The Cary Sheet — Earliest Marseille Pattern (Milan, c. 1500)

An uncut sheet of Milanese tarot woodcuts, c. 1500 — the earliest surviving evidence of the Tarot de Marseille pattern itself, a full century before Nicolas Conver's 1760 edition. Held at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale (the Cary Collection of Playing Cards). If you want the missing link between the hand-painted Italian court decks (Visconti-Sforza) and the printed Marseille standard, this is it: the same trump designs, already woodcut for mass printing.

ANCESTRAL STATUS: ancestral to the standard tarot (the printed C-order line), not an ancestor of card-playing itself.

SOURCES: Beinecke Library, Yale (digitised in their collections); Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980).

Where the pictures come from: who holds this deck's pictures, how sharp they are and what their rights allow: Sources: Cary Sheet.