Ace of Cups

The cups suit comes from the Latin suit system (coins, cups, swords and batons or clubs), which spread in Europe in the 1370s from cards brought from Mamluk Egypt and Moorish Granada. Italian decks, including the tarot decks of the 15th century, kept these suits. Wikipedia traces the cups themselves further back, to Islamic-world cards that adapted earlier Chinese money-suited cards, though it gives no firm date for that step.

In the Visconti-Sforza deck, painted in Milan around 1450 by the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo and now in the Morgan Library, the Ace of Cups is not a goblet. One secondary source describes a tiered Gothic fountain with water jets and a small winged figure on top, and the same fountain appears on the earlier Cary-Yale deck. That source reads it as both a baptismal font and a eucharistic monstrance; this is an interpretation, not a documented intention.

The Sola Busca deck (engraved around 1490, painted in 1491) is the earliest known tarot in which every suit card carries a scene, ending the plain pip design. Scholars think Pamela Colman Smith may have seen photographs of it in the British Museum, which received them in 1907.

For the Tarot de Marseille (16th to 18th century), one source says the cups cards show geometric, heraldic arrangements among stems and leaves, with no scene.

The 1909 deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for Arthur Edward Waite, gives the Ace a new design: a hand comes out of a cloud holding a cup, with streams of water pouring from it, a dove above it carrying a Host marked with a cross, and water-lilies on the water below. Waite describes this in his book of 1910 (see below). It is a Christian devotional image, quite unlike the fountain of the Visconti-Sforza deck or the pip designs of Marseille-type decks.

Mary K. Greer, as reported by one secondary source, treats the winged figure atop the Visconti-Sforza fountain as a distant ancestor of the dove, a thematic link and not a copy.