Well, here's a try.
There is one writer that I'm beginning to appreciate who seems to really track beautifully with many bits and pieces that I've seen and heard in discussion of history, Renaissance thought and associations with pagan divinities, even the 50 card 'tarocchi of Mantegna,' which had some clerical support--and this close-to-tarot game is the view as if the heavens were alive with the muses, graces, Olympians and music of the spheres.
Joscelyn Godwin has written many books on music, pagan literature and history, but the thread that I pull from him is he is writing not as an observer, but as someone who can see universal concepts and also feel the context of the time.
Anyway, the title that is most related to tarocchi interests is his "Pagan Dream of the Renaisance and Chapter 3 covers very heightened examples of the revival of antiquity, retranslated in the prosperous golden ages of Italian nobility.
He mentions Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Tempio Malatestiano, Tarocchi of Mantegna, the Florentine Picture Chronicle of the 1460s and the Schifanoia Frescos in Ferarra in 1450-1471 under Duke Borso
There were some pagan influenced excesses such as the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, where one enters in the north through the watery sign of cancer to bodily exististance to the southern area of the temple that is ruled by Capricorn to transcendence and immortality. This was under Sigismundo Malatesta. Godwin's book also cites one of the various Tarocchi of Mantegnas. He chooses to discuss the one which might have been conceived in the 1460s by Pope Pius II, Nicholas of Cusa and Greek colleague cardinal Bessarion in Mantua from June 1459 to July 1460. (There are dates from 1465 (online?) to a Lo Scarabeo's Silver Mantegna reissue of the 1470 and the Il Menghello version of the cards)
I'm still reading about with the Hyperotomachia Poliphi or the Florentine Picture Chronicle...but from what I know about the imagined world of the Schifanoia Frescos and 1465/1470 Mantegna cards, at least from Ferrara, one could see the imagined and painted dream of immortals, divinities and muses who accompanied and watched over the world of man.
Some may point you to Dante Algheri as a great example of both an endpoint and beginning of medieval and Renaissance cosmology where someone who tried to write it all in a cosmic framework. Yes, the pagan world of divinities were very important.
One could even read of them as allegories or personalities in bits and pieces of written poems and Italian history, as in pagents and triumphs during marriages and ducal crownings that echoed the Roman triumph.
There is a historical theory that the uneasy and delicate balance of seeking classical wisdom from Athens and Rome balanced with the heritage of beliefs from Jeresulem is supposedly an ongoing theme, not only in the development of humanities and Renaissance histories, but from the beginning of Western civilization.
Here's a hopeful thread note that might assist with that concept:
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7903&highlight=western+civilization
I don't know if I'm wandering too far: but perhaps a little of this background is helpful? At least the author cited above?
Best wishes