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(intriguing music)

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Over the centuries, and throughout a
diverse array of different cultures,

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artists have been drawn to the topic of
representing people in the act of playing chess.

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But unquestionably the most famous
chess-related artwork ever produced

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was made in 1555 by a young woman
from Cremona, Sofonisba Anguissola,

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an artist whose name, even then, was rapidly
becoming widely known throughout Italy and beyond

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due to her many magnificently penetrating
portraits of both herself and others.

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Why has this particular chess painting so emphatically
triumphed over all the others over the ages?

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Some say it's because of the
compelling faces of the characters,

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while others point to the remarkably
level of artistic detail throughout.

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And then there are those who attribute the painting's success
to the highly unusual fact, particularly so for the time,

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that all four figures
depicted are female,

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or that they're playing chess independent of any male
presence, or that it was created by a female artist.

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And while there's clearly
something to each of these points,

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it's equally clear that the only way to develop a deep
understanding of this singularly captivating masterpiece

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is to carefully thread together
all of these factors, and many more,

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to try to reconstruct what might have been going through
the mind of the remarkable artist who created it.

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Who was Sofonisba Anguissola exactly?

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In many ways, this is a strange question to be asking of
someone who achieved considerable fame during her lifetime,

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mentioned frequently, and glowingly,
in leading contemporary accounts,

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by a diverse array of writers, scholars, other
artists, and even monarchs, many of whom she painted.

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On the other hand, what do we
really know about Sofonisba?

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Likely the majority of her artistic efforts are
either lost or dispersed in private collections,

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with today's experts agreeing on no more than
a few dozen paintings on public display,

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a relatively paltry amount for a highly productive artist who was
already making waves as a teenager and lived well into her 90s.

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We're not even sure of the year of her birth, with the
accepted range being somewhere between 1531 and 1535.

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But other vital details,
thankfully, are quite clear.

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She was born in Cremona, the first child of Amilcare Anguissola
and Bianca Ponzoni, who went on to have seven children in total,

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six girls and one boy,

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with the last child, Anna Maria, being born some
20 years or so after Sofonisba, around 1554.

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Amilcare had been the illegitimate son,
later legitimized, of Annibale Anguissola,

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the head of a well-entrenched family of minor
nobility in both Cremona and nearby Piacenza,

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while his wife, Bianca, was
the daughter of a local count.

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But despite their elevated social
status, money was always a problem,

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with the records showing Amilcare regularly
trying out a spectrum of professional endeavours—

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from trading in manuscripts and paper goods to a cheese
shop to a pharmacy—to try to support his burgeoning family;

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none of which, it seems,
was particularly successful.

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But what was successful, on the
other hand, indeed strikingly so,

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was his dedicated efforts to rigorously educate all of his children
in the most learned and cultivated environment imaginable.

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Whatever their financial fortunes,

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the Anguissolas had clearly long prided themselves on
their level of education and cultural sophistication,

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as witnessed by their somewhat quirky custom of calling
family members after renowned figures from ancient Carthage,

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like the illustrious Generals Hamilcar and
Hannibal of the First and Second Punic Wars—

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a tradition Amilcare, in turn,
passed on to two of his children:

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his son Astrubale, and his
firstborn child, Sofonisba,

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named after the Carthaginian queen
who’d famously killed herself

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rather than be taken to Rome and
exhibited in a triumphal procession,

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a celebrated story
of female patriotism

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that's been widely commemorated throughout the ages by
historians, poets, playwrights, composers, and artists.

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That Amilcare was determined to provide the
best possible education for his daughters,

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despite his very straitened economic
circumstances, certainly made him unusual.

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But what made him even more unusual still was his decision
to let his two eldest children, Sofonisba and Elena,

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receive formal artistic training from the
professional painter Bernardino Campi in 1446,

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when they were somewhere
between the ages of 10 and 15.

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Campi, roughly a decade older than Sofonisba, had only
started his professional career five years earlier,

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but would go on to become a very respected
painter of both portraits and religious scenes,

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the subject of Alessandro
Lamo's glowing 1584 biography.

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Campi left for Milan about four years later, whereupon the
sisters continued their artistic education with Bernardino Gatti,

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an older, well-established local artist
known primarily for his religious works.

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At some point shortly thereafter,
Elena entered a convent—

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Sofonisba's portrait of her as a nun is often
considered to be her first surviving work—

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While Sofonisba had enthusiastically
committed herself to her art,

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producing an array of portraits that her promotionally-inclined
father was continually sending as gifts to powerful figures,

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from the Duke of Ferrara to the
Duchess of Mantua, to the Pope.

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He even wrote to Michelangelo, asking the aged icon to
comment on one of Sofonisba's drawings of a laughing girl,

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prompting Michelangelo to reply that
he'd prefer to see a weeping boy,

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which most believe led Sofonisba to make her
famous sketch of a boy bitten by a crayfish,

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often regarded as having inspired Caravaggio's painting
of a boy bitten by a lizard, created some 40 years later.

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And while her father was busy vigorously
promoting Sofonisba's artistic reputation,

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she was occupying herself with both creating new paintings
and teaching what she knew to her younger siblings,

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several of whom went on to become very
impressive artists in their own right.

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So much so that given both the stylistic
similarities and strong family resemblances,

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many works long attributed to Sofonisba could well be
by one of her sisters, or maybe even joint projects.

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And even when we're confident
that a painting is by Sofonisba,

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there's often been considerable debate on whether it's a self-portrait
or a depiction of one of her highly-accomplished sisters.

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In particular, Lucia Anguissola, the
leading figure in The Chess Game,

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is thought by many to have been as equally
promising an artist as her older sister,

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but never had the chance to fulfill her true
potential, dying as she did in her 20s.

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But the very fact that she managed to produce several
remarkably penetrating paintings in such a short time,

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living under obviously
constrained circumstances,

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is a clear testimony to both her unquestionable natural talent
and Sofonisba's obviously exceptional teaching abilities.

