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Tarot history · Sources and evidence

Was 15th-Century Tarot Already a 78-Card Deck? The Visconti Evidence

Published October 11, 2026 · TarotCards24

The familiar 78-card tarot is not a safe template for every early deck. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s account of the Visconti cards describes an older Visconti pack with as many as six court cards per suit—including male and female versions of the ranks—and three additional theological virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity. The museum also says it is uncertain whether this was a one-off structure or an earlier stage before tarot decks became more standardized.

That uncertainty is the interesting part. Early tarot was not a factory product governed by one universal checklist. Surviving decks show experimentation, workshop choices, and differences between commissions.

“Visconti” and “Visconti–Sforza” are not interchangeable

The names can cause confusion. The Visconti Tarot and the Visconti–Sforza Tarot are distinct mid-15th-century decks associated with Milanese rulers and the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo. The Metropolitan Museum describes the Visconti pack as having 69 surviving cards and places them at Yale’s Beinecke Library. The Visconti–Sforza cards were made shortly after 1450, likely for Francesco Sforza; surviving cards are now divided among collections, including the Accademia Carrara and the Morgan Library.

The Visconti–Sforza deck is closer to the structure many readers recognize: four suits, court cards, a Fool, and a sequence of trumps. But the older Visconti pack’s extra figures and virtues show why historians avoid treating “the first tarot” as one perfectly fixed 78-card object.

What the surviving cards can tell us

The cards are handmade works on pasteboard, with paint and tooled gold grounds. They are also fragments of a larger history: some cards are missing, and the decks are not all preserved together. A surviving count is therefore not necessarily the original count. Museum descriptions distinguish what remains from what scholars infer about the complete pack.

The images also draw on a wider visual culture. Emperors, popes, virtues, death, fortune, and other personifications already existed in medieval and Renaissance art. Tarot’s distinctive feature was not necessarily inventing every figure from scratch; it was arranging them into a particular sequence alongside ordinary suit cards.

That distinction is useful for modern readers. A card’s presence in an early deck can document the image and the game structure. It cannot automatically tell us how a person in 1450 interpreted that card in a private reading. For claims about divination, we need sources from the period in which that practice is documented.

A history with room for variation

The Visconti evidence does not mean that every early tarot had six court cards, nor does it prove a single route from a nonstandard deck to the modern pack. It shows that at least one early Milanese tarot differed from the familiar structure and that the standard form emerged through a history of variants.

So was 15th-century tarot already a 78-card deck? Some surviving decks closely resemble that structure, but the Visconti example warns against a universal yes. The best answer is more specific: early tarot collections were related, but not perfectly uniform. Their differences are evidence—not errors to be corrected against a modern deck.

Sources

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