d'Este Tarocchi — The Ferrarese Fragment (c. 1450)

At a glance

Among the oldest surviving tarot of all — sixteen hand-painted cards made in Ferrara around 1450, in the orbit of the ruling House of Este, contemporaries of the Milanese Visconti decks but from the other great early tarot court. Only 16 cards survive (8 trumps + 8 court cards) of what was once a full pack; they are held in the Cary Collection of Playing Cards at Yale's Beinecke Library (PLAYING CARDS GEN 966) and shown here from Yale's open-access high-resolution scans.

Why it matters — the B-order home

Ferrara is the home of the B-order trump sequence (the Eastern branch in Dummett's A/B/C scheme). Where Milan's Visconti decks head the C-order line that became the Tarot de Marseille, the d'Este cards are a rare, luxurious witness to Ferrara's parallel tradition — proof that tarot's invention was not a single Milanese event but a courtly fashion shared across northern Italy in the 1440s–50s.

What survives

• 8 trumps: Il Bagatto (the Magician), Il Papa (the Pope), Temperance, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, the World, and Il Matto (the Fool).
• 8 court cards: kings, queens, a cavalier and a jack across Swords, Batons, Coins and Cups.
• Card identifications are Yale's own catalogue labels — not guessed from iconography. The cards are unnumbered (as 15th-century hand-painted trumps were).

Game, not divination

Like the Visconti decks, this is a luxury court game object — trionfi, three centuries before any divinatory use. No cartomantic meaning is native to it.

Provenance & evidence

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale — Cary Collection (Mary Flagler Cary, 1967); PLAYING CARDS GEN 966; cards 140 × 78 mm; completely digitized, open access (credit: Yale University Library). Dating ('c. 1450') and the Ferrarese/Este attribution follow the standard scholarship but, as with all the early hand-painted decks, remain debated.

Sources

Yale Beinecke / Cary Collection catalogue; Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Thierry Depaulis on the Ferrarese decks.

RESEARCH NOTE (2026-06-13). Dating is disputed: c. 1450 (used here) vs c. 1470s (Pollett). The deck's original composition is unknown. See research/decks/este-tarot.md.

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