Sola Busca's Reach into the Rider-Waite-Smith

The Sola Busca's influence resurfaced more than four centuries after it was made. Tarot historians, including Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett in their documentary studies of the occult tarot, have traced specific visual borrowings from the Sola Busca's illustrated pip cards into the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, whose artist Pamela Colman Smith is understood to have studied the Sola Busca cards at the British Museum before designing her own fully illustrated minor arcana.

That connection matters beyond a single deck's history, because the Rider-Waite-Smith went on to become the most widely reproduced tarot deck of the twentieth century, and its illustrated minor arcana, the feature that let it become a standard teaching deck for cartomancy, traces its immediate visual model back to a Renaissance Italian deck few tarot readers today have ever seen a full reproduction of.