4 of Pentacles

The Four of Pentacles belongs to the suit of coins, one of the four Italian suits (coins, cups, swords and batons). These suits came into Europe in the 1370s with playing cards from Mamluk Egypt and Moorish Granada, and trace back through the Islamic world to older Chinese money-suited cards. In Italian decks the suit is often called denari.

In the c. 1450 Visconti-Sforza cards, made in the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo, the Four of Coins shows four plain gold discs on a patterned ground, with no figure and no scene. Scholars disagree about the discs: Gertrude Moakley reads them as Visconti sun emblems, while Giordano Berti compares them to a florin of Filippo Maria Visconti. The later Tarot de Marseille (about 1650 to 1700) also gives a plain arrangement of four coins with a small flourish in the middle.

The first tarot deck with a picture on every numbered card is the Sola Busca, engraved around 1490 and painted in 1491, probably in Venice or the Veneto; its artist is unknown. Its pips carry Arabic numerals. Scholars think Pamela Colman Smith may have seen photographs of it before drawing her 1909 deck, so the idea of an illustrated Four may come from that tradition. No fifteenth-century source gives this card a meaning.

In 1909 Pamela Colman Smith drew the Four of Pentacles for Arthur Edward Waite, and the Rider company published the deck that year. Unlike the plain coin patterns of Visconti-Sforza and Marseille cards, her card is a scene: Waite describes a crowned figure holding a pentacle with a second on the head and two more under the feet, so that all four coins are tied to one person.

This is a new image in the tarot tradition, set against the earlier counting of four discs.