Chess illustrations drawn by Da Vinci

 

Ariel David

Associated Press

Sunday, March 14

 

Rome- Leonardo da Vinci drew everything from war machines to anatomy sketches. Now it seems he may have also been an early illustrator of the chess puzzle.

Experts say the Renaissance genius, whose interests included painting, mathematics, music, engineering, anatomy and botany, may have illustrated the puzzles in a long-lost chess treatise recently recovered in the library of an aristocratic family in northern Italy.

The manuscript was penned around 1500 by Luca Pacioli, a mathematician and friend of Leonardo, and some experts believe the artist may have drawn the elegant pieces that illustrate the chess puzzles discussed in the treatise.

“The pieces are exceptional for that era,” said Franco Rocco, a Milan-based architect who studied the illustrations. “Even today, they look futuristic.”

The treatise, “De Ludo Schaccorum”-Latin for “Of the Game of Chess”-includes more than 100 chess problems that challenge the player to reach a checkmate in a certain number of moves. Today, such mind-twisters are popular fixtures in newspapers.

The sole copy if the treatise was found in 2006 among 22,000 volumes collected by the Coronini family in their palace in Gorizia, on Italy’s border with Slovenia.

“It was like a Holy Grail of chess,” said Serenella Ferrari Benedetti, cultural coordinator of the foundation that manages the Coronini estate. “We knew it existed by nobody had ever seen it.”

The illustrations of the red-and-black chess pieces were themselves a puzzle. The slender abstract design was so unusual that Ferrari Benedetti asked Rocco to study the drawings.

After a year of research, Rocco concluded that Pacioli enlisted Leonardo’s help to draw the pieces.