Tarocchi of Renaissance Italy: Art, Symbol, and Divination🔆

 

When the earliest tarocchi decks appeared in 15th-century Italy, they were not mass-produced objects, nor accompanied by instructional guidebooks as modern tarot cards are today. Instead, they were hand-painted works of art, created for noble families like the Visconti and the Sforza courts of Milan. These decks were lavishly illuminated with gold leaf, pigments as fine as those used in devotional paintings, and imagery drawn from Renaissance allegory. Each card was itself a miniature painting—a portable altar of symbols. 

Unlike modern tarot practice, early readers of tarocchi had no printed compendium to consult. The imagery itself was the guide. A figure such as La Giustizia (Justice), with her scales and sword, would be understood not through memorized definitions, but through the viewer’s ability to read the symbolic language of art. Renaissance culture was steeped in allegory: to interpret a painting, a fresco, or even the layout of a cathedral meant to understand a visual code that pointed beyond the material world.

This was not new to Europe. The Egyptians had long embedded spiritual knowledge into images—temple walls, tomb paintings, and hieroglyphs all carried divine stories meant to outlast spoken language. In the Renaissance, the revival of classical philosophy and the fusion of Christian mysticism rekindled the idea that pictures could be a universal, godly script. Just as Egyptians painted their encounters with gods and the afterlife, Renaissance Italians encoded their visions into cards and canvases.

Artists like Leonardo da Vinci were trained to see the world as layered with hidden meaning. His notebooks reveal a fascination with proportion, geometry, and the interplay between human form and cosmic order. To look at a card through a da Vincian lens was not to "guess its meaning," but to meditate upon the image until the divine order emerged. In this sense, reading tarocchi was not unlike contemplating a painting by da Vinci himself: each gesture, object, and background detail could open a doorway to hidden knowledge.

Because there were no guidebooks, the early practice of reading tarocchi required both education and intuition. Some only used their bible as a guide. It's important to note that though some may not believe, it's important not to practice opening doors you may not understand how to close. Tarocchi was a difficult art, reserved for those who could see beyond the surface of an image and enter into dialogue with it. To hold the cards was to hold a gallery of mysteries in miniature, and to divine with them was to use art itself as the medium between the human and the divine.

From Egyptian temple walls to Italian tarocchi, the thread is the same: art was not decoration, but revelation. Images spoke where words failed. They preserved divine encounters, encoded spiritual philosophy, and allowed initiates to commune with truths too vast for literal language. Today, as tarot is practiced with printed meanings and accessible handbooks, it is worth remembering that its origins lay in something much older and more challenging: the silent, visual language of art itself.