later. It was a luxury game, a work of art, and a mirror of the court that paid for it. Of an original 78 cards, 74 survive, divided between the Morgan Library and the city of Bergamo. Four are lost. This guide is a complete, source-grounded journey through the deck · its dynasty, its painter, its materials, its structure, the four missing cards, and a card-by-card index to all 78.

In This Guide

The Dynasty: Visconti and Sforza
The Artist: Bembo, and the Cicognara Myth
The Commission and the Dating Problem
Three Collections, One Deck
Gold Leaf and Tempera: Technique
The Four Lost Cards
Structure of the Deck
The Non-Scenic Pips: A 460-Year Overlay
Complete Card Index · All 78
Influence on Later Traditions
Frequently Asked Questions
Study the Visconti-Sforza Tradition

Free Companion PDF

Download the Complete Illustrated Companion

A free 30-page PDF · all 78 cards with images, museum locations, and commentary · print it or read alongside this guide.

Download the Free Companion (PDF) →

The Dynasty: Visconti and Sforza

The story of the Visconti-Sforza tarot begins not with cards but with power.

Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Duchy of Milan was held by two intertwined dynasties whose marriages and wars shaped northern Italy. The Visconti had ruled Milan since the late thirteenth century, accumulating territory, wealth, and a reputation for both lavish patronage and ruthless statecraft. By the early fifteenth century the duchy was held by Filippo Maria Visconti, last of the male Visconti line · a reclusive, suspicious ruler who nonetheless kept one of Europe’s most splendid courts and used luxury objects as instruments of policy.

Filippo Maria’s only surviving child, Bianca Maria Visconti, was born illegitimate and later legitimised. Her 1441 marriage to Francesco Sforza · a brilliant condottiero (mercenary commander) of modest birth · was among the most consequential unions of the Italian Renaissance. When Filippo Maria died in 1447 Milan briefly became a republic; Francesco took the duchy by force in 1450, founding the Sforza dynasty and fusing both lines. The very word Sforza evokes sforzare, “to force” · a resonance the family cultivated, and one that surfaces on the cards themselves.

The Sforza court was extravagant and politically calculated, and it understood that legitimacy required spectacle. Francesco and Bianca Maria commissioned frescoes, funded churches, staged tournaments, and filled their residences with objects that announced taste and authority. The culture of trionfi · triumphal processions · saturated court life, and the card game that borrowed the name carried the same imagery. The cards we now call “trumps” were originally trionfi; their pictures came straight out of the visual language of courtly triumph and Christian moral teaching. The portrait-trumps make the dynastic purpose explicit: scholars have long read the Empress and the Emperor as figures of Bianca Maria and Francesco, and Love as their marriage itself.

The Artist: Bembo, and the Cicognara Myth

Most of the Visconti-Sforza cards are attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, a painter from a family of artists active in Cremona and Milan in the mid-fifteenth century, documented in Sforza service from around 1447 into the 1470s. He worked, as Renaissance painters did, through a workshop · so “Bembo” here is best read as Bembo and his shop. His manner belongs to the Lombard Late-Gothic and International Gothic tradition: elegant line, flattened courtly space, and an emphasis on ornamental beauty and gold over Florentine spatial rigour. Minority scholarship has floated other names · a member of the Zavattari family among them · but the workshop attribution is the consensus, settled in the twentieth century after Roberto Longhi proposed Bembo in 1928.

The deck is not all one hand. A group of six trumps · most often identified as Fortitude, Temperance, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, and the World · is by a distinctly different, later painter, with more elongated figures and a different gold tooling. These are the deck’s restored cards, generally dated c. 1465–70 (the exact membership of the group is debated, but these six are the cards most consistently assigned to the later hand).

Here a persistent myth needs correcting. Older and popular sources name Antonio Cicognara as the painter of the six. That attribution rests on a nineteenth-century literary forgery · a fabricated source · and modern scholarship (Gertrude Moakley; Stuart Kaplan’s Encyclopedia of Tarot) rejects it. The restored cards are today attributed instead to Franco dei Russi. The accurate statement is therefore: Bembo’s workshop, c. 1450, with six trumps restored by a second hand (Franco dei Russi) around 1465–70 · and the “Cicognara deck” label, still widely repeated online, is not sound.