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A few years later, both of these attributes, Sofonisba's
unique combination of artistic and pedagogical excellence,

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combined in an offer that radically
changed her career trajectory:

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she was invited to be a lady-in-waiting and painting instructor
to Elizabeth of Valois—Isabel de Valois for the Spanish—

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the new wife, his third, of the powerful
Habsburg King, Philip II, son of Charles V.

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And in 1559, she left for Spain to paint and teach
at one of the most powerful royal courts of the age.

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But Elizabeth's sudden death in 1568 at the age of
only 23 abruptly changed Sofonisba's circumstances.

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Philip soon remarried again,
this time to Anne of Austria,

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while Sofonisba remained at
the court for a few years,

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helping with the education of Elizabeth's
two young daughters, Isabella and Catalina.

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But eventually, Philip arranged a marriage for her with the Sicilian
nobleman, Fabrizio Moncada, governor of the town of Paternò;

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and in 1573, she returned to Italy.

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When Moncada died only five years later,
Sofonisba decided to go back to Cremona.

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But on the trip sailing north from Palermo, she fell
in love with the ship's captain, Orazio Lomellini,

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and they promptly married and settled in
Genoa, where they remained for 35 years.

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And then, in 1615, Sofonisba and Orazio relocated to Palermo,
where she would live out the last decade of her life.

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In 1624, one year before she died, she was
visited by the 25-year-old Anthony van Dyck,

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who was in Palermo to paint the
reigning viceroy, Emmanuel Philibert.

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Van Dyck was clearly very
impressed by Sofonisba,

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whom he described as having preserved her memory
and great sharpness of mind despite her old age,

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and devoted a page of his
Italian sketchbook to her,

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with the entry framed around his drawing of Sofonisba, offering
a customarily revealing description of the great artist-teacher.

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"When I did her portrait, she
gave me several pieces of advice

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on how not to raise the light too high so that the
shadows would not accentuate the wrinkles of old age,

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and many other good suggestions,

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from which it's apparent she was
a miraculous painter from life."

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Most of the works universally attributed to Sofonisba
come from the first decade of her artistic career -

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quite a remarkable fact, given how active
she clearly was throughout her long life.

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There are a number of possible explanations
for this curious state of affairs.

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From her father's promotional determination to send his daughter's
portraits to the rich and powerful in those early days,

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thereby increasing the chance that they would
one day make it into a museum or gallery,

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to the fact that relatively few scholars have spent
time pouring over Sofonisba's work over the centuries.

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But there are other reasons too.

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While Sofonisba quickly developed a reputation
for being a superlative portraitist,

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with her house in Cremona receiving a steady flow of
important visitors keen to be immortalized by her brush,

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much of her early artistic development, at
first likely for simply practical reasons,

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came through painting both
family members and herself,

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resulting in her becoming the artist who painted the greatest
number of self-portraits between Dürer and Rembrandt.

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But by the time she arrived in Madrid, she found
herself in a very different situation indeed,

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and clearly opted quite
deliberately to modify her style

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to fit into the prevailing artistic fashion
associated with contemporary Spanish court culture.

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Virtually none of the paintings she
produced during that time were signed,

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and most seem virtually indistinguishable
from the works of Alonso Sánchez Coello,

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Philip II’s official court painter whose
work often directly overlapped with hers.

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In one surviving document, Coello was asked to make no less
than 13 copies of a portrait of Philip's son, Don Carlos,

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that Sofonisba had
made the year earlier.

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But it's hardly implausible that such requests
could also have gone in the other direction,

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with Sofonisba reworking an original by
Coello - albeit likely not 13 times.

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Either way, it would've been very difficult for any to
discern which finished works were by Coello or Sofonisba,

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just as it is still
very difficult today.

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A good example of this ambiguous state of artistic authorship
concerns the surviving portraits of Elizabeth of Valois.

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Today, most are convinced that this
portrait was done by Sofonisba.

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It's signed by her, after all, but curiously,
not until years later after she left Spain.

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Another painting of Elizabeth is attributed to
both Coello and his famous teacher, Anthonis Mor,

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while still another is believed to be a copy
by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Coello’s student,

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after an original—now
presumed lost—by Sofonisba.

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Not to mention this portrait of Elizabeth, generally regarded
as being by Coello—with some, or all, or perhaps none—

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of these recognized as being the inspiration for the later
portrait of Elizabeth by the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens.

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But then there’s also this full-length portrait of Elizabeth in the Prado,

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which for centuries was
believed to be by Coello,

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but has recently been
reattributed to Sofonisba.

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And Coello is not the only Spanish-based painter
whose name has sometimes overlapped with Sofonisba’s—

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this portrait of Pompeo Leoni sculpting an image of
Philip II, widely regarded as being by El Greco,

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is attributed by at least one eminent
art historian to Sofonisba instead.

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Intriguingly, both Sofonisba and El Greco had personal
relationships with the famous miniaturist Giulio Clovio,

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and both of them painted
Clovio's portraits.

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Meanwhile, a recent technical study revealed
that the painting Lady in a Fur Wrap,

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sometimes believed to be by Sofonisba and even more widely
thought to have been a work of El Greco, was actually by Coello.

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In short, getting a clear handle on what exactly
Sofonisba produced is particularly challenging.

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And since she never
painted for commission—

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her earlier works were given as gifts while she
was on salary in Spain as a lady-in-waiting—

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we also lack any of the revealing contract documentation of
notable works between patrons and other Renaissance masters

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that sometimes,
fortunately, survive.

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And then there's the
question of her training.

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While Sofonisba was given the
unprecedented opportunity for a young woman

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of receiving expert instruction by
someone not directly related to her,

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with virtually every other successful female painter of
the period, from Levina Teerlinc to Katarina van Hemessen

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to Lavinia Fontana to Marietta Robusti having
been daughters of accomplished artists,

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she nonetheless lacked the opportunity to develop vital artistic
skills that her male counterparts would have spent years perfecting.

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She never learned the finer points of human anatomy
through drawing figures in the nude or dissections,

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and was never schooled in the
art of linear perspective—

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necessary requirements to producing large-scale historical scenes
that were then considered to be the height of artistic excellence.

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And the astute eye can sometimes see evidence
of these shortcomings in some of her works,

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from occasionally ill-defined, amorphous-looking
bodies, to unconvincing vanishing points.

