Tarot began as a card game. The three earliest surviving decks—all from 15th-century Milan, commissioned by the Dukes of Sforza and Visconti—were hand-painted luxury objects with no particular mystical intent, their imagery drawn from the allegorical traditions of Renaissance court culture. The divination practices came later, as the cards circulated and accumulated meaning. The Morgan is staging a double exhibition that traces both halves of this history. The first part is devoted to the original Renaissance decks. The second part takes the legendary 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck as its starting point and follows the imagery’s adoption by André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Betye Saar, among others, for whom the tarot offered an alternative to the strictures of modernist aesthetics. —Elena Clavarino