The Commission and the Dating Problem

Why were the cards made? The most-discussed theory ties the deck to the 1441 wedding of Bianca Maria and Francesco · a hand-painted, gold-leafed tarot would have been a fitting dynastic gift, and the portrait-trumps support a celebratory reading.

But the dating is not tidy. Art historians place the Bembo core around c. 1450, with the restored six around c. 1465–70 · a span well past the 1441 wedding. Either the deck was not a wedding object, or it was assembled and supplemented over many years; some scholars argue what survives reflects more than one commission rather than a single unified project. What is certain is the social fact: this was an object made for people who could afford to play cards painted in gold. Trionfi was an aristocratic trick-taking game in which a special set of illustrated trumps beat the four suits. To commission a hand-painted set was a statement of wealth, learning, and authority · never tavern equipment. The Visconti-Sforza deck was an art object that happened to be playable.

Three Collections, One Deck

The 74 surviving cards sit today in two cities, across what are historically three collections. Precision here matters, because a great deal of loose information circulates.

The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York · 35 cards

The largest group · 35 cards · is at the Morgan Library and Museum, catalogued under the manuscript shelfmark MS M.630 with individual numbers, and purchased by J. P. Morgan in 1911. The Morgan holds 20 of the 22 trumps (all but the lost Devil and Tower) plus a specific, itemised set of suit cards · not, as is sometimes claimed, “all of one suit.” Among the Swords, for example, the Morgan holds only the Ace of Swords (M.630.34) and the Ten of Swords (M.630.35); among Staves only the Ace, Four, and Nine; among Coins only the Seven, Eight, and Ten. The itemised Morgan captions are the deck’s most citable primary descriptions, and the per-card pages in this guide quote them verbatim where they exist.

The Accademia Carrara, Bergamo · 26 cards

A second group · 26 cards, largely suit cards · is held at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo.

The Colleoni Collection, Bergamo · 13 cards

A third group · 13 cards · belongs to the private Colleoni collection in Bergamo, historically associated with the family of the condottiero Bartolomeo Colleoni. Together the Bergamo holdings (Carrara plus Colleoni) account for the 39 cards not at the Morgan. Because the Bergamo cards are not itemised in a public per-card catalogue, every description of them in this guide is reconstructed from facsimiles and the deck’s consistent programme · and is hedged accordingly. That single fact governs how much can honestly be said about most of the pip cards.

How the deck was divided

The exact route by which one deck reached three collections is undocumented. The cards passed through several aristocratic Italian families before entering institutional and private hands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the division reflects the ordinary fortunes of inheritance, sale, and loss. One physical clue recurs: many surviving cards bear small pin or nail holes at the top centre, which has led to the standard conjecture that individual cards were lent out as artists’ models · a plausible mechanism for how a complete deck shed exactly four cards.

Gold Leaf and Tempera: Technique

Tilt one of Bembo’s cards and the surface moves. The gold is not flat: it shimmers, because of how it was made.

The cards are egg tempera · pigment bound in egg yolk · on laminated paste-board (sheets of rag paper pasted and pressed), at a standard size of roughly 173 × 87 mm. Tempera was the dominant Italian medium before oil paint, well suited to the precise linear style of International Gothic work. The luminous grounds are gold leaf over gesso and bole, burnished, then worked with punch and stipple tooling (granito): a pointed tool pressed repeatedly into the burnished gold so that light scatters from countless tiny facets · less a mirror, more a woven field of radiance. The same tooling tradition runs through Sienese panel painting and Byzantine icons, where the gold meant transcendent space; whether Bembo intended that resonance in a card game is an open question, but the optical effect is unmistakable.

A crucial distinction for reading the deck: the trumps and court cards are heavily gilt, while the pip cards are far less so, set on a pale cream flower-and-vine ground. The palette throughout is vermilion, ultramarine, malachite green, and lead-tin yellow, with fine pen scrollwork. The gold, being metal rather than pigment, has resisted fading where the painted passages have softened · which is why the survivors read as brilliant gold around gently muted colour.

