Update: De Ludo Scachorum

Prior post. An argument brews about whether da Vinci did the illustrations for this rare work on chess: From The New York Times Historical Stalemate: Chess Book May Have Leonardo Illustrations (or Not) By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN Published: April 14, 2008 Reported discoveries of lost works by Leonardo da Vinci are almost as common as, well, images of the Mona Lisa. The latest attribution to be proposed involves the design for the illustrations in a chess book from around 1500. The book, “De Ludo Scachorum,” or “The Game of Chess,” is by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar and Renaissance mathematician who was a friend and collaborator of Leonardo. One of the earliest chess books, it contains 114 diagrams of chess problems drawn in red and black. Long thought to be lost or destroyed, it was discovered in 2006 in a 22,000-volume library in northeastern Italy that belonged to Count Guglielmo Coronini, who died in 1990. The nonprofit Coronini Cronberg Foundation, which oversees the library, enlisted Franco Rocco, an Italian architect and sculptor whose work has puzzlelike qualities, to examine the book and its illustrations. After a year of study he determined that Leonardo created the design on which the illustrations are based, possibly by building a chess set. “I reached the conclusion that the diagrams are the invention of Leonardo da Vinci,” he said in a telephone interview. Mr. Rocco said that he based his report on the quality of the drawings and the friendship between Pacioli and Leonardo. The proportions of the illustrations are based on the golden ratio, he said, like many figures in Leonardo’s compositions; he also noted a similarity between the queen and designs for a fountain in Leonardo’s “Atlantic Codex.” His findings have been widely reported in the international press and have stirred some excitement in chess circles. In his chess column in The Times of London, Raymond Keene wrote that the sophistication of the chess puzzles themselves could have come only from “a powerful intelligence” and might also be the work of Leonardo. But Martin Kemp, a prominent Leonardo expert who is an emeritus art history professor at Oxford University, has emphatically dismissed the possibility that Leonardo had any hand in the drawings. “There is not an earthly chance of them being by Leonardo," he said in a telephone interview. He said that there was no resemblance between the drawings and Leonardo’s work. Nor did he find the designs particularly compelling, he said. The relationship between Pacioli and Leonardo is undisputed and has long fascinated art and mathematics scholars. The two met in Milan in 1496, and Leonardo illustrated Pacioli’s 1509 “Divina Proportione,” a treatise on mathematics and proportions that dealt at length with the golden ratio. (Two quantities or shapes are in the golden ratio if the ratio of their sum to the larger quantity is the same as the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one; expressed mathematically, the golden ratio is roughly 1.618.) In 1499 the French invaded Milan, and Leonardo and Pacioli fled to Mantua. While there Leonardo drew a portrait of the marchesa of Mantua, Isabella d’Este, who liked chess. “De Ludo Scachorum” was written during this time and dedicated to the marchesa and her husband, Francesco Gonzaga. Asked whether Leonardo might have designed the actual chess puzzles, Mr. Kemp said he doubted that. While Leonardo was interested in geometrical games, Mr. Kemp said, no information in surviving manuscripts suggests that he played chess. “It is not improbable of him being interested in it,” he said, “but whether he had the patience to sit for hours and play, there is some doubt.” As for Mr. Rocco’s investigation, Mr. Kemp called it “a nightmare of nonmethod.” He said the attribution was based on unsubstantiated ideas, which made the theory rickety from a historian’s perspective. “You start with one hypothesis, and you build another hypothesis on top of it and then you build another hypothesis on top of that, and you have this tower of unsupported hypotheses,” Mr. Kemp said. As he wrote in an e-mail message, “The silly season on Leo never closes.”