Tarot History Forum

Ercole changed the flower, so I was thinking prior. I agree Sforza is still in the running.

Ross Caldwell wrote: 02 May 2026, 20:43 Yes it's an Este symbol that they granted to Alessandro Sforza to use. It's hard to judge only on that basis who the cards were made for.

If we go with Ercole d'Este, who became lord of Ferrara in 1471, that seems pretty late to have been getting Tarot cards made in Florence. Borso also had his own local production by then. Did Leonello use the device? If he did, we might have a deck made for Leonello. But he had in-house production as well.

I'm still partial to Alessandro Sforza on the basis that the cards were made in Florence.

But the deck known as the "Este deck" or "Este-Aragon deck" was also made in Florence, apparently for the Este court on the occasion of the wedding of Ercole I to Eleanor of Naples/Aragon in 1473... The cards themselves also have a couple of features that seem to have been typically Ferrarese, such as the long baton held by the jack of that suit, and the image of Diogenes and Alexander on the Sun card: It is a Ferrarese deck, made by a Florentine workshop. So the existence or non-existence of Ferrarese production workshops appears to be irrelevant to the question, if the Este court was still commissioning luxury decks from Florence even at that date.

More pertinent to that question (of who the Catania deck was made for) is its dating to "ca. 1450" (Tarots Enluminés).