The Four Lost Cards

Of the original 78, four do not survive. They fall into two very different kinds of loss, and conflating them is a common error.

The debated trumps: the Devil and the Tower

The Devil (XV) and the Tower (XVI) are the two missing trionfi. Their absence runs deeper than a mislaid card: scholars genuinely debate whether Bembo’s workshop ever painted them at all. The companion Visconti deck, the Cary-Yale (Visconti di Modrone), also lacks a Devil and a Tower, and some early trionfi sequences are shorter than the later twenty-two-card canon. What a Milanese Devil or Tower of c. 1450 looked like is therefore inferred from the broader tradition and the later Tarot de Marseille (Le Diable; La Maison Dieu, the lightning-struck tower with falling figures), not read from any surviving Lombard card.

The certain losses: the Three of Swords and the Knight of Coins

The Three of Swords and the Knight of Coins are different: a complete tarocchi pack has a full Ace-to-Ten and four courts in every suit, so these two certainly existed and were simply lost. And both are reconstructable with real confidence. Because the Visconti-Sforza pips are rigorously non-scenic, the lost Tre di Spade would have shown three curved blades on the cream ground · not the famous pierced heart, which is a Rider-Waite-Smith image borrowed from a different deck (see below). The Cavallo di Denari is all but described by its three surviving companions · the Knave, Queen, and King of Coins · and the mounted Knights of the other suits.

Every card in modern circulation purporting to be one of these four is a modern reconstruction, and they differ sharply from one another · the plain proof that no original is known. This guide publishes a dedicated page for each lost card; the illustrations there are clearly labelled modern placeholders, not Bembo originals and not museum reconstructions, and should never be cited as evidence of the lost cards’ appearance.

Structure of the Deck

The Visconti-Sforza established the structure all later tarots inherit · with instructive differences from the modern deck.

The 22 Trumps (Trionfi)

The trumps are a hierarchical sequence of 22 allegorical figures. In Bembo’s deck they bear no numbers: the ordering used today is reconstructed from fifteenth-century game rules and lists. The Fool stands outside the numbered order; the sequence climbs through worldly and spiritual powers to the World. Several original Italian names differ sharply from the modern English ones · and the differences are not cosmetic:

Numeral	Original Name	Modern Equivalent
—	Il Matto (The Fool)	The Fool
I	Il Bagatto (The Juggler)	The Magician
II	La Papessa (The Popess)	The High Priestess
V	Il Papa (The Pope)	The Hierophant
VI	L’Amore (Love)	The Lovers
VIII	La Giustizia (Justice)	Justice
IX	Il Tempo (Time)	The Hermit
XI	La Forza (Fortitude)	Strength
XII	Il Traditore (The Traitor)	The Hanged Man

When the card now called the Hermit was Time (Il Tempo), it carried an old man with an hourglass, not a lantern-bearing seeker. When the Hanged Man was the Traitor (Il Traditore), it pointed to pittura infamante · the Italian practice of publicly shaming traitors in paintings that hung them by one foot. The familiar names were softened and universalised by later French and English occultists; the Italian names are the historically grounded ones, and this guide leads with them.

The 56 Suit Cards

The four suits use the Italian system · Coppe (Cups), Denari (Coins), Bastoni (Staves/Batons), Spade (Swords) · the swords drawn as broad, curved, scimitar-like blades. Each suit has ten numbered cards and four courts: Re (King), Regina (Queen), Cavallo (Knight, a mounted figure), Fante (Knave, a standing attendant). Modern decks substitute “Page” for the Knave; the change is not neutral · a Page implies a youth in training, a Fante is a servant, and the shift reflects the later reinvention of the courts as a developmental ladder rather than a household.

A heraldic throughline ties the suits to the dynasty. Following Moakley, the Swords and Batons carry the Sforza affiliation and the a bon droyt motto-scroll, while Cups and Coins lean Visconti. The motto is documented in the Morgan catalogue on the Ace of Swords and Ten of Swords specifically · though a bon droyt (“by good right”) originates with Gian Galeazzo Visconti around 1360 and was retained under the Sforza, so the safest reading is suit-level, not a slogan stamped on every card.

