This month we’ll be releasing Sofonisba’s Chess Game (the general release is mid-September, while a sneak preview in four installments starts this Friday September 5th for our paid subscribers). This will be the third film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series following Botticelli’s Primavera and Raphael’s School of Athens. And you might well be wondering why I opted to engage in a rigorous examination of that particular painting.
After all, Sofonisba Anguissola (1532/5-1625) is hardly an artist often mentioned in the same breath as Botticelli and Raphael; and while there’s a clear case for her Chess Game being the most famous chess-related work in the history of art, that in itself is hardly the most convincing of justifications, like singling out The School of Athens simply due to the number of its characters or Primavera because of its perplexing diversity of often-contradictory interpretations.
As it happens, those two other paintings represent intriguing examples of opposite poles in the art reception landscape, with Raphael’s School of Athens consistently regarded as the acme of artistic excellence since its creation more than 500 years ago, while Botticelli’s Primavera suffered widespread neglect for the better part of 300 years until it was famously “rediscovered”, along with many of his other now-iconic works like The Birth of Venus, in the late 19th century.
Which is all to say that it’s important to appreciate that for every Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo, all three of whom have been firmly ensconced in the artistic pantheon from their own lifetimes to the present day, there are hundreds of artists whose popularity has dramatically waxed and waned over the centuries.
Sofonisba, for example, despite being a woman in a very male-dominated mid-16th century world, was widely recognized as being a unique artistic talent throughout her long lifetime, from Michelangelo proffering advice on her youthful drawings1 to Anthony van Dyck’s stirring description of the technical insights she offered him in old age.2
But despite her solid reputation during her lifetime, Sofonisba slowly (although not entirely) fell out of fashion over the centuries, only to be rigorously resurrected over the last few decades as the trend to examine women artists has dramatically increased.3
As it happens, my interest in Sofonisba was independent of any art historical trends. I discovered her remarkable Chess Game not only well before I knew who she was, but a year or two before I embarked on my recent plunge into the world of Renaissance Art, while I was working on our detailed documentary on the cultural history of chess (Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration).
Given the long history of chess, it’s perhaps unsurprising that there have been many famous artists who have chosen to feature chess scenes in their paintings, from Karel van Mander, the “Dutch Vasari” whose 1604 Schilder-Boeck is one of the key resources on the lives of Northern Renaissance artists,
to John Singer Sargent’s famously languid summer chess scene
to Marcel Duchamp’s group portrait of two couples, with the men, rather anti-socially, immersed in a game of chess.4
But all these chess-playing depictions, and the many, many others produced over the centuries, struck me as pretty much the same: two deeply concentrating adversaries, invariably men, poring over a chess board.
Sofonisba’s Chess Game, on the other hand, is something very different indeed;
and not just because all four characters depicted are female, or that their beautifully distinctive faces display an intriguingly wide array of emotional responses, or that the clothes they’re wearing are presented in superb, mesmerizing detail, or that the bluish mountains in the background bear a striking resemblance to those often present in works of Leonardo da Vinci (who had, in turn, been so strongly influenced in this respect by the great Flemish masters of the 15th century).
All of that is certainly true; but for me, at least, what really made this painting so obviously stand out from all the others I saw in the “chess art” genre and firmly imprint itself on my memory, is how the chess itself seemed so strikingly secondary, as emphasized by the fact that the only person in Sofonisba’s Chess Game who’s actually looking at the board is the maid on the far right who is furthest away from the action.
Sofonisba’s Chess Game, in other words, is clearly about chess – a well-recognized test of intellectual dexterity that was surely chosen for a reason. But it is, equally clearly, about much, much more than chess.
And that, I think, makes it very deserving of a closer look.
Howard Burton
Below is the trailer of our new film Sofonisba’s Chess Game.
Exclusive offer: Paid subscribers will be able to watch this film ahead of its official release later this month. If you have not subscribed yet (free or paid), make sure to subscribe now to quality for a free pass - at the end of September we’ll select 15 subscribers.
Sofonisba’s father Amilcare sent Michelangelo one of her drawings of a laughing girl for his comments, to which Michelangelo replied that he would have liked to see a weeping boy, which is now generally viewed as having prompted Sofonisba to create her sketch of Boy Bitten by a Crayfish, now in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.
The 25 year old Van Dyck visited Sofonisba in Palermo one year before she died and devoted a page of his Italian sketchbook to her, describing how, “When I did her portrait, she gave me several pieces of advice on how not to raise the light too high so that the shadows would not accentuate the wrinkles of old age and many other good suggestions, from which it’s apparent she was a miraculous painter from life.”
Recent exhibitions involving Sofonisba’s art include: A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana at the Museo Nacional del Prado (October 2019 – February 2020); Sofonisba - History’s forgotten miracle at Denmark’s Nivaagaard Malerisamling, continued as Sofonisba Anguissola: Portraitist of the Renaissance at the Rijksmuseum Twente (September 2022 – June 2023); Ingenious Women: Painting from the 16th to the 18th century at Hamburg’s Bucerius Kunst Forum, continued as Ingenious Women: Women Artists and their Companions at Kunstmuseum Basel, Hauptbau & Neubau (October 2023 – June 2024); Strong Women in Renaissance Italy at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Sept 2023 – January 2024), and Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800 at the Baltimore Museum of Art and Royal Ontario Museum (October 2023 – July 2024).
Duchamp, by the way, was a notorious chess fanatic who repeatedly threatened to quit art for chess and coined the phrase lovingly repeated throughout the chess world for generations: “While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
Fascinating.