The Sola Busca tarot, the oldest complete tarot deck
Engraved around 1490 and coloured in Venice in 1491, its 78 cards trade virtues for Roman heroes and gave the Rider–Waite–Smith deck its scenes.
The Sola Busca tarot is the oldest complete tarot deck in the world: all 78 cards, engraved around 1490 and coloured by hand in Venice in 1491. It is also the strangest. Its triumphs are not the Pope, the Lovers and the Moon but named heroes from Roman history and the Bible, and its numbered cards, which in every other early deck show only suit signs, each carry a scene.
Four centuries later, its pictures found their way into the most popular tarot deck ever printed.
Draw your three cards from the Sola Busca Create your Renaissance portrait
Who made it
The deck was engraved in metal with a burin, printed on paper and mounted on card, then coloured and gilded by hand. Its maker is unknown. In 2012 the Pinacoteca di Brera, which now owns it, attributed the engravings to Nicola di maestro Antonio, a painter from Ancona, by comparison with his panels and prints. The humanist Ludovico Lazzarelli has been proposed as the mind behind its pictures, and the Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo the Younger as the patron who had it coloured.
Venice is written all over it. Many of the inscriptions on the cards refer to the Republic, and the coloured set is dated to Venice, 1491.
Heroes instead of virtues
The 22 triumphs are numbered from 0 to XXI in Roman numerals, as in later decks, but each is a named figure. The Fool, numbered 0, is Mato. After him come soldiers and statesmen of ancient Rome, many from the story of Gaius Marius and his wars: Marius himself, Catulus, Nero, Cato. Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon appears as Nabuchodenasor, and Bacchus holds the fourteenth place.
Why these figures, in this order, is still argued over. They follow none of the standard Italian sequences of triumphs.
Fifty-six small scenes
The suit cards are what make the Sola Busca unique among early decks. The four suits are coins, cups, swords and batons, numbered in Arabic numerals, and every card shows people doing something: fighting, carrying, mourning, working.
The court cards are named too. The King of Swords is Alexander the Great, the Queen of Swords his mother Olympias, and the Knight of Swords the god Zeus Ammon, from whom Alexander claimed descent. The Ten of Cups may show Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary founder of alchemy, and several of the coin cards seem to describe the making of coins and the stages of the alchemical work. The Brera's 2012 exhibition was titled for that reading: Il segreto dei segreti, the secret of secrets.
The 1907 photographs
The coloured deck stayed in private hands in Milan, passing through the Busca-Serbelloni family to the Sola-Busca family, who gave it its name. In 1907 the family gave the British Museum a set of black-and-white photographs of all 78 cards.
Two years later, in London, Pamela Colman Smith drew the cards of the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot, published in 1909. Hers was the first popular deck to give every numbered card a scene, as the Sola Busca had, and several of her designs follow it closely. The clearest is the Three of Swords: a heart pierced by three swords, in Venice in 1491 and in London in 1909. Read the story of the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot.
Bought for Italy
In 2009 the Italian state used its right of first refusal to buy the coloured deck, for €800,000, and gave it to the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. The museum showed it in full in the exhibition of 2012 and 2013.
Uncoloured impressions of 35 of the cards, printed from the same plates, survive elsewhere: 23 at the Albertina in Vienna, four each at the British Museum, in Hamburg and in Paris. The Brera shows the coloured deck on its own website.
Drawing from the Sola Busca in Fable
The Sola Busca is one of the decks in Fable's tarot reading. When you draw from its world, you see its own cards: each trump captioned by the figure named on it, and every suit card with its scene. Your reading ends with a portrait painted for you from your reading, in the historic style of the deck.
Draw your three cards from the Sola Busca Create your Renaissance portrait
For the story of tarot from the first painted cards to the reading deck, read the history of tarot, and for the deck painted for the Dukes of Milan, the Visconti–Sforza tarot.
Sources: Pinacoteca di Brera, Il segreto dei segreti. I tarocchi Sola Busca e la cultura ermetico-alchemica tra Marche e Veneto alla fine del Quattrocento (exhibition and Skira catalogue, 2012); Mark J. Zucker, "The Master of the 'Sola-Busca Tarocchi'", Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 35 (1997); Arthur M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving (1938); Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980). The uncoloured cards shown are the Albertina's impressions, public domain, credit ALBERTINA, Wien.