The Sola Busca tarot is the earliest completely extant example of a 78-card tarot deck. The Latin motto TRAHOR FATIS (I am drawn by Fate) appears four times in the Tarot masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, the Sola Busca deck, and over a procession of ancient Greek and Roman heroes.
The characters depicted in the Sola-Busca cards include Nebuchadnezzar and Gaius Marius, the uncle of Julius Caesar. The trumps loosely follow the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, but also include members of the Roman Pantheon such as Bacchus.
The similarity between some of the artwork of the ubiquitous Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909 (see links at end of page) and that of the Sola-Busca indicates that the artist of the former, Pamela Colman Smith, drew inspiration from the earlier work. Smith created the art for the Rider deck two years after the exhibition of a set of black-and-white photographs of the Sola-Busca deck by the British Museum.