Une partie d'échecs

Lucas van Leyden painted this small panel around 1508, when he was only about 14 and already selling prints across the Low Countries as a prodigy. A crowd leans in around a board where a young woman and an older man play chess, with onlookers craning to follow the moves. Look closely at the board itself and the game is not quite the chess we know. It has extra pieces and a wider grid, a variant called courier chess that was popular in the region then. In the pictures of the time chess was shorthand for courtship, a contest between the sexes where the real prize was not the game. That is the joke Lucas is telling. The concentration on every face is played straight, which only makes the flirtation underneath easier to read.