Cards in the Visconti-Sforza deck housed at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo include the Moon (far left), and (clockwise from top left)
the Emperor, Five of Coins, Queen of Wands, Four of Swords, the World, Ten of Cups, Page of Coins, and Six of Wands.PHOTOS: FONDAZIONE ACCADEMIA CARRARA, BERGAMO. NGM MAPSTRAVEL | CLOSER LOOK
by Caravaggio and Raphael, the Sola Busca deck,
completed in 1491. Considered the inspiration for
the Rider-Waite-Smith deck—a gold standard for
tarot users today—the Sola Busca was the first known
to put detailed illustrations on all 78 cards. These
original cards, which recall an era of knights, knaves,
and family crests, fit right in with the frescoes and
panels in 15th- and 16th-century churches.
Arnell Ando, a Los Angeles-based expert who leads
tarot-themed tours of northern Italy, delights in these
parallels. On her itinerary is the Palazzo Schifanoia,
near the town of Ferrara, in the Emilia-Romagna
region. Its walls teem with astrological symbols. In
Tuscany, the Siena cathedral features a tiled floor
mosaic depicting what looks like the tarot
symbol for the wheel of fortune.
Think of tarot nowadays and you might
conjure images of fraudster psychics, but
in the late Middle Ages and early Renais-
sance, before divination ever entered the
picture, tarocchi was a ripe new medium
for artists and poets. Playing cards had
just come into fashion, and tarocchi was
distinctive: Each 78-card deck had four
suits—wands, coins, swords, and cups—plus 22
special trionfi (trump) cards with evocative names
such as the Devil, the Emperor, and Justice. With their
rich illustrations, the cards set the imagination aflame
while distilling universal truths about life.
Like the Renaissance paintings of Raphael and
Michelangelo, the cards were full of emotion—and
magic. To those who knew the references, tarot spoke
a secret language that the Roman Catholic Churchwanted to suppress. In code, artists were able to
include references to alchemy, astrology, and even
kabbalah, a mystical branch of Judaism.
It doesn’t surprise me that tarot, in its eloquent
beauty, its effortless melding of the religious and the
secular, is a wholeheartedly Italian invention. It bears
the unmistakable signature of a culture that gave us
the “Birth of Venus” and the Sistine Chapel. There’s
even an urgency in the way the cards communicate
(consider the ominous figures of the Judgment card,
rising from their graves, for example), as if they can’t
get the message out fast enough. How Italian is that?
I first studied tarot in my 20s, when I was part of
a radical tarot school in New York City called the
Brooklyn Fools. The reason I fell in love with
tarot then is the same reason people did 600
years ago: It’s relatable. We share many
of the same concerns as in Renaissance
times: We worry about money, get our
hearts broken, wonder how to make
changes for the better in our lives.
In Menegazzi’s Milan workshop,
which doubles as a gallery for his paint-
ings, shadow boxes, and every imaginable
style of tarot, it’s hard not to feel moved by his
passion. Surrounded by watercolor brushes, inkpots,
and cardboard, he reaffirms what the original tarot
artists of the 1400s sought to do: Express ideas in a
beautiful way about the complexities of being human.
Six hundred years later, we’re still listening to what
they have to say. j
Alex Schechter is a writer and sound therapist based in
Los Angeles.AFRICAASIA
ATLANTIC
OCEAN ITALYMilan