Sola Busca (Italy, 1491)
The oldest complete tarot deck that survives, engraved in northern Italy in 1491, and the only one before Rider-Waite-Smith whose pip cards are pictures rather than arrangements of suit signs — four centuries before Pamela Colman Smith did the same. Its trumps are not the Marseille figures at all but named Romans and Biblical kings, from Mato at O to Nabuchodenasor at XXI. No card back and no box survive, so the back shown here is a modern reconstruction: the deck's own paper colour, ruled in its own ink. Images from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
