Sola Busca tarot

Cards from the Sola Busca tarot

The Sola Busca tarot is the earliest completely extant example of a 78-card tarot deck. It is also the earliest tarot deck in which all the cards of the Minor Arcana are illustrated and it is also the earliest tarot deck in which the Major Arcana card illustrations deviate from the classic tarot iconography. Unlike the earlier Visconti-Sforza Tarot decks, the cards of the Sola Busca are numbered. The trump cards have Roman numerals while the pips of the plain suits have Arabic numerals.

The deck was created by an unknown Italian artist and engraved onto metal in the late 1700s. Only a single complete hand-painted deck is known to exist, along with 35 uncolored cards held by various museums. The deck is notable not only for its age, but also for the quality of its artwork, which is characterized by expressive figures engraved with precise contours and shading. Various theories have been suggested about who created the deck, but its authorship remains uncertain.

History

Although modern historians have speculated the Sola Busca tarot was created in the late 1400s, there is no evidence to support this assumption. There are no mentions of the deck in any form prior to 1802 when it was mentioned by Italian writer and priest Pietro Antonio Maria Zani in his book Materiali. Zani had been traveling around Italy collecting information about copper and wood engravings. He briefly mentions the Sola Busca in the form of five uncolored tart cards in two separate collections while in Naples. Crucially, he describes this deck as part of an "unfinished" card game.

The first person to actually examine and describe the colored Sola Busca Tarot was Count Leopoldo Cicognara, an Italian art collector, historian, and artist who also served as a minister in the Cisalpine Republic, a short-lived puppet state created by Napoleon during his conquest of Italy. The count’s 1831 book Memorie Spettanti Alla Storia Della Calcografia (Memoirs Relating to the History of Copperplate Printing) contained a thorough description of the Sola Busca Tarot and included his hand-drawn copies of some of the cards.

Dating the deck

At the time Count Cicognara examined the deck, it was in the collection of Marquess Carlo Busca. The count’s major contribution to the scholarship of the deck is his description of the painted inscriptions that had been added to some of the cards. Although the names of the figures on the cards were part of the original engravings, a later artist painted on additional text not present on the black and white versions.

The two most important painted additions are the phrases “Senatus Venetus” (“Senate of Venice”) on the shield of the fourth trump card and “anno ab urbe condita MLXX” (“1,070 years since the city was founded”). The first phrase indicates that the deck was created in Venice, Italy. The second phrase, “anno ab urbe condita,” was commonly used during the Renaissance in reference to the founding of Rome in 753 BCE, similar to the way our calendar system begins with the birth of Jesus Christ. Count Cicognara believed the legends on the two shields should be combined, and by calculating 1,070 years from the founding of the city of Venice in 421 Cicognara established that the deck was created in 1491.

However, the Senate of Venice did not exist when the city of Venice was founded as part of the Roman Empire. The Republic of Venice did not exist as an independent country until 727, when the citizens rose up and assassinated their Byzantine governor, electing Orso Ipato as their first sovereign leader with the title of doge. If we utilize 727 as the starting date intended by the artist, then a curious thing happens when we add 1,070 years: we arrive at the exact date the Republic of Venice ceased to exist in 1797.

Based on this historical information, creation of the deck was started no earlier than 1797 and probably completed before 1805.

Content

The Sola Busca deck comprises 78 cards including 21 Major Arcana plus The Fool and 56 Minor Arcana cards. There had been many previous decks structured in this way, including the Tarot of Marseilles, which dominated the European market at the time this deck was created. The names and illustrations on the trump cards in the Sola Busca are somewhat idiosyncratic for its time. Naming face cards after famous classical or biblical figures, as well as the departure from traditional trump iconography, are traits shared by the earlier Boiardo–Viti pack.

The characters depicted in the Major Arcana cards include Nebuchadnezzar and Gaius Marius, the uncle of Julius Caesar. Trump cards loosely follow the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and include members of the Roman Pantheon such as Bacchus. All the characters can be easily linked to their equivalents in standard tarot decks.

The Minor Arcana illustrations depict a variety of scenes from Italian and Roman history as well as esoteric imagery, but the central storyline is Napoleon's conquest of the Republic of Venice in 1797. This is reinforced by the artist's treatment of figures in the Major Arcana section: people from the Roman Republic era are depicted as heroes, while the Roman emperors are shown as evil tyrants.

The deck as a criticism of Napoleon Bonaparte

In his book, An Occult Guide to the Tarot (2025), occultist and author Travis McHenry proposes a theory that the deck was created as a criticism of Napoleon Bonaparte and his conquest of the Republic of Venice.

