Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (39.1998)

belong to the repertoire of love symbolism. What then is the real meaning of
the painting, assuming that it is not merely a family genre scene?

Chess playing, in addition to being a symbol of wisdom, nobility, social
order, and an exercise of war strategy, is interpreted in iconography with
richness of a morał content. At the heart of the knowledge imparted by
chess-playing was the command of the ideals of Christian life, the recollection
of death, and an admonition about the vanity of the temporal world. In the
emblem of Guillaume de Perrier of 1539,4 one of the players is putting the
chess pieces away in a sack. The subscriptio reads: “Le roy d’echetz, pendant
que le ieu dure, / Sur ses subiectz a grandę preference: [...]/ Qu’apres łe ieu de
vie transitoire/[...] Le roys ne sont plus grand que les uassaulx:/Car dans le sac
(comme a tous es notoire)/ Roys et pyons en honneur sont esgaulx”. In
emblematic tradition captured chess pieces were considered in the realm of
the dead. In the scenery of Venetian villas, which constituted a surrogate
Arcadia, chess pieces seem to express the same thing as the sign of death

2. Sofonisba Anguissola,
The Chess Gamę, 1 550,
Muzeum Narodowe,
Poznań
(Phot. Teresa
Żółtowska-Huszcza)

4 Guillaume de la Perriere, Le Theatre de Bons Engins, auąuel sont centenuz cent Emblemes
moraulx..., Denys Ianot, Paris 1539; quoted after: A. Henkel and A. Schone, Emblematu.
Handbnch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI und XVII Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 1967, 1306 (“While the
gamę goes on / the king is morę important than all his subjects/ But the gamę ends, sińce it is only
a brief episode/ And then the kings become as smali as their subjects /Because in the sack (as
everyone knows) the figures and pawns are all the same”).

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