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Tarot history · Sources and evidence

Did Renaissance Triumphs Shape Tarot? What the Evidence Can—and Cannot—Show

Published October 11, 2026 · TarotCards24

Love, Death, Justice, and Fortune appear in tarot as figures in a sequence. They were also familiar subjects in Renaissance art and public ceremony. That overlap has led scholars to ask whether the early trump cards drew on the triumphal processions staged at Italian courts. The idea is plausible and evidence-based—but it remains an explanation of how the imagery may have developed, not a surviving designer’s statement of intent.

Paolo Plebani’s National Gallery of Art research overview places early tarot in the culture of 15th-century Italian courts. Contemporary accounts describe public ceremonies with allegorical floats representing figures such as Love, Death, and Justice. Plebani argues that trionfi cards may have translated such allegorical sequences into a card-game structure.

The word “trionfi” came before the familiar name

The research also highlights a naming detail: 15th-century sources used trionfi for the game and its special cards, while the word “tarot” appeared later. This is a reminder that the names readers use today are not always the names the first players used.

Petrarch’s poem I Trionfi is another part of the discussion. Its allegorical sequence of triumphs—Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity—offers a striking parallel with some tarot trump themes. Plebani treats the poem as a likely conceptual framework, but a parallel is not proof that the cards were directly copied from the poem. The relationship is a historical argument built from texts, images, and court culture.

What is documented and what is inferred

The material record documents that early tarot decks combined suit cards with a sequence of trumps, and that many of the figures already existed in wider European visual culture. The research proposal links this combination to public pageantry and humanist interest in classical and vernacular texts.

What we do not have is a complete instruction sheet from the first tarot makers saying, “these cards represent this procession.” The earliest surviving decks are luxury objects, often incomplete, and the history of their images is reconstructed from comparisons across manuscripts, paintings, poems, and archival records.

That difference matters. It is fair to say that triumphal pageantry may have helped shape the imagery and ordering of early trumps. It is too strong to say that tarot is simply a deck version of Petrarch’s poem, or that every card has one proven Renaissance meaning.

A sequence made from familiar images

The most durable insight is not that one source explains every card. It is that tarot’s originality may lie in arrangement. Virtues, rulers, death, fortune, and other personifications were already visible in medieval and Renaissance culture. Putting them into a repeating, ordered series alongside the four suits created a new way to play and look at those images.

The procession theory helps explain why early tarot feels like a parade of social, moral, and cosmic figures. It also remains a theory that historians test against objects and texts. That is more interesting than a tidy origin myth: the deck’s beginnings are a layered history, and some parts are still under investigation.

Sources

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