Experts link Leonardo da Vinci to chess puzzles in long-lost Renaissance treatise
The Associated Press
Published: March 14, 2008
ROME: 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.
Experts say the Renaissance genius may have drawn the puzzles found on 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 experts believe the artist may have come up with the striking and elegant chess pieces that illustrate the puzzles the treatise discusses.
“The pieces are exceptional for that era,” said Milan-based architect and sculptor Franco Rocco, who studied them. “Even today they look futuristic.”
The treatise, titled “De Ludo Schaccorum” (Latin for “Of the Game of Chess”), includes more than 100 chess problems — puzzles that challenge the player to reach checkmate in a certain number of moves.
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.
“It was like a Holy Grail of chess,” said Serenella Ferrari Benedetti, cultural coordinator of the foundation managing the Coronini estate. “We knew it existed but nobody had ever seen it.”
But the red and black pieces used to draw the problems were themselves a puzzle. Their slender and abstract design was so unusual that Ferrari Benedetti asked Rocco to study them.
After a year of research, Rocco has come to the conclusion that Pacioli, a great mathematician not known for his artistic prowess, enlisted Leonardo’s help to draw the innovative figurines.
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