The Morgan Library & Museum has put one of the oldest complete tarot decks in the world at the center of a new exhibition. Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions traces the cards from their origins in 15th-century Italy to their 20th-century afterlife as a source of inspiration for artists and practitioners.

The show's centerpiece is the Morgan's collection of the Visconti-Sforza tarot deck, likely produced around 1450 by Bonifacio Bembo for the powerful Milanese family that gives the deck its name. The cards measure 6.8 x 3.4 inches (172.7 x 86.4 mm) and carry tempera with gold and silver leaf on pasteboard. A caption in the exhibition dates elements of the set to circa 1456–58.

The deck was not made for fortune-telling. It was designed as a game for the aristocracy, and that fact illuminates one of tarot's enduring puzzles. Of the 76 cards in a standard deck, 14 belong to the suit of pentacles — coins — an object far more profane than the swords, cups and wands that fill the other suits, all of which have long histories in spiritual practice. Standing in front of the gilded Visconti-Sforza cards, a visitor begins to see why money earned its place: tarot and capital co-evolved amid Renaissance Italy's rise to power, and in that context, pentacles made sense.

The exhibition divides into two sections, "Renaissance Symbols" and "Modern Visions." The first gathers the earliest surviving tarot decks from the 15th century. The second examines how, in the 20th century, those cards continued to serve as material for artists and practitioners who found in them a language for their own moment.

Tarot, on the scale of divination, is a newcomer. Coffee readings, yarrow stalks, stars and turtle shells belong to traditions that stretch back thousands of years, and each reflects a material logic rooted in the culture that produced it. Tarot has lasted roughly 500 — and the specific 500 years it has occupied are themselves the point. The answer, one argument running through the show suggests, is remixability: divinatory tarot re-emerges in popularity during times of tumult, and the card structure creates a format for reinterpreting the images in light of contemporary concerns.

That structural openness is what allows a Renaissance aristocrat's gilded game to speak to a broken modern world — and what makes the Morgan's pairing of 15th-century decks with 20th-century visions more than a curiosity of antique collecting. If tarot resurfaces in every turbulent era, the exhibition implies, the current one will likely find its own use for the cards soon enough.