No records survived to tell us exactly where,when,by whom,or why the first tarot cards weremade.However,the oldest surviving cards (the Cary-Yale Visconto deck) were made for Fillipo Viscotti, the last Visconti duke of Milan. Probably painted as a wedding gift, this magnificent deck of overly large cards was hand -painted with hammered gold-leaf illumination. Both the new game and the cards used to play were origionally called trionfi (triumphs or 'trumps'), but by 1516 had become known as tarocchi-- a name that is still used in Italy today. this word possibly refers to a technique called taroccare for stamping designs (tara) into sheets of gold, for it also refers to a Sicillian orange with similarly golden, pitted surface. It may even be related to theAribic word taraga, which means "to hammer." However, this is only the latest in a long list of proposed meanings for tarot or tarocchi that range from Egyptian "royal road" to the Buddhist goddess Tara to the Italian river Taro.
Woodcut tarot decks, of a medieval design, appeared at some point during the century, with variation in design by region. The fifty-card Tarocchi del Mantegna, for instance, include cards such as the beggar,servant,artisan, and merchant,as well as many of the familiar Major Arcana cards, and culminated with the Prime Mover and First Cause. A deck known as the Charles VI or Gringonneur Tarot is actually a late -fifteenth century hand-painted deck of the northern Italian type (probably from Venice or Ferrara)
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