Historic images

This handout image provided on Friday, March 14, 2008 by the Coronini Cronberg Foundation shows drawings of chess puzzles in a chess treatise recently recovered in the library of an aristocratic family in Gorizia, northern Italy. The chess puzzle, the mind-racking brain food now printed in many an upscale newspaper, may have had an early and accomplished aficionado in one of the greatest artists that ever lived: Leonardo da Vinci. The manuscript was penned around 1500 by Luca Pacioli, a mathematician and friend of Leonardo, and experts believe Da Vinci may have come up with the striking and elegant chess pieces that illustrate the puzzles the treatise discusses. The sole copy of the treatise was thought lost for centuries until it was identified in 2006 among 22,000 volumes collected by the Coronini family in their palace in Gorizia, on Italy’s border with Slovenia. (AP Photo/Courtesy of the Coronini Cronberg Foundation, HO)