The Tarocchi Players - Renaissance Italy and the History of the Tarot
The Tarocchi Players - Palazzo Borromeo c1440, Milan Italy
Welcome to Episode #130:
Did you know that the roots of tarot have their beginnings in the north of Italy at the height of the Renaissance. The first playing cards emerged in the courts of the noble Milanese families and became a popular card game for entertainment and play.
The Visconti Sforza, Bolognese Tarochini and the Minchiate Tarot cards were commissioned by the aristocratic families to be hand painted and designed by expert artisans. Played as a game called 'carte da trionfe' the tarot was purely a trick playing game in the height of the Renaissance.
Today I discuss the Visconti and Sforza alliance in Milan, Cosimo de Medici patronising philosophers to transcribe the Corpus Hermeticum to Latin, the time of ‘Renaissance Magic’, the shift in art and philosophy in the 14th and 15th century, the move toward the mystical traditions and how the tarot eventually evolved into that of cartomancy, esoteric practice via secret societies and occult practitioners in England and France in the 18th and 19th centuries. To now be tethered to the mystery traditions and used as form of divination, fortune telling and spiritual practise.
I also share a few personal revelations about the tarot system along the way. And lastly, if you are in Italy it turns out there is some serendipity to this episode I discovered while writing my show-notes you can visit the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo (a quick train ride from beautiful Milano) for an exhibition that is on until June 2026, that covers the last seven hundred years of tarot. If only a patron would come calling to me! How I would love to see this exhibition!
Images from the Morgan Museum & Library, New York
Shownotes:
Holistic Tarot: An Integrative Approach to Using Tarot for Personal Growth by Benebell Wen
Helenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune by Chris Brennan
The House of Gucci - Film, 2021 based on the book - The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed by Sara Gay Forden
The Pinacoteca Art Museum, Brera - Milan
Accademia Carrara in Bergamo
The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino (Italian: Il castello dei destini incrociati)
Visconti Sforza Tarot, 15th Century, Milan
The Tarot cards can be found in Italy, America and the United Kingdom in The Pinacoteca Art Museum, Brera in Milan, The Morgan Museum in New York & The Accademia Carrara in Bergamo (currently exhibiting in Italy) & The Victoria and Albert Museum in England
Florentine Minchiate Tarot - Revised Edition, 1860-1890
"Around the middle of the fifteenth century, not so long after the first written references in Europe to cards of any kind, an artist named Bonifacio Bembo painted a set of unnamed and unnumbered cards for the Visconti family of Milan"
Origins of Tarot, Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self Awareness by Rachel Pollack
Tarot - Claude Burdel 1751 based on the Tarot de Marseille ( I love the Mediterranean colours of this deck)