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But what is beyond question is the breathtaking sophistication and
stunningly penetrating psychological understanding of her portraits,

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which somehow manage to not only offer a
remarkably detailed depiction of the sitter,

00:19:16.288 --> 00:19:22.494
but also, even more significantly,
key aspects of his or her character.

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In fact, one common way of distinguishing between a genuine
Sofonisba painting and the many copies often attributed to he

00:19:31.770 --> 00:19:35.207
is through the careful
recognition that those imitations

00:19:35.207 --> 00:19:41.980
so palpably lack those essential personal insights
that Sofonisba seemed to uniquely possess,

00:19:44.283 --> 00:19:48.921
There are other obvious hallmarks
of her style as well, of course,

00:19:49.188 --> 00:19:54.393
from intricately detailed expositions
of jewelry, tapestries, and clothing,

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to a finely crafted chiaroscuro technique to
produce the most lifelike faces imaginable,

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to a regularly invoked use of green to effectively
contrast her subjects with the surrounding background.

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But all of these pale in comparison to her almost
magical ability to somehow convey the thoughts,

00:20:14.613 --> 00:20:24.690
feelings, and desires of her subjects, so many of whom so
penetratingly engage with their eyes directly with the viewer.

00:20:24.690 --> 00:20:28.994
Of course, in her early
work, that subject,

00:20:29.461 --> 00:20:38.403
either for logistical reasons or as a key aspect of her father's
determined promotional agenda, was very often Sofonisba herself,

00:20:38.403 --> 00:20:44.543
gazing straight out at us to demonstrate her
literary, musical, and artistic expertise

00:20:44.543 --> 00:20:50.415
that her educationally-focused father was so
convinced would give glory to the family name.

00:20:50.415 --> 00:20:56.388
And not just through the portraits alone, but
also through their accompanying inscriptions,

00:20:56.822 --> 00:21:05.764
with Sofonisba consistently referring to herself as "Virgo,"
a virtuous woman living in the Anguissola family home,

00:21:05.864 --> 00:21:15.140
with her father, Amilcare, often explicitly mentioned, either
subtly, such as his name being displayed in cryptographic form

00:21:15.140 --> 00:21:21.146
on the shield she's holding in the famous miniature
portrait now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,

00:21:21.513 --> 00:21:24.049
or in the inscriptions themselves,

00:21:24.049 --> 00:21:28.353
like the one prominently displayed on
the side of the board in The Chess Game,

00:21:28.720 --> 00:21:36.728
declaring how Sofonisba, the virgin daughter of
Amilcare, painted from life her three sisters and a maid.

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As we'll soon see, chess was an eminently suitable activity for
members of the Anguissola family to be portrayed engaging in

00:21:46.438 --> 00:21:54.479
to demonstrate their sophistication and refinement,
fully on par with music, painting, and literature.

00:21:55.147 --> 00:22:01.987
But there are two prominent features of this work that
immediately distinguish it from Sofonisba's earlier paintings.

00:22:02.821 --> 00:22:09.528
Most obviously, we're now presented with four
simultaneous portraits instead of just one.

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But there's another slightly more subtle distinction in
the way that these different characters are dressed,

00:22:15.701 --> 00:22:23.709
with all three of the Anguissola daughters elaborately outfitted
in a way far more appropriate for attending a prestigious gala

00:22:23.709 --> 00:22:28.180
than settling down to an informal
game of chess in the backyard.

00:22:28.180 --> 00:22:35.220
We'll return later to this point too, but for the
moment, it's worth emphasizing that Sofonisba,

00:22:35.220 --> 00:22:38.690
in virtually all of her
known early self-portraits,

00:22:38.690 --> 00:22:46.898
is dressed very simply indeed, with a plain dark jacket
with a white collar, and typically no earrings or jewelry.

00:22:47.966 --> 00:22:52.537
Many have interpreted this as an
explicitly feminist type of statement,

00:22:52.537 --> 00:22:57.542
a clear determination to resist
any form of female objectification

00:22:57.542 --> 00:23:03.815
through the overt denial of any of the trappings of
standard indicators of feminine beauty of the time,

00:23:03.815 --> 00:23:13.091
instead emphatically portraying herself in terms of her rigorously
acquired level of cultural and professional accomplishment.

00:23:13.091 --> 00:23:19.965
Which brings us, most intriguingly, to one of the
most perplexing Sofonisba-related portraits of all:

00:23:19.965 --> 00:23:24.970
Bernardino Campi painting
Sofonisba's portrait.

00:23:24.970 --> 00:23:30.942
Campi, as we've seen, was Sofonisba's
first and primary art teacher,

00:23:30.942 --> 00:23:37.949
and the fact that he's presented here painting Sofonisba
in her traditional black outfit with white lace collar

00:23:37.949 --> 00:23:43.755
was long regarded as evidence that the
painting was, in fact, by Sofonisba—

00:23:43.755 --> 00:23:51.363
a witty inversion on their respective roles, with Campi
shown to be creating his famous student, Sofonisba,

00:23:51.363 --> 00:23:56.034
when, in fact, it's actually her who's painting
him. When, in fact, she is actually painting him.

00:23:56.034 --> 00:23:57.903
Or so it appeared.

00:23:58.937 --> 00:24:06.645
But when conservators restored the painting in the 1990s,
they noticed that the original work had been painted over

00:24:06.645 --> 00:24:12.350
and Sofonisba's black dress was actually
an addition made centuries later.

00:24:12.350 --> 00:24:21.426
Its original color was a striking red with gold
brocade, while she was also, notably, wearing earrings,

00:24:21.426 --> 00:24:29.334
leading many to conclude that the painting was not
made by Sofonisba after all, but actually by Campi.

00:24:31.636 --> 00:24:36.174
There are a number of additional
indicators to support this argument,

00:24:36.174 --> 00:24:44.549
such as the fact that one of Bernardino Campi's most frequent
artistic devices, some might even say personal hallmark,

00:24:44.549 --> 00:24:52.757
was painting figures with their index and middle fingers
extended precisely in the way that Sofonisba is shown here.