The Non-Scenic Pips: A 460-Year Overlay

This is the single most misunderstood fact about the deck, and the place where this guide departs most sharply from popular tarot writing.

The Visconti-Sforza pip cards are not illustrated. A Three is three suit-signs; a Seven is seven of them · arranged in symmetrical, decorative patterns on a pale flower-and-vine ground, with floral and heraldic ornament, and no human figures or narrative. The richly elaborated Aces (the Ace of Cups is a fountain-like showpiece; the Ace of Swords a single great blade in an a bon droyt scroll) are the only developed emblems. Everything a modern reader “knows” a pip means · the Five of Cups’ grief, the Ten of Swords’ ruin, the Three of Swords’ broken heart · is a later overlay, and the chain of that overlay is documented:

c. 1450 · Bembo: non-scenic emblem. No fixed meaning.
16th–18th c. · Tarot de Marseille: still non-scenic · geometric, interlaced suit-signs.
1491 · Sola-Busca: the first fully scenic pip deck, a different Italian pack. Photographs of all 78 Sola-Busca cards reached the British Museum in 1907, where Pamela Colman Smith studied them.
1780s · Etteilla: the first systematic per-card divinatory meanings.
c. 1888 · Golden Dawn (Book T): elemental and decan titles (“Lord of …”) imposed on each pip.
1909 · Rider-Waite-Smith: Smith’s now-universal narrative scenes.

The sharpest illustration of the gap is the Three of Swords. The bleeding-heart image everyone pictures is one of only two securely documented borrowings from the Sola-Busca into the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (the other being the RWS Ten of Wands, adapted from the Sola-Busca Ten of Swords). It descends from the Sola-Busca, not from Milan · and the Visconti-Sforza deck’s own Three of Swords is precisely one of the four cards that is lost. The most famous “Three of Swords” in the world has no Visconti-Sforza ancestor at all.

One more durable detail for researchers: the suit names did not all survive translation. Coppe stayed Cups and Spade stayed Swords, but Denari became Deniers and then Pentacles, and Bastoni became Bâtons and then Wands. When a modern source calls a Visconti-Sforza card a “Pentacle” or a “Wand,” it is already speaking a later dialect.

Complete Card Index · All 78

Every card in the deck is listed below · all 74 surviving cards now have a dedicated page with iconographic analysis, museum sourcing, and technique, and each of the 4 lost cards has a page that documents its absence and what scholarship can and cannot say. Lost cards are marked and use clearly-labelled modern placeholder images.

Influence on Later Traditions

Because of its completeness and beauty, the Visconti-Sforza became the reference point for the tarot’s origins · but it was one of several fifteenth-century Italian decks, and the line from it to the modern card is long and much-edited.

From Milan to Marseille

The most direct descent runs from the Italian hand-painted decks to the woodblock-printed Tarot de Marseille, standard across France from the seventeenth century. Many Marseille trumps are visibly related to their Visconti-Sforza ancestors · Fortitude still works the lion’s jaws, the Wheel still carries figures rising and falling, Death still rides. But the gold grounds vanished into flat colour, hand-painting gave way to the stiffer logic of the woodblock, and the specific Milanese courtly references were standardised away.

The occult turn

The reinvention of the tarot as a divinatory and esoteric system began in the eighteenth century with French occultists who wrongly claimed the cards encoded ancient Egyptian wisdom. Allegories of Christian virtue and worldly power were recast as a hidden doctrine. The most influential modern result is the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, whose narrative pip cards · Pamela Colman Smith’s invention · broke completely with the decorative Visconti-Sforza pips, even as its trumps still carry a recognisable iconographic descent across five centuries.

For students who want to follow that evolution properly · from the courts of Milan through the Golden Dawn and into modern practice · Mary K. Greer’s Improve Your Tarot Readings Through Tarot History is a guided path through exactly this territory.

