This is a surviving part of a sheet of playing cards that was never cut apart. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates it to around 1500 and describes it as a woodblock print colored with stencils in red, blue and brown. It is about 12 by 9 1/2 inches. Each card sits in its own frame, and Roman numerals run across the cards. Many of the figures stand under arches in long red robes: crowned women holding swords and scepters, a bearded old man in a long robe, an angel blowing a trumpet, and an angel holding up a globe with a walled town by a river.
The word is Tarocchi, the Italian name for the cards we now call tarot. When this sheet was printed, the cards were a game, not a way of telling fortunes. Tarot began at the Italian courts in the fifteenth century as a trick-taking game with an extra suit of trumps, and the fortune-telling meanings came later, in the eighteenth century. Few of the earliest printed sheets survive, because cards were worn out with use, which is why a sheet like this one is valuable.
Look at the figures and you can find ancestors of the cards we know: a woman with a sword and scales, who would become Justice; an angel with a trumpet; a world with a city inside. The hand coloring is a little uneven, and the red sometimes slides off the lines, which gives the sheet the feel of a handmade object.
The Tarocchi sheet appears on our:
For what the cards came to mean, see our tarot series, starting with The Fool: The Beginning of Consciousness.