Visconti-Sforza tarot cards (Pierpont Morgan Bergamo deck)

This is the Morgan Library and Museum's own institutional record for its portion of the Visconti-Sforza tarot cards, the fifteenth century deck commissioned for the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan and among the oldest surviving tarot decks in the world. The Morgan holds one of three surviving partial sets, with the remaining cards divided between the Accademia Carrara and the Colleoni family collection, both in Bergamo. Its strength is that a holding institution's own catalogue record is authoritative for exactly this kind of fact: which cards survive, where they are held and their physical description. Its limit is that it documents custody and provenance rather than interpreting the deck's imagery or its place in the history of tarot as a divinatory practice, a later development the fifteenth century cards themselves predate; a claim about tarot's occult use needs a source on that later history instead.