The touchstone

Today the Visconti-Sforza is at once a historical artefact, an art object, and a living reference for practitioners and deck designers. Encountering Bembo’s originals · gold, non-scenic pips, unnumbered trumps, four conspicuous gaps · is the fastest cure for the assumption that the tarot arrived fully formed. It did not. It was assembled, edited, and reinterpreted across six centuries, and this deck is where the record begins.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where are the original Visconti-Sforza tarot cards held today?

The 74 surviving cards are in two cities across three historical collections. The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York holds 35 (catalogued as MS M.630, acquired by J. P. Morgan in 1911), including 20 of the 22 trumps. The Accademia Carrara in Bergamo holds 26, and the private Colleoni collection in Bergamo holds 13. The Bergamo cards are not published in a per-card catalogue, so descriptions of them are reconstructed and hedged.

How many Visconti-Sforza cards survive, and which are lost?

Seventy-four of the original 78 survive. The four lost cards are The Devil (XV), The Tower (XVI), the Knight of Coins, and the Three of Swords. The two lost trumps may never have been painted at all · the question is genuinely debated · while the Three of Swords and Knight of Coins certainly existed in a complete deck and were simply lost.

Who painted the Visconti-Sforza tarot · and was it Cicognara?

The core of the deck is by the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo, c. 1450. A second hand restored six trumps around 1465–70. That second painter is not Antonio Cicognara: the Cicognara attribution rests on a nineteenth-century literary forgery and is rejected by modern scholarship (Moakley; Kaplan). The restorations are attributed instead to Franco dei Russi.

When was the Visconti-Sforza deck created?

The Bembo core is dated to roughly c. 1450, with six restored trumps around c. 1465–70. The deck is often linked to the 1441 marriage of Bianca Maria Visconti and Francesco Sforza, but the stylistic dating runs later than 1441, so it was likely produced over time · possibly across more than one commission · rather than as a single wedding gift.

Are the Visconti-Sforza pip cards illustrated like the Rider-Waite-Smith deck?

No. The pip cards are non-scenic: they show only the suit symbols in decorative arrangements, with no figures or scenes. Narrative pip illustration first appears in the 1491 Sola-Busca deck and becomes standard only with Rider-Waite-Smith in 1909. Any “meaning” attached to a Visconti-Sforza number card is a later cartomantic overlay.

Did the Visconti-Sforza Three of Swords show a heart pierced by swords?

No · and it could not have. By the deck’s strictly non-scenic system the lost Three of Swords would have shown three curved blades on a decorative ground. The pierced-heart image is a 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith design borrowed from the Sola-Busca tarot, a different fifteenth-century deck. The Visconti-Sforza’s own Three of Swords is one of the four lost cards.

Is the Visconti-Sforza the oldest tarot deck?

It is the most complete of the earliest surviving tarots, but not provably the oldest. Other fifteenth-century Italian decks survive more fragmentarily, including the Cary-Yale Visconti (which may predate it) and the Brera-Brambilla. The Visconti-Sforza’s distinction is the number and quality of its surviving cards, which make it the most studied early deck.

Why is it called the “Visconti-Sforza” deck?

The name marks the two Milanese dynasties for whom it was made. The Visconti ruled Milan from the late thirteenth century; when Bianca Maria Visconti married Francesco Sforza in 1441 and he took the duchy in 1450, the lines were fused. The hyphenated name is also a convenient catalogue label · the deck is sometimes called the “Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo” tarot after its collections.

Study the Visconti-Sforza Tradition

These cards are the beginning of a tradition that has shaped Western visual culture for nearly six centuries. These courses offer guided paths through its history and art.

Improve Your Tarot Readings Through Tarot History · Traces the tarot’s evolution from the courts of Milan through the Golden Dawn and beyond · Taught by Mary K. Greer
Cartomancers in Western Art · The visual history of card reading across five centuries of Western art · Taught by Mary K. Greer

Every one of the 78 Visconti-Sforza cards now has a dedicated page · 74 surviving cards studied from museum sources, and 4 lost cards documented honestly. Begin with The Fool in the Visconti-Sforza tarot, trace the dynasty through the Empress and the Emperor, confront the gaps at the Devil and the Tower, or browse the complete card index above and follow the deck wherever it leads.