The Chess Players

Around 1475 in Siena this scene was painted on the front of a cassone, the decorated chest a bride brought to a marriage. That setting explains the subject. A young man and a young woman face each other over a chessboard, and the game is really about courtship. In the stories of the day a match of chess between a man and a woman stood in for the pursuit of love, and here she is about to lose. Liberale da Verona, better known as an illuminator of the great choirbooks in Siena, gives both players the bleached, frizzy blond hair that Sienese women worked hard to achieve at the time. The panel is one of a pair. Its companion shows the same couple at an earlier moment, the youth caught by the sight of her at a window.