Visconti-Sforza Tarot: The Judgment Card
The Deck:
I encountered the Visconti-Sforza tarot deck in a small tarot shop (Il Meneghello) in Milan. The shop was tiny, possibly less than 300 square feet is my guess. The front part of the shop displayed various tarot decks drawn by the owner. The back was the shop owner’s tarot-drawing work station. He remains one of the last few tarot artists in the world, and one of the most well-known ones, who still paints tarot cards by hand.
Not far from the shop is the Sforzesco Castle, where the Visconti-Sforza tarot deck was invented in the 15th century. The Morgan Library in New York now houses 35 cards from one of the original decks.
At the shop, I noticed a different deck, something more whimscal and less “formal”, so to speak, than the Visconti-Sforza deck, but the owner kept pointing me to the bulky deck. His daughter came to translate for me. I hesitated about buying the deck. It felt unfamiliar.
Only later did I realize that the Visconti-Sforza tarot is one of the earliest complete tarot decks, if not the earliest. That and the fact that the tarot shop was right next to where the deck was invented (hence the Sforzesco Castle widely being considered the birthplace of tarot) made the encounter feel very romantic in hindsight. At the time, I bought the whimscal deck that jumped out at me, left the shop to sit on the decision for a while.
I did go back to get the Visconti-Sforza deck.
The Card:
A while ago—I’m writing this in early 2025—the idea of going through this deck, starting with the Major Arcanas—came to me. I want to write about each card in the order that I pick from the deck. (Let’s see how long this endeavor continues.)
The first card was The Judgment.
The Judgment card speaks: “What translates through you is not personal. There are personal and impersonal aspects of operating in this world.”
Intuition is personal and impersonal. The personal part is the specificity of an ask: “what would work the best for me?” The impersonal part is the ingenuity of an answer that can sometimes feel out of the left field.
Trust is what binds the two.
