8 of Pentacles

The suit now called Pentacles began as the Italian suit of coins (denari). Italian decks use four suits: coins, cups, swords and batons. According to Wikipedia’s article on card suits, these Latin suits were adopted from cards that reached Europe from Mamluk Egypt and Moorish Granada in the 1370s. Tarot was added later, in northern Italy in the 15th century, as a set of trump cards on top of an ordinary four-suit pack.

In most early decks, a numbered card such as the Eight of Coins was not a picture. It showed the suit symbol repeated eight times, and that plain pip design is also how the card looks in the Tarot de Marseille tradition.

The Sola Busca deck is the exception. It was engraved around 1490 and hand-coloured in 1491, probably in Venice, and it is the earliest tarot in which every numbered suit card carries a scene. The artist is not known. Its pip cards are numbered with Arabic numerals, and the cards of the coins suit run from the Ace to the Ten, with only the court cards named. Nothing in the sources used here describes its Eight of Coins in detail.

The Eight of Pentacles as most people know it comes from the deck Pamela Colman Smith drew for A. E. Waite, published in 1909. Smith gave every numbered card a scene, where older decks mostly gave only repeated symbols. Writers connect this choice with the Sola Busca deck: photographs of it were given to the British Museum in 1907, and Waite and Smith probably saw them there. One account says Waite was shown the deck in 1909 and then asked Smith to illustrate the whole Minor Arcana.

Sources differ on how closely Smith copied Sola Busca, and the cards usually named as borrowings are others, such as the Three of Swords and the Ten of Wands. The Eight of Pentacles is not among them. Waite’s own text for the card, quoted below, describes a worker in stone showing his finished pieces.