Tarot Decks

Sola Busca

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Sola Busca." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://divinity.interactivelion.com/tarot-decks/sola-busca.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Sola Busca. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://divinity.interactivelion.com/tarot-decks/sola-busca

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-sola-busca,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Sola Busca},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://divinity.interactivelion.com/tarot-decks/sola-busca},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The Sola Busca tarot, engraved in Milan or Ferrara around 1491, is the earliest known tarot deck with fully illustrated, scenic pip cards rather than plain suit-sign arrangements, four centuries before the Rider-Waite-Smith deck made that convention standard. Its trumps carry invented names drawn from classical and legendary figures rather than the usual Marseille sequence, and its imagery, alchemical and astrological in flavor, directly influenced several of the Rider-Waite-Smith minor arcana scenes, the Three and Ten of Swords and the Six of Wands among them. Only one complete deck survives, held by the British Museum.

Facts

Occult Attributions

Tarot Trump Attributed

Directly influenced Rider-Waite-Smith minor arcana imagery, including the Three and Ten of Swords and the Six of Wands 1Rider-Waite-Smith source study

Disputed

Creator / Originator

Debated, and considerably less settled than the engraver identification recorded under artist. No historical record names who conceived or commissioned the deck outright; the same two rival theories proposed for its engraver, a Venetian client served by Mattia Serrati da Cosandola, or the painter Nicola di Maestro Antonio, are the only candidates ever put forward, and neither commands scholarly consensus as the deck's originator any more than as its maker. 1

Artist

Debated. Arthur Mayger Hind, in his 1935 Early Italian Engravings, argued from the deck's own imagery, its references to the Republic of Venice, that it was made for a Venetian client and proposed the engraver Mattia Serrati da Cosandola on that basis. A separate theory instead names the painter Nicola di Maestro Antonio. Neither identification commands scholarly consensus. 1

Attributions

Publisher

No publisher in the modern sense; it survives as a set of engraved prints, most likely made for a Venetian client, matching the same disputed patronage theories recorded under its creator and artist facts. 1

Tradition

Renaissance Italian card art, dated to around 1491, the earliest known fully illustrated Minor Arcana and a direct visual source Pamela Colman Smith drew on for the Rider Waite Smith Minor Arcana. It predates and is independent of the Rider Waite Smith system by more than four centuries. 2

Method

How the Cards Are Read

No divinatory reading method is documented; the deck predates cartomantic and occult tarot reading, which begins with Court de Gebelin and Etteilla three centuries later, and its own original use, whether gaming or commemorative, is not established. 1

Custody

Current Location

The only complete surviving deck is held by the British Museum 1

Identity

Publication Year

1491 1

Approximate; the surviving deck is generally dated on stylistic and documentary grounds to around 1491, not to a firmly fixed year.

Origins

Place of Origin

Milan or Ferrara, northern Italy 1

Deck

Cards in the Deck

78 1

Pip Cards

Scenic pips: every suit card is an illustrated scene 1

The earliest known example of the convention Rider-Waite-Smith would later standardize.

Cult

Attributes and Iconography

The earliest known tarot deck with fully illustrated, scenic pip cards, four centuries before Rider-Waite-Smith made that treatment standard; its trumps carry invented names drawn from classical and legendary figures rather than the Marseille sequence, and its alchemical and astrological imagery directly influenced several Rider-Waite-Smith minor arcana scenes, among them the Three and Ten of Swords and the Six of Wands. 1

Learn More

The Earliest Fully Illustrated Deck

The Sola Busca, engraved in Northern Italy around 1491, holds a distinct place in tarot history as the earliest known deck to give every minor arcana card its own illustrated scene rather than a plain repetition of suit signs. Where earlier and contemporary decks such as the Visconti-Sforza illustrate only the trumps and court cards and leave the pip cards as simple arrangements of cups, coins, swords or batons, the Sola Busca gives each of its forty numbered minor cards a distinct figure or narrative scene, a level of visual ambition no surviving earlier deck attempts.

Only one substantially complete set of the deck survives, later divided between collections with the majority now held at the British Museum. The deck takes its modern name not from its original patron, whose identity is not securely established in the surviving record, but from the Sola-Busca family who owned it in a later century, a naming pattern common to several surviving historical decks named for a later collector rather than a first commissioner.

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.

Cross-Tradition Connections