00:24:52.757 --> 00:24:59.397
And then there's the 1554 letter from fellow
painter Francesco Salviati to his friend Campi

00:24:59.397 --> 00:25:06.171
playfully referring to Sofonisba as, "The
beautiful Cremonese painter, your creation"—

00:25:06.171 --> 00:25:13.612
a seemingly straightforward summation of a work where
Campi the painter is portrayed as creating Sofonisba,

00:25:13.612 --> 00:25:21.253
whose dominant size reflects her soon-to-be much
larger public reputation than that of her teacher.

00:25:21.253 --> 00:25:23.788
But while we'll likely
never know for certain,

00:25:23.788 --> 00:25:32.831
the two good reasons to believe that this painting is actually
by Campi and not Sofonisba is firstly, as we’ve said,

00:25:32.831 --> 00:25:40.739
she's dressed in a way quite differently from how Sofonisba
portrays herself in every other one of her known self-portraits.

00:25:40.739 --> 00:25:46.912
But, most importantly of all, it doesn't
really look like a Sofonisba self-portrait,

00:25:46.912 --> 00:25:56.388
which is to say that it's obviously clearly identifiable as an image
of Sofonisba, but there's something missing, something in the eyes.

00:25:56.388 --> 00:25:59.491
It just doesn't feel like a Sofonisba.

00:25:59.491 --> 00:26:03.562
She's not alive.

00:26:16.641 --> 00:26:21.346
The game of chess has a long and
particularly intriguing history.

00:26:21.346 --> 00:26:30.155
Believed to have originated in India at some point in the 5th
or 6th centuries, it then spread to Persia's Sasanian Empire,

00:26:30.155 --> 00:26:34.593
where its presence is documented in
several key works of literature,

00:26:34.593 --> 00:26:40.899
before becoming deeply embedded in Islamic
culture after the 7th-century Muslim conquest,

00:26:40.899 --> 00:26:47.839
with a particularly intense flowering during the
Abbasid Caliphate in the 9th and 10th centuries.

00:26:47.839 --> 00:26:55.313
It entered Christian Europe somewhere around the turn
of the 2nd millennium, and rapidly gained popularity,

00:26:55.313 --> 00:27:00.218
as can be seen from Alfonso VI of León's
court physician, Petrus Alphonsi,

00:27:00.218 --> 00:27:04.589
explicitly mentioning it in his
12th-century Disciplina Clericalis,

00:27:04.589 --> 00:27:12.397
as one of the seven knightly accomplishments, along with
riding, swimming, archery, boxing, hawking, and verse writing,

00:27:12.397 --> 00:27:21.373
only a century or so before the famed Lewis chessmen
were being created, some 3,000 kilometers to the north.

00:27:21.373 --> 00:27:28.513
By the latter part of the 13th century, chess played
a starring role in Alfonso X's Book of Games,

00:27:28.513 --> 00:27:35.520
where it was conspicuously endorsed as “a nobler
and more honored game than dice or backgammon”.

00:27:35.520 --> 00:27:42.527
But even more significantly, chess in medieval
Europe was becoming much more than a mere pasttime,

00:27:42.527 --> 00:27:47.632
as it increasingly became invoked in
an allegorical and literary context.

00:27:47.632 --> 00:27:53.204
From Jacobus de Cessolis' influential
13th-century political treatise,

00:27:53.204 --> 00:27:57.242
describing how the uniquely
individuated nature of chess pieces

00:27:57.242 --> 00:28:04.616
illustrates how a harmoniously interconnected society can
be constructed from its very different composite parts,

00:28:04.616 --> 00:28:11.690
to intricate romantic tales demonstrating how the
discipline involved in mastering the intricacies of chess

00:28:11.690 --> 00:28:18.096
gives rise to a deeper level of self-awareness
that will make you a better lover.

00:28:18.096 --> 00:28:27.572
The simple fact that chess, unlike virtually all other games
of the time, had no random or luck-related element involved,

00:28:27.572 --> 00:28:32.711
led to it being increasingly
recognized as an art:

00:28:32.711 --> 00:28:37.782
a skill that could be perfected
by careful study and analysis,

00:28:37.782 --> 00:28:44.122
a domain where even the most intellectually formidable
of beginners would always be swiftly defeated

00:28:44.122 --> 00:28:47.926
by those who'd taken the time to
methodically familiarize themselves

00:28:47.926 --> 00:28:51.029
with the game's core strategies
and fundamental principles.

00:28:54.766 --> 00:28:57.001
And by the turn of
the 16th century,

00:28:57.001 --> 00:29:04.476
those very principles were being increasingly examined due
to the recent key changes to the movement of two pieces:

00:29:04.476 --> 00:29:07.145
the bishop and queen.

00:29:07.145 --> 00:29:17.188
According to the new rules, which we still use to this day,
bishops—the descendants of the old Indian pieces of elephants—

00:29:17.188 --> 00:29:21.192
were no longer limited to two
diagonal squares at a time,

00:29:21.192 --> 00:29:26.598
and could now move as far as
desired along any open diagonal.

00:29:26.598 --> 00:29:32.604
But it was the change to the queen that
dramatically altered the nature of chess forever,

00:29:32.604 --> 00:29:37.742
radically modifying her range
from adjacent diagonal squares

00:29:37.742 --> 00:29:42.480
to the dominant combination
of the rook and new bishop,

00:29:42.480 --> 00:29:53.458
instantly transforming her from a glorified multidirectional
pawn to by far the most valuable piece on the board.

00:29:53.458 --> 00:29:58.296
Suddenly, a game of chess was no
longer a slow, plodding affair,

00:29:58.296 --> 00:30:06.271
but one rife with a dazzling array of strategic
possibilities and dramatically penetrating tactical strikes.

00:30:06.271 --> 00:30:12.811
Some called it “new chess”, or even
more revealingly, “mad queen chess”,

00:30:12.811 --> 00:30:20.385
but whatever the name, the new game had swiftly
become enormously popular throughout all of Europe.

00:30:20.385 --> 00:30:26.357
And it was at this time that the first serious
chess instructional manuals began to appear,

00:30:26.357 --> 00:30:34.365
including one by the famous Renaissance mathematician
and friend of Leonardo da Vinci, Luca Pacioli.

