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The Renaissance and the Birth of the Tarot
by David Brice
The Early Tarot Images
When Dante Alighieri began writing his Divina Comedia in
1306, he envisioned himself moving through a universe composed
of a series of concentric circles. It began with
Hell, inside the spherical earth and consisting of nine
circles culminating in a red-hot core. The earth
itself, enclosed in its ball of atmosphere, was balanced
on an axis, with Jerusalem and the Mount of Purgatory at
its extremities. Then came the ten circles of the heavens,
surmounted by the Prima Causa, or invisible, ineffable
mind of God, from which all things were manifested.
The scheme of creation Dante presented was in many ways
ancient, with its notions of crystal spheres and the geocentric
orientation which moderns find quaint and primitive. But
there was also much in it that reflected a new, or maybe
more correctly, revised philosophy that had arisen in Dante's
time and place; northern Italy in the early 14th century
was a hotbed of artistic ferment and Neoplatonic ideas.
Many of these same ideas would be incorporated into the
tarot at the time of its creation, roughly one and one-quarter
centuries after the appearance of The Divine Comedy.
Prima Causa XXXXX, from the Tarot of Mantegna
Central to this new philosophy was the idea, inherited
from Plato, that higher realities are abstractions, and
that the physical world and its tangible phenomena, while
real, are only shadowy and inferior reflections of spiritual
realities which are, by nature and definition, abstract.
But Neoplatonism was not simply rehashed Platonism; it
was more a synthesizing tendency than a philosophy per
se, and it assigned itself the rather unenviable task
of reconciling Plato's ideas with those of Aristotle, who
envisioned a universe of hierarchies. Just as human society
presents itself as a vertically arranged scale of ordered
ranks, and the animal kingdom proceeds from lower to higher
forms, Aristotle reasoned, so everything in the universe
can be ranked and arranged in order of importance. Both
of these fundamental Neoplatonic assumptions would find
their way into the system of thought articulated by the
Tarot trumps, which begin with the conditions of humanity
as it lives in the tangible world (the Matto, and cards
I through V), proceed through the more abstract virtues
and vicissitudes of life such as love and war (trumps VI
through XII), mark the inevitable passage of all lives
through death, hell, and purgatory (numbers XIII, XV, and
XVI), and culminate in the ultimate reality of the celestial
regions, including an assertion of the certainty of Final
Judgment.
The Neoplatonists, besides attempting to reconcile the
competing philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, also worked
to include Stoicism, Jewish mysticism, Arabic philosophy,
and Byzantine Christianity in their grand synthesis, for
the aim of the most ambitious among them, most notably
Pico della Mirandola, was nothing less than the discovery
of "a common universal philosophy that encompasses
a broad range of human thought" (Hooker, 1). In pursuing
this goal, they were not forging new modes of thought so
much as attempting to harmonize the various strands they
inherited from the middle ages and the ancients. Never
a formal school or institutionalized movement, Neo-platonism
was nevertheless enormously influential among the educated
classes of 14th and 15th century Italy, and included among
its adherents princes of the Church such as Cardinal Bessarion,
and writers like Francesco Petrarch, whose work was a major
influence on the philo-sophical orientation of the Visconti
family of Milan, and whose series of poems, I Trionfi (The
Triumphs) is sometimes cited as a direct pre-decessor of
the series of 22 pictures we know as the tarot trumps (Kaplan,
1986, 141-147). Indeed, the most enduring legacy of Renaissance
Neoplatonism is probably its application to cultural expressions
of its age: literature, painting, and music (Hooker, 5).
This is why Renaissance art and its direct ancestors,
medieval and ancient Roman art, are rich lodes of the same
images that would find their way into the Tarot. Nearly
every trump -- the Lenten "King of Fools" who
would become enshrined as the Tarot's Matto (the trump
which is not a trump), the Virtues, those allegorical personifications
so immensely popular with European artists from ancient
times onward, the ubiquitous Wheel of Fortune, which we
find carved in stone in many European churches, and the
Last Judgment which also found a place in the trump sequence
-- all of these have analogs in the universal iconographic
language of the age in which they incubated.
Forteza XXXVI, from the Tarot of Mantegna
It is for this reason, more than any other, that we can
finally and with confidence lay to rest the myth, long
perpetuated and stubbornly resistant to the known facts,
that Tarot is the repository of one or another secret doctrines. This
conviction, which serves mainly to foster a sense of exclusivity
among those who adhere to it, has been spread by in-numerable
sources. One of the most recent argues that "Insisting
on text evidence for proof of our theories is illogical
given the under-ground status of its originators and the
persecutions that it engendered" (Payne-Towler). This
line of reasoning is not only notable for its circularity,
but also fails to explain why it would be necessary to
form a secret society for the promulgation of a philosophy
which was universally out in the open in the form of pictures
and sculptures which, taken together, can be seen as an
iconographic code communicating a religious philo-sophy
which is neither heretical nor dangerous. Because the fact
is that, the philosophical and pictorial elements which
would come together in the Tarot trump sequence were readily
and publicly available to anyone in Renaissance Italy who
was reasonably well educated and reasonably well versed
in the philosophical and artistic currents of the time.
The Tarot
of Mantegna is available at TarotGarden.com, please
mention the Association for Tarot Studies or the 2005
International Conference when ordering.
This article first appeared on David
Brice’s TarotSeeker site, reproduced with permission
from, and thanks to, the author.
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