It is often said that the tarot comes from ancient Egypt, from the Romani or from some lost wisdom. Documented history tells a different and in many ways more fascinating story: the tarot was born in the courts of fifteenth-century northern Italy as a refined card game, and only much later became an esoteric tool. Knowing this history takes nothing away from the symbolic depth of the cards; on the contrary, it allows us to read them with more aware eyes.
The game of trionfi
Playing cards were already widespread in Italy by the end of the fourteenth century, with the four suits of cups, coins, swords and batons. During the fifteenth century, in court circles, an addition appeared: a series of picture cards that had the power to "beat" the suit cards. They were called trionfi, triumphs, and the game itself was known as the game "of triumphs".
The term evokes a precise literary and artistic tradition: Petrarch's Triumphs, in which Love is overcome by Chastity, Chastity by Death, Death by Fame, and so on, and the triumphal processions of Renaissance festivals. The idea of a sequence of figures, each superior to the one before, was familiar to the educated public of the time. Many scholars believe that the series of trumps followed exactly this logic: a moral and cosmic hierarchy, from human figures to the virtues, from death to the final judgement, up to the world.
Only from the sixteenth century onwards did the term tarocchi spread, and its etymology remains uncertain.
The painted court decks
Of the earliest tarots, what survives is mainly luxury decks, hand-painted on card with gold backgrounds, made for noble families. The most famous are linked to the Visconti and the Sforza, lords of Milan. The surviving cards of these decks are now kept in various collections, in Italy and abroad, and are often incomplete. Some of the miniatures are traditionally attributed to the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo, a painter active in Lombardy.
These decks show figures very close to the major arcana we know: the Empress, the Emperor, the Wheel, the Chariot, Death, the Sun. But the style is that of courtly art: precious garments, family coats of arms, heraldic mottoes. They were prestige objects, closer to a work of art than to an everyday deck of cards.
Different regional traditions
Over time the game spread and diversified. In Italy variants arose with their own rules and compositions:
- the Bolognese tarocchino, a reduced deck with some pip cards removed, still played in Bologna today;
- the Florentine minchiate, an enlarged deck with many extra trumps, including the missing virtues, the elements and the signs of the zodiac;
- Sicilian tarot, with its own features, still known in a few places on the island;
- Piedmontese tarot, close to the pattern that would spread in France.
The variety of these traditions shows that the tarot did not arise from a single design but from a living practice that each place adapted to its own taste.
The so-called "Mantegna tarocchi"
One curious case deserves mention. There is a series of fifty fifteenth-century engravings, produced in the Ferrara or Venetian area, known as the "Mantegna tarocchi". Despite the name, it is neither a tarot deck nor a work by Andrea Mantegna. It is a kind of illustrated encyclopaedia, showing the conditions of humankind, the Muses, the liberal arts, the virtues and the planets. The traditional name is a misunderstanding, but the series bears witness to the same cultural climate in which the trionfi were born: a taste for allegorical images arranged in hierarchies.
When the Egyptian myth was born
The leap from game to esotericism took place in France at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1781 the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin, in his vast Le Monde primitif, argued that the tarot was an ancient Egyptian book that had survived hidden in the form of a game. It was a hypothesis with no documentary basis, but it was enormously successful. From there came Etteilla's cartomancy and, in the following century, the great occultist interpretations.
Recognising that the Egyptian origin is a myth does not mean denying the symbolic value of the cards. Rather, it means understanding that this value was built up, layered and enriched over the centuries by generations of artists, players and interpreters. In the Officina Ermetica this historical awareness is considered an integral part of study: one reads a symbol better when one knows its journey.
In short
- The tarot was born in the courts of fifteenth-century northern Italy as the game of trionfi.
- The trumps echoed the culture of allegorical sequences, such as Petrarch's Triumphs.
- The painted decks linked to the Visconti and the Sforza are among the oldest surviving examples.
- Regional traditions developed in Italy, such as the Bolognese tarocchino and the minchiate.
- The myth of an Egyptian origin goes back to Court de Gébelin in 1781 and has no documentary basis.