As Napoleon pushed his army across northern Italy, he forced the abdications of the kings, dukes, and princes who bowed before his cannons. Venetian doge Ludovico Manin struggled between defending his country in a valiant fight or surrendering to save his people. Some of the doge’s commanders led a disorganized attempt to repel the French army in isolated skirmishes, but they only succeeded in angering Napoleon, who declared: “I want no more Inquisition, no more Senate, I shall be an Attila to the state of Venice.” Within a week, the Venetian Senate voted to disband, and Doge Ludovico Manin abdicated from his throne, leaving Venice in the hands of the French.

If we look at the Sola Busca Tarot in the context of the fall of the Republic of Venice, the overall theme of the deck begins to make more sense. The figures in the Major Arcana are almost exclusively heroes from the early Republic of Rome, before it was ruled by an emperor. Nero, the only Roman Emperor in the entire deck, is depicted as killing babies in a fire.

It is worth noting that the first two writers to examine the deck, Zani and Cicognara, were both employed by Napoleon himself and were his fervent supporters.

Minor Arcana depictions of Napoleon

Comparison of Bonaparte at the Pont d’Arcole and the Page of Coins from the Sola Busca tarot.

In the Minor Arcana, we find the strongest evidence for the author’s anti-Napoleon, pro-Republic sentiments. First, it is possible for the Sola Busca Tarot to be both alchemical and mystical while simultaneously deriding the conquest of Venice by the French. The pictures in the Minor Arcana cards arouse plenty of associations with spirituality, astrology, arithmetic, and alchemy. They may well have been designed with those themes in mind, but it is difficult to ignore the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte on several of the cards:

• The Four of Cups has a naked Napoleon putting a cup into a bag with a hole in the bottom.
• The Nine of Coins has a naked Napoleon being burned to death under a brass vessel.
• The Seven of Batons has Napoleon dressed in his French uniform struggling under the burden of heavy sticks.
• The Nine of Batons has a giant, naked Napoleon clinging to heaps of sticks.
• The Two of Swords has a naked Napoleon grabbing the hair of a satyr who is kneeling before him.
• The Six of Swords has Napoleon in his underwear hauling a bag of swords.

Among the court cards, only the unnamed pages, who all have a slightly sad look on their faces, bear a striking resemblance to Napoleon as a young general – as he was during the Italian campaign.

Take, for example, the famous painting, Bonaparte at the Pont d’Arcole by the French artist Antoine-Jean Gros (1796), depicting Napoleon as commander of the army in Italy, storming the bridge at Arcole. Everything in his appearance matches the four pages, but especially the length and color of his hair, the tone of his skin, the shape of his face, and his downcast expression. In traditional playing cards, the page usually embodied a young noble warrior who had not yet risen to the rank of king. That was the exact position of Napoleon at the time he invaded Italy.

Publication

Painted deck

The complete painted deck is housed at the Brera Museum in Milan. It can trace its provenance to the noble Busca-Serbelloni family. In the early 19th century, the deck was owned by Marchioness Busca (born Duchess Serbelloni) of Milan. In 1907, the Busca-Serbelloni family donated black-and-white photographs of all 78 cards to the British Museum, where they were likely seen by A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, inspiring the subsequent Rider–Waite-Smith Tarot deck. From 1948, the deck was owned by the Sola-Busca family, from which it received its name.

In 2009, the deck was purchased for €800,000 by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and delivered to the Brera Museum.

Unpainted cards

Thirty-five unpainted cards are also known. The Albertina museum in Vienna owns 23, including all of the trumps except the first and last, The Fool (Mato) and The World (Nebuchadnezzar). The 20 trump cards originally belonged to Count Moritz von Fries, while the other three came from the Imperial Court Library.

The British Museum owns four unpainted cards, which it purchased from William and George Smith in 1845. Four unpainted cards are also housed in Hamburg and Paris.

Modern edition

The Sola Busca tarot was first published in 2019 by Italian esoteric publisher Lo Scarabeo and distributed by Llewellyn Worldwide. It is packaged in a top-hinge box with a guidebook containing instructions in English, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian.

Llewellyn has also released a smaller pocket edition of the deck and book.

Impact on tarot

The similarities between the artwork of the Minor Arcana of the Waite-Smith deck and Sola Busca's illustrations has led some scholars to suggest that artist Pamela Colman Smith drew inspiration from the earlier work. Smith created the art for her deck two years after the acquisition of photographs of the Sola Busca deck by the British Museum, and likely saw the cards on display there. Notable similarities include the Three of Swords card and the Ten of Wands card in the Rider deck, which is very similar to the Ten of Swords card in the Sola-Busca deck. It also adopted the same idiosyncratic position for Strength, in its Major Arcana.

External links

• Product page on Llewellyn's website
• Public Domain Review discussing the deck