00:30:34.365 --> 00:30:39.337
So it was hardly surprising to see
chess making a conspicuous appearance

00:30:39.337 --> 00:30:45.777
in Baldassare Castiglione's hugely influential
1528 work, The Book of the Courtier,

00:30:45.777 --> 00:30:51.916
where the explicitly multifaceted nature of
the ideal courtier is profiled in detail:

00:30:51.916 --> 00:30:57.589
someone who's eminently skilled in a wide
range of suitably aristocratic pursuits—

00:30:57.589 --> 00:31:02.293
music, literature,
jousting and many more—

00:31:02.293 --> 00:31:10.468
yet manages to perform all such activities with
a deliberate nonchalance, or “sprezzatura”.

00:31:10.468 --> 00:31:17.075
Accomplishment at chess, meanwhile, is singled
out by one of the dialogue's main characters,

00:31:17.075 --> 00:31:20.111
the thoughtful Cardinal
Federico Fragoso,

00:31:20.111 --> 00:31:25.683
as particularly problematic to this
carefully constructed, well-rounded profile,

00:31:25.683 --> 00:31:31.055
given the necessary amount of time required
to develop a suitable level of expertise,

00:31:31.055 --> 00:31:40.932
leading him to conclude that, "In this case, a very unusual thing
happens, where mediocrity is more to be praised than excellence."

00:31:40.932 --> 00:31:46.304
But whether excellence or simply
basic competence was the goal,

00:31:46.304 --> 00:31:52.610
it was clear that chess was nothing less than the
paradigmatic example of a challenging mental activity

00:31:52.610 --> 00:31:57.348
that could be significantly developed
through dedicated study and reflection,

00:31:57.348 --> 00:32:03.288
a prime instance of the ennobling power of
education to refine the disciplined mind,

00:32:03.288 --> 00:32:07.992
fully on par with the likes
of poetry, music, and art;

00:32:07.992 --> 00:32:17.101
and thus an eminently suitable activity for an avowedly cultivated,
ever-striving family, like the Anguissolas, to be engaged in,

00:32:17.101 --> 00:32:20.738
at least every so often.

00:32:20.738 --> 00:32:24.909
And as the game steadily
gained in popularity,

00:32:24.909 --> 00:32:31.883
with the kings of Europe increasingly inviting chess' brightest
international stars to publicly compete at their courts—

00:32:31.883 --> 00:32:38.990
very much including, as it happens, that of Spain's
Philip II, where Sofonisba spent so many years—

00:32:38.990 --> 00:32:48.333
it was inevitable that chess would make an appearance
in the literary humanist world of the Renaissance.

00:32:48.333 --> 00:32:52.804
The first such work we have a
record of was Scachs d'amor,

00:32:52.804 --> 00:32:57.542
a late 15th-century
Valencian poem of 64 stanzas,

00:32:57.542 --> 00:33:04.048
describing the courtship of Venus by Mars
through a chess game played with the new rules.

00:33:04.048 --> 00:33:09.787
But by far the most influential chess-related
literary work to appear during this time

00:33:09.787 --> 00:33:12.857
was the Latin poem Scacchia Ludus,

00:33:12.857 --> 00:33:19.731
where chess was provided with a classical origin myth
befitting its recently elevated cultural status,

00:33:19.731 --> 00:33:25.436
featuring a game between Apollo
and Mercury on Mount Olympus.

00:33:25.436 --> 00:33:34.345
Scacchia Ludus was written by Marco Girolamo Vida, the
highly renowned humanist writer and Bishop of Alba,

00:33:34.345 --> 00:33:39.050
who dedicated the work to his
friend, Cardinal Federico Fragoso,

00:33:39.050 --> 00:33:42.420
a mutual friend of
Baldassare Castiglione

00:33:42.420 --> 00:33:48.526
and the very same person whose character utters
those ironic comments extolling chess mediocrity

00:33:48.526 --> 00:33:52.964
in Castiglione's The Book of the
Courtier that we saw a moment ago.

00:33:52.964 --> 00:34:02.640
Vida, as it happens, was also born in Cremona, and was
known to be a good friend of Sofonisba's father, Amilcare.

00:34:02.640 --> 00:34:06.911
And in his 1550 Latin
oration against the Pavians,

00:34:06.911 --> 00:34:11.716
he notably lists, as proof of the
superiority of his hometown of Cremona,

00:34:11.716 --> 00:34:16.421
the accomplishments of two of
the city's female cultural stars:

00:34:16.421 --> 00:34:25.263
one “extremely learned in both Greek and Latin literature, who
speaks and writes on any subject in a clear and fluent style”,

00:34:25.263 --> 00:34:31.369
and another “deservedly counted among
the excellent painters of our time.”

00:34:31.369 --> 00:34:35.373
Vida mentions neither
woman explicitly by name,

00:34:35.373 --> 00:34:38.876
but his detailed description of
their respective accomplishments

00:34:38.876 --> 00:34:44.048
makes the identities of the two Cremonese
women he refers to crystal-clear:

00:34:44.048 --> 00:34:47.418
the poet, Partenia Gallerati,

00:34:47.418 --> 00:34:55.493
and the painter, Sofonisba
Anguissola, then still a teenager.

00:35:04.202 --> 00:35:07.839
What exactly are we witnessing here?

00:35:07.839 --> 00:35:14.579
At first glance, it seems that we're catapulted
into a front row seat of a private family moment.

00:35:14.579 --> 00:35:17.548
And to some extent,
that's certainly true.

00:35:17.548 --> 00:35:22.286
The renowned artist and art
historian, Giorgio Vasari,

00:35:22.286 --> 00:35:29.961
famously saw the painting during a visit to the
Anguissola house in Cremona in 1566, writing glowingly:

00:35:29.961 --> 00:35:37.502
"I have seen this year in Cremona, in the house of
her father, a painting made with much diligence:

00:35:37.502 --> 00:35:41.439
the depiction of his three daughters
in the act of playing chess,

00:35:41.439 --> 00:35:50.915
and with them, an old housemaid, done with such diligence and facility
that they appear alive and the only thing missing is speech."

