Section 04COLLECTIONS
Collections
Named holdings in named institutions — where the oldest cards are, and what survives of them.
5 pieces in this section
- Lead piece
Seventy-Four Cards in Three Cities
The most studied tarot pack in existence survives incomplete, divided across two institutions and a private collection — and the gaps are as revealing as the cards themselves.
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What the Morgan Library Holds, and How It Got There
The Morgan's fifteen Visconti-Sforza cards are the largest surviving fragment of the pack in one place — and their acquisition history is as layered as their gilding.
Read the piecePhoto: cottonbro studio / Pexels
The British Museum's Playing-Card Collection
One of the largest systematically catalogued archives of historical playing cards in the world sits in Bloomsbury — and its tarot holdings have shaped the documented record of the medium.
Read the piecePhoto: Tarot-cary-collection-ita-sheet-3s-c1500. · Wikimedia Commons
Nicolas Conver Cut His Blocks Around 1760, and Every Edition Still Argues With Them
The Marseille pattern is not a design — it is a set of tooling marks, accumulated across ink pulls and sharpened edges, that no digital scan fully settles.
Read the piecePhoto: As BATON Nicolas Conver Tarot 1760 · Wikimedia Commons
