Latviešu
EnglishHistory[edit]
Playing cards first entered Europe in the late 14th century, probably from Mamluk Egypt, with suits very similar to the tarot suits of Swords, Staves, Cups and Coins (also known as disks, andpentacles) and those still used in traditional Italian, Spanish and Portuguese decks.[10]
The first known documented tarot cards were created between 1430 and 1450 in Milan, Ferrara and Bologna in northern Italy when additional trump cards with allegorical illustrations were added to the common four-suit pack. These new decks were originally called carte da trionfi, triumph cards, and the additional cards known simply as trionfi, which became «trumps» in English. The first literary evidence of the existence of carte da trionfi is a written statement in the court records in Florence, in 1440. The oldest surviving tarot cards are from fifteen fragmented decks painted in the mid 15th century for the Visconti-Sforza family, the rulers of Milan.[11]
Early decks[edit]
Le Bateleur: The Juggler from the Tarot of Marseilles. This card is often named The Magician in modern English language tarots
Picture-card packs are first mentioned by Martiano da Tortona probably between 1418 and 1425, since the painter he mentions, Michelino da Besozzo, returned to Milan in 1418, while Martiano himself died in 1425. He describes a deck with 16 picture cards with images of the Greek gods and suits depicting four kinds of birds, not the common suits. However the 16 cards were obviously regarded as «trumps» as, about 25 years later, Jacopo Antonio Marcello called them a ludus triumphorum, or «game of trumps».[12]
Special motifs on cards added to regular packs show philosophical, social, poetical, astronomical, and heraldic ideas, Roman/Greek/Babylonian heroes, as in the case of the Sola-Busca-Tarocchi (1491)[1] and the Boiardo Tarocchi poem, written at an unknown date between 1461 and 1494.[13]
Two playing card decks from Milan (the Brera-Brambilla and Cary-Yale-Tarocchi)—extant, but fragmentary—were made circa 1440. Three documents dating from 1 January 1441 to July 1442, use the term trionfi. The document from January 1441 is regarded as an unreliable reference; however, the same painter,Sagramoro, was commissioned by the same patron, Leonello d’Este, as in the February 1442 document. The game seemed to gain in importance in the year 1450, a Jubilee year in Italy, which saw many festivities and the movement of many pilgrims.
Three mid-15th century sets were made for members of the Visconti family.[14] The first deck, and probably the prototype, is called the Cary-Yale Tarot (or Visconti-Modrone Tarot) and was created between 1442 and 1447 by an anonymous painter for Filippo Maria Visconti.[14] The cards (only 67) are today in the Cary collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, in the U.S. state of Connecticut.[15] The most famous was painted in the mid-15th century, to celebrate Francesco Sforza and his wife Bianca Maria Visconti, daughter of the duke Filippo Maria. Probably, these cards were painted byBonifacio Bembo or Francesco Zavattari between 1451 and 1453.[14] Of the original cards, 35 are in The Morgan Library & Museum, 26 are at the Accademia Carrara, thirteen are at the Casa Colleoni,[14] and four: The Devil, The Tower, Money’s Horse (The Chariot), and the 3 of Spades, are lost or were never made. This «Visconti-Sforza» deck, which has been widely reproduced, reflects conventional iconography of the time to a significant degree.[16]
Hand-painted tarot cards remained a privilege of the upper classes and, although a single sermon by a Dominican preacher inveighing against the evil inherent in cards (mostly centered around their use in gambling) can be traced to the 14th century,[17] no routine condemnations of tarot were found during its early history.[1]
Because the earliest tarot cards were hand-painted, the number of the decks produced is thought to have been rather small, and it was only after the invention of the printing press that mass production of cards became possible. Decks survive from this era from various cities in France, and the most popular pattern of these early printed decks comes from the southern city of Marseilles, after which it is named the Tarot de Marseilles.[18]
