From secret societies to Selfridges: the eccentric geniuses responsible for the macabre world of tarot

A new exhibition shows how, over the centuries, the cards went from courtly novelty to occultish tool of divination – and the way in which the art form is still evolving

There are few more appropriate venues in which to stage an exhibition about tarot than the newly refurbished galleries of the Warburg Institute. Based in Bloomsbury, London, since 1933 but founded in Hamburg at the turn of the 20th century by historian Aby Warburg – himself a pioneering modern scholar of tarot cards – its aim was the study of global cultural history and the role played by images, with particular emphasis on the relationship between the Renaissance and ancient civilisations.

“Tarot is a legacy of Italian Renaissance visual culture that spreads through time and space,” explains Bill Sherman, Warburg director, and co-curator of the exhibition Tarot: Origins & Afterlives. “But how does something created in a mid-15th-century northern Italian courtly context, not at that point associated with divination or the occult, become such a pervasive global phenomenon?”

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