Cary-Yale Visconti Tarot Deck (15th Century)

The Cary-Yale Visconti Tarocchi Deck is comprised of 22 Major Arcana and 64 Minor Arcana cards. The deck includes reproductions of tarocchi cards from the Cary Collection of Playing Cards, now housed at Yale University. Nineteen cards have been recreated to replace missing originals. In addition to the King and Queen, each suit in the Minor Arcana contains both male and female Knights and Pages.

Three mid-15th century sets were made for members of the Visconti family. The first deck, and probably the prototype, is called the Cary-Yale Tarot (or Visconti-Modrone Tarot) and was created between 1442 and 1447 by an anonymous painter for Filippo Maria Visconti. The cards (only 66) are today in the Cary collection of the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, in the U.S. state of Connecticut. The most famous was painted in the mid-15th century, to celebrate Francesco Sforza and his wife Bianca Maria Visconti, daughter of the duke Filippo Maria. Probably, these cards were painted by Bonifacio Bembo or Francesco Zavattari between 1451 and 1453. Of the original cards, 35 are in The Morgan Library & Museum, 26 are at the Accademia Carrara, 13 are at the Casa Colleoni and four: 'The Devil', 'The Tower', 'Money's Horse (The Chariot)' and '3 of Spades', are lost or else never made. This "Visconti-Sforza" deck, which has been widely reproduced, reflects conventional iconography of the time to a significant degree.

Hand-painted tarot cards remained a privilege of the upper classes and, although some sermons inveighing against the evil inherent in cards can be traced to the 14th century, most civil governments did not routinely condemn tarot cards during tarot's early history. In fact, in some jurisdictions, tarot cards were specifically exempted from laws otherwise prohibiting the playing of cards.

Because the earliest tarot cards were hand-painted, the number of the decks produced is thought to have been rather small, and it was only after the invention of the printing press that mass production of cards became possible. Wikipedia

All the images are contained in a PDF file, including scans of the booklet with information and instructions about the deck.

To export the images from the PDF, you can use this free program:
http://en.softonic.com/s/pdf-xchange-viewer

The original size of the cards is 19 X 9 cm.

Sample of the pictures: