Chess book may (or may not) have Leonardo illustrations

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.

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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.

→ Read the entire article: "Historical Stalemate: Chess Book May Have Leonardo Illustrations (or Not)." Dylan Loeb McClain. Published 14 April 2008.