Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions
Morgan Library & Museum
June 26–October, 4, 2026
New York
There are hundreds, maybe thousands of different tarot decks. Scour the internet and you will find faithful reproductions of classic decks from various eras, idiosyncratic decks by famous artists like Salvador Dalí, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Leonora Carrington, and ideological decks that celebrate everything from Black power and queer aesthetics to New Wave music and the divine feminine. My sister-in-law collects cat-inspired tarot decks, of which there are surprisingly many.
What is the enduring appeal of tarot? Where did it originate and how has it evolved into the multifaceted means of expression that it is today? These are the questions that the Morgan Library & Museum’s Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions attempts to answer. As the title suggests, this is really two exhibitions because the history of tarot itself is bifurcated. Tarot originated as an aristocratic card game in the Renaissance with suits and figures that are ancestors of today’s playing cards. Tarot made an abrupt U-turn in the late eighteenth century when various occultists gave it an imagined Egyptian origin and transformed it into a tool for divination. The exhibition somewhat tenuously bridges those versions with materials related to medieval and Renaissance fortune telling.
This being the Morgan Library, original tarot decks are supplemented with collateral materials, which include spectacularly beautiful illuminated manuscripts, comparative paintings, explanatory etchings, and Renaissance “model books” that offered motifs for artists of all stripes, including tarot designers. The show is so rich visually that it is easy to get lost in the individual objects. But the basic story it tells is this: During the Renaissance, unique gilded and hand-painted tarot decks were commissioned from celebrated local artists by aristocratic families in Northern Italy. They were used in a trick-taking game that involved twenty-two archetypal images drawn from court life, the religious hierarchy, theological virtues, celestial bodies, and a variety of symbols relating to fate, chance, and the course of life. These were accompanied by fifty-six lesser cards, which—much like modern card decks—were divided into four suits represented by cups, wands, swords, and coins. Though the game was a secular pursuit, whose rules are not entirely clear today, it was given a spiritual gloss by its relation to the idea of the “triumph” (which later became, ironically, the “trump”) of virtue over vice.
The second part of the story involves the tarot’s transformation by French occultist Antoine Court de Gébelin, who in 1781 linked the figures on the cards to ancient Egyptian magic. No longer a simple card game, tarot could now be seen as a complex divination system, allowing for a jump to modern perceptions and use of tarot as not only a divination tool, but also a code for the creation of all kinds of personal narratives. In dealing with the modern and contemporary phase of tarot history, the exhibition focuses on the British occult revival of the late nineteenth century; tarot’s hold on Surrealists such as André Breton, Roberto Matta, Ithell Colquhoun, and Leonora Carrington; and its spread to the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, where it found a home among the counterculture, and its shattering into so many iterations today.