00:35:52.483 --> 00:36:00.992
As we saw earlier, Sofonisba's Latin inscription on the side of
the chessboard straightforwardly collaborates Vasari's account.

00:36:00.992 --> 00:36:11.135
"Sofonisba Anguissola, virgin daughter of Amilcare,
painted from life her three sisters and a maid in 1555,"

00:36:11.135 --> 00:36:15.139
when Sofonisba would have
been in her early 20s.

00:36:15.139 --> 00:36:22.446
So is that all that's going on? A revealing
window on a touching domestic scene?

00:36:22.446 --> 00:36:24.882
Well, no.

00:36:24.882 --> 00:36:31.923
Like all great works of art, this painting contains
several hidden layers of meaning and subtle ambiguity,

00:36:31.923 --> 00:36:35.026
both deliberate and inadvertent.

00:36:35.026 --> 00:36:43.167
Even the seemingly straightforward inscription curiously
has Sofonisba's name spelled with an “E” rather than an “O”,

00:36:43.167 --> 00:36:45.536
as she otherwise always did,

00:36:45.536 --> 00:36:48.439
prompting some to question if it
was added later by someone else.

00:36:53.945 --> 00:37:00.351
When it comes to who is being portrayed
at least, matters are pretty transparent.

00:37:00.351 --> 00:37:04.255
We're told by both the
inscription and Vasari

00:37:04.255 --> 00:37:07.158
that we're looking at
three daughters and a maid;

00:37:07.158 --> 00:37:14.632
and given the dating, it's clear that the principal
protagonists are: Lucia, roughly 18 at the time,

00:37:14.632 --> 00:37:17.935
playing against the
adolescent Minerva,

00:37:17.935 --> 00:37:22.707
while the seven-year-old
Europa looks delightedly on.

00:37:22.707 --> 00:37:29.380
As for the maid, she bears an unmistakable resemblance
to an elder figure, also in the background,

00:37:29.380 --> 00:37:37.888
of one of Sofonisba's self-portraits at the keyboard—sometimes
thought to be a portrait of Lucia or even a self-portrait by her—

00:37:37.888 --> 00:37:42.827
this time looking considerably older.

00:37:42.827 --> 00:37:47.231
But it's not at all clear where
the game is actually taking place.

00:37:47.231 --> 00:37:52.937
It's obviously outdoors, with two
of the sisters framed by oak trees,

00:37:52.937 --> 00:37:58.476
their faces contrasted with a dark background to
intensify their sense of three-dimensionality,

00:37:58.476 --> 00:38:02.613
as Leonardo da Vinci had
explicitly recommended.

00:38:02.613 --> 00:38:07.918
And you might be tempted to conclude, based
on the elaborate personalized tablecloth,

00:38:07.918 --> 00:38:13.024
which, incidentally, seems to make an
appearance in another Sofonisba portrait,

00:38:13.024 --> 00:38:16.594
that they're simply playing
in the household garden.

00:38:16.594 --> 00:38:20.097
But while Cremona is
close to the Po River,

00:38:20.097 --> 00:38:28.773
the imposing mountains depicted in the background clearly don't
really fit the geography, and seem to imply an invented setting—

00:38:28.773 --> 00:38:35.012
another tip of the hat to Leonardo, with his famous
made-up landscapes of blue-tinged mountains,

00:38:35.012 --> 00:38:43.020
that were themselves an homage to the signature background scenes
of the celebrated Netherlandish masters who preceded him.

00:38:44.155 --> 00:38:53.631
In fact, the closer you look at it, the more evident it is that
The Chess Game’s backdrop of a river, city spires and blue hills,

00:38:53.631 --> 00:38:57.935
is directly inspired by Leonardo.

00:38:57.968 --> 00:39:02.473
And then there's the matter of what
the Anguissola daughters are wearing,

00:39:02.473 --> 00:39:10.881
with their beautifully constructed necklaces, detailed hairpieces,
and elaborate costumes lined with intricate gold brocade,

00:39:10.881 --> 00:39:18.055
we're hardly looking at some everyday scene of three young
ladies from a relatively modest, albeit noble background,

00:39:18.055 --> 00:39:22.026
indulging in a relaxed moment
of intellectual diversion.

00:39:22.026 --> 00:39:27.098
What we're facing instead is
obviously a family portrait,

00:39:27.098 --> 00:39:34.972
with three of the Anguissola girls dressed up in their finest
clothes and jewelry to suitably immortalize their images;

00:39:34.972 --> 00:39:39.844
while at the same time, just like
the elaborate patterned tablecloth,

00:39:39.844 --> 00:39:46.484
providing a clear opportunity for Sofonisba to
demonstrate her considerable artistic dexterity.

00:39:46.484 --> 00:39:50.521
Indeed, both the necklace
and brooch worn by Minerva,

00:39:50.521 --> 00:39:52.957
together with Lucia's hairpiece,

00:39:52.957 --> 00:40:00.765
are also featured in another Sofonisba portrait of the woman
commonly believed to represent her mother, Bianca Ponzoni,

00:40:00.765 --> 00:40:08.539
all of which points to the strong likelihood that The Chess Game
was created as a personal family portrait for the Anguissala home.

00:40:08.539 --> 00:40:16.180
which is precisely where Vasari saw it when he visited Amilcare
in Cremona, several years after Sofonisba had left for Spain.

00:40:16.180 --> 00:40:20.818
A proud declaration of the noble
values of the Anguissola family,

00:40:20.818 --> 00:40:27.758
whose principal legacy lay not through money,
power, or a preponderance of male heirs,

00:40:27.758 --> 00:40:33.230
but rather through their children's rigorously
acquired levels of intellectual sophistication—

00:40:33.230 --> 00:40:36.367
here represented by the game of chess,

00:40:36.367 --> 00:40:43.174
an activity that, as we've seen, was believed to
be culturally on par with literature and music,

00:40:43.174 --> 00:40:50.414
in keeping with family friend Marco
Girolamo Vida's poem, Scaccia Ludus.

