Tarot’s Renaissance Origins Take Center Stage at the Morgan Library & Museum
A deck once prized by a New York financier with a taste for the occult is now anchoring one of the season’s most unusual museum exhibitions. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York will open Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions on June 26, bringing together roughly 380 works that trace tarot from its courtly beginnings in 15th-century Italy to its modern life as a tool of divination and artistic invention.
At the heart of the exhibition are 35 cards from the Visconti-Sforza deck, a partial set acquired by J.P. Morgan in 1911. The museum’s holdings are supplemented by a loan from the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, allowing the majority of the surviving cards to be shown together in North America for the first time. The early section of the exhibition places the cards in the world of Lombard court culture, where tarot began as a refined game of skill rather than a mystical system.
That historical framing is central to the show’s argument. Co-curator Joshua O’Driscoll emphasizes that the cards were made in the Renaissance, even when their imagery still carries echoes of the medieval world. The exhibition also includes the earlier Visconti di Modrone deck, recently linked to Andrea Bembo, a member of Bonifacio Bembo’s workshop, and Anna Delle Foglie’s catalogue essay highlights the deck’s “fairytale-like character,” especially in the Fortitude card.
From there, the exhibition moves into tarot’s later reinvention. French occultists in the late 18th century helped give the cards a supernatural aura, setting the stage for their 20th-century revival among artists and esoteric thinkers. The modern section includes material connected to Aleister Crowley, André Breton, Victor Brauner, and Max Ernst, as well as cards on loan from Marseille. Breton’s octopus card, the museum notes, is an homage to Paracelsus.
Pamela Colman Smith’s 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck forms another key chapter in the exhibition. Her eerie Fool card appears alongside Sketch for Glass, a 1908 watercolor work on paper that shows a cloaked figure facing a moonlike sun. The exhibition will also offer on-site tarot readings, bringing the subject out of the vitrine and into the present tense.
By pairing Renaissance objects with modern occult and Surrealist material, the Morgan is presenting tarot not as a fixed tradition, but as a visual language that has repeatedly been remade.
