J.P. Morgan wasn’t just a shrewd financier and passionate art collector — he was also, by most accounts, a deeply superstitious man. He had a genuine interest in the occult, believed in astrology, and was famously fond of solitaire. All of that came together in 1911, when he acquired three and a half dozen cards belonging to a legendary 15th-century tarot deck, commissioned by Milan’s ruling Visconti-Sforza dynasty and painted by northern Italian artist Bonifacio Bembo. That incomplete deck has since become one of the signature holdings of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, the institution built around the financier’s collection and legacy. Now those 35 cards anchor a sprawling two-part exhibition on tarot that opened in late June, bringing together roughly 380 objects that trace the cards’ history from 15th-century Lombard court culture all the way to New York in 2026 — where, in the show’s final section, visitors can actually get their fortune read.
The exhibition follows tarot’s transformation from a refined intellectual pastime that emerged on the Italian peninsula into an international symbol of the occult, embraced over the centuries by figures like English writer and occultist Aleister Crowley and French Surrealist André Breton. In the early 1940s, Breton, alongside fellow Surrealists including Romanian artist Victor Brauner and Max Ernst, designed their own Surrealist tarot deck — represented here by several cards on loan from Marseille. Breton’s own contribution, a strange card populated with octopuses, is dedicated to the 16th-century alchemist Paracelsus.
The exhibition’s first section pairs the Morgan’s original Visconti-Sforza cards (circa 1456–1458) with additional cards on loan from Bergamo’s Accademia Carrara, making this the first exhibition in North American history to bring together the majority of the surviving cards from that legendary deck. Curator Joshua O’Driscoll points out that certain cards — including the “Death” card — draw on distinctly medieval visual language despite being the work of a Renaissance-era artist. As O’Driscoll explains it, the line between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was never as clean as it’s often made out to be, and the visual grammar of the slightly earlier Visconti di Modrone deck (circa 1441–1442) still leans heavily on late Gothic style. That deck is now attributed to an artist recently identified as Andrea Bembo, working out of Bonifacio Bembo’s workshop. Italian art historian Anna Delle Foglie notes in the catalogue that the woman shown playing with a lion on the di Modrone deck’s “Strength” card reads almost like a figure out of a fairy tale.
Tarot’s mystical reputation actually traces back to late 18th-century French occultists, who effectively laid the groundwork for the cards’ dramatic 20th-century revival. The exhibition’s contemporary section opens with drawings by British artist Pamela Colman Smith for the iconic 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, designed specifically for divination. Alongside the cards themselves — including an unsettling, phantasmagoric rendering of “The Fool” — the show traces Smith’s artistic development through a striking 1908 watercolor, Sketch for a Wine Glass: a mysterious cloaked figure gazing, entranced, at what might be either the moon or the sun.
The Morgan Library & Museum
“Tarot! Symbols of the Renaissance, Modern Interpretations”
On view through October 4