00:40:51.148 --> 00:40:57.254
And while it's quite possible that other now-lost
Anguissola family group portraits were created,

00:40:57.254 --> 00:41:06.864
the most obvious existing point of comparison with The Chess Game
is Sofonisba's painting of Minerva, Amilcare, and Asdrubale,

00:41:06.864 --> 00:41:16.574
which Vasari also saw during his visit to
Cremona, and also commented on favorably.

00:41:16.574 --> 00:41:22.546
This work is much more obviously in the “family
legacy portrait tradition” than The Chess Game,

00:41:22.546 --> 00:41:29.920
with the long-awaited young male heir prominently
displayed as the torchbearer of the family line.

00:41:29.920 --> 00:41:35.059
There are many clear stylistic
similarities between the two works.

00:41:35.059 --> 00:41:42.333
Once more, we have an outdoor scene with the figures
framed by trees before a background landscape of a river

00:41:42.333 --> 00:41:45.236
and imposing bluish
mountains in the distance.

00:41:45.769 --> 00:41:52.042
But there's also the question of how the figures
in the painting are interacting with each other.

00:41:52.042 --> 00:41:57.548
As we'll see shortly, there's much valuable
information to be gleaned in The Chess Game

00:41:57.548 --> 00:42:00.918
from appreciating where each
of the figures is looking,

00:42:00.918 --> 00:42:07.258
and a similar effect on the viewer is created by
the portrait of Minerva, Amilcare, and Asdrubale,

00:42:07.258 --> 00:42:15.699
with the two siblings exchanging glances with each other, while
Amilcare—and the dog—are directly engaging with the viewer.

00:42:15.699 --> 00:42:17.635
Meanwhile,

00:42:17.635 --> 00:42:24.842
the trees in the 3-person portrait are straightforwardly
invoked to convey the continuity of the family line

00:42:24.842 --> 00:42:27.511
in the standard fashion of the day:

00:42:27.511 --> 00:42:36.320
with the few green shoots at the base of the tree behind the
sword-bearing heir, Asdrubale, referencing his patrilineal destiny.

00:42:36.320 --> 00:42:46.030
But it turns out that The Chess Game also uses its vegetation
in a strikingly similar, albeit much more subtle, way.

00:42:46.230 --> 00:42:55.372
Its trees are unmistakably oaks, and thus directly linked to the
three rooks on the board, which are clearly in the form of acorns—

00:42:55.372 --> 00:42:58.776
one for each of the three
depicted Anguissola daughters,

00:42:58.776 --> 00:43:07.685
from the young and impulsive, Europa, to the rapidly
maturing, Minerva, to the eminently self-controlled, Lucia.

00:43:07.685 --> 00:43:12.856
A family's future legacy,
Sofonisba looks to be saying,

00:43:12.856 --> 00:43:18.862
is far more dependent on the careful
cultivation of character than anything else.

00:43:18.862 --> 00:43:27.705
Which is why The Chess Game is much more than a simple legacy
painting or even a proud advertisement of familial accomplishment.

00:43:27.705 --> 00:43:34.878
Because it's not just a question of knowing which
suitable activities, such as chess, to participate in,

00:43:35.179 --> 00:43:42.052
but rather a much broader statement of intellectual
and moral development and self-mastery.

00:43:42.052 --> 00:43:49.960
It is, in short, about education
in the broadest sense of the word.

00:43:49.960 --> 00:43:54.431
Not only what specifically to
learn and how to practice it,

00:43:54.431 --> 00:44:00.070
like knowing the rules of chess or even understanding
how to be sufficiently adept at the game,

00:44:00.704 --> 00:44:04.541
but more generally, how
to progress at anything:

00:44:04.541 --> 00:44:11.248
highlighting, in particular, the vital task
of achieving self-mastery over any situation.

00:44:11.248 --> 00:44:14.652
It's also about enjoyment, certainly,

00:44:14.652 --> 00:44:19.289
but enjoyment in an appropriately
dignified, self-enhancing way,

00:44:19.289 --> 00:44:26.530
one that explicitly comes about through conscious
effort, deliberate application, and personal guidance

00:44:26.530 --> 00:44:29.633
while continually focused
on the higher goal.

00:44:30.034 --> 00:44:35.072
With the three sisters, and their
three strikingly different ages,

00:44:35.072 --> 00:44:40.244
reflecting three very distinct
stages of this educational process.

00:44:40.811 --> 00:44:46.817
All of this, needless to say, is
reinforced by the cascade of eye movements,

00:44:46.817 --> 00:44:51.488
with each character looking in
a distinctly different direction.

00:44:51.922 --> 00:44:56.527
The youngest, Europa, is
naturally the most effusive,

00:44:56.527 --> 00:45:00.597
openly reveling in the discomfort
of her older sister, Minerva,

00:45:00.597 --> 00:45:06.637
who's just lost her now powerful queen,
and quite possibly the game itself.

00:45:06.637 --> 00:45:13.343
Minerva's upward pointing right hand displays
her surprise at the game's sudden turn of events,

00:45:13.343 --> 00:45:16.046
if not actual resignation,

00:45:16.046 --> 00:45:21.618
as she looks, perplexed and helplessly,
at her conquering older sister;

00:45:21.618 --> 00:45:25.689
who, in turn, hardly
gloats about her victory—

00:45:25.689 --> 00:45:34.098
instead casting a knowing glance that looks out towards the
viewer of the painting, demonstrating her calm self-assurance.

00:45:34.098 --> 00:45:39.336
The object of the enterprise, she
seems to be all but directly saying,

00:45:39.336 --> 00:45:43.307
is not victory in some
objectively meaningless game,

00:45:43.307 --> 00:45:48.579
but the patient instruction of core
life values to loved family members,

00:45:48.579 --> 00:45:54.918
in particular, how to gracefully
accept both victory and defeat.

00:45:54.918 --> 00:45:59.123
This trio of intricately
directed glances:

00:45:59.123 --> 00:46:06.096
from Europa to Minerva, from Minerva to
Lucia, and from Lucia to the viewer,

00:46:06.096 --> 00:46:12.903
palpably reinforces this educational chain of
how to painstakingly develop self-mastery:

00:46:13.270 --> 00:46:20.811
from the joyous and spontaneous reactions of youth to a
more sophisticated, controlled, and nuanced understanding.

00:46:22.479 --> 00:46:26.984
And there is a fourth, even more
subtle link in this family chain.

00:46:28.352 --> 00:46:31.655
While in standard Anguissola
portrait fashion,

00:46:31.655 --> 00:46:34.691
Lucia looks forthrightly
out towards the viewer

00:46:34.691 --> 00:46:40.063
to convey her sentiments on the proper mechanisms
of educational and cultural accomplishment,

00:46:40.063 --> 00:46:47.871
perhaps a better way still to describe the scene is that
she's looking outwards towards her eldest sister, Sofonisba,

00:46:47.871 --> 00:46:50.073
who's actually painting the work—

00:46:50.874 --> 00:46:58.882
the fourth unseen Anguissola daughter, who, through
her own patiently acquired wisdom and cultivation,

00:46:58.882 --> 00:47:01.718
is best equipped to create
the entire commentary.

00:47:04.755 --> 00:47:09.726
And who better than Lucia,
Sofonisba's most accomplished student,

00:47:09.726 --> 00:47:15.332
to vividly incarnate the triumphant
educational values of the Anguissola family

00:47:15.332 --> 00:47:18.969
that will be directly responsible
for their enduring legacy?

00:47:20.370 --> 00:47:28.946
It's notable, too, that in this tri-fold series of glances between
the three sisters, none of them is actually looking at the board.

00:47:28.946 --> 00:47:35.886
Once again, explicitly underscoring the idea that the
primary message here is not about the game itself,

00:47:35.886 --> 00:47:44.161
but rather a broader form of development, learning how
to appropriately act and react to life's circumstances.

00:47:49.166 --> 00:47:56.106
Correspondingly, anyone looking to find evidence in the
painting of a detailed interest in the particulars of chess

00:47:56.106 --> 00:47:58.442
will be swiftly disappointed.

00:47:58.442 --> 00:48:02.613
Not so much because the board is set up
differently from what we're used to,

00:48:02.613 --> 00:48:07.050
with the square to the player's right
colored black instead of the usual white—

00:48:07.050 --> 00:48:10.487
those things weren't standardized
back in the Renaissance—

00:48:10.487 --> 00:48:17.361
but simply because the scene we're witnessing doesn't look
like anything that would reasonably occur in a real game,

00:48:17.361 --> 00:48:19.596
even in the 16th century.

00:48:20.297 --> 00:48:28.639
Minerva has two oppositely-colored bishops, at least,
but otherwise, her pieces look pretty randomly placed.

00:48:28.639 --> 00:48:32.542
In particular, it's hard
to imagine how her rook—

00:48:32.542 --> 00:48:38.315
important symbolically, as we mentioned earlier,
to represent her younger sister, Europa—

00:48:38.315 --> 00:48:41.318
could have ended up on the
other side of her knight

00:48:41.318 --> 00:48:44.521
unless it was moved
there, quite unusually,

00:48:44.521 --> 00:48:49.793
in between the knight's movements away
from and then back to its original square.

00:48:49.793 --> 00:48:56.099
Perhaps even more revealingly, Lucia seems
to have just captured Minerva's queen,

00:48:56.099 --> 00:49:02.205
a highly significant loss in chess terms, that
presumably led to Minerva's surprise gesture.

00:49:02.205 --> 00:49:09.112
But her actions are decidedly out of sync with the way any
chess player would move her hands under the circumstances:

00:49:09.112 --> 00:49:17.888
with her right hand still holding one of her pieces in play,
while the newly-won queen is shown off to her side by her left.

00:49:17.888 --> 00:49:23.026
In a real chess game, a captured piece is immediately taken off the board,

00:49:23.026 --> 00:49:26.063
and then it’s the
other player’s move.

00:49:26.063 --> 00:49:33.570
If Lucia has just captured her opponent's queen, what
on earth is she doing still touching her pieces?

00:49:34.171 --> 00:49:39.910
It seems pretty clear that accurately depicting
the specific positions of chess games,

00:49:39.910 --> 00:49:43.347
or vividly modeling the hand
movements of real players,

00:49:43.347 --> 00:49:49.319
wasn't Sofonisba's major preoccupation while
constructing this fascinating group portrait,

00:49:49.319 --> 00:49:54.491
a point indirectly reinforced by the fact that
the only character who does turn to the board

00:49:54.491 --> 00:49:57.260
is the maid on the right
overlooking the scene,

00:49:57.260 --> 00:50:05.736
her wrinkled features smoothed over very much in the way that van
Dyck reported years later that Sofonisba explicitly told him to do,

00:50:05.736 --> 00:50:14.444
as can also be seen in her appearance in the background of the
later portrait of Sofonisba, or perhaps Lucia, at the keyboard.

00:50:14.444 --> 00:50:18.949
And while some might claim that The
Chess Game is an avowedly feminist work

00:50:18.949 --> 00:50:24.855
due to its singular depiction of women indulging
in the iconically intellectual activity of chess,

00:50:24.855 --> 00:50:28.091
that might not be the correct
way to look at things.

00:50:30.360 --> 00:50:33.363
While chess was
certainly, as we've seen,

00:50:33.363 --> 00:50:40.837
widely considered to be an appropriately elevated recreation
eminently suitable for the noble, sophisticated mind,

00:50:40.837 --> 00:50:50.180
as we've also seen, it was by no means viewed
as more so than writing, or music, or painting,

00:50:51.081 --> 00:50:56.453
all pursuits that regularly featured in other portraits of the Anguissola sisters.

00:50:58.422 --> 00:51:05.295
It's not the presence of chess itself, then, that plays such
a fundamental role in the enduring renown of The Chess Game,

00:51:05.295 --> 00:51:08.598
whose groundbreaking
accomplishments are often trumpeted:

00:51:08.598 --> 00:51:12.602
the first Renaissance group portrait
exclusively devoted to women,

00:51:12.602 --> 00:51:17.274
the first Renaissance painting to
juxtapose characters of different classes,

00:51:17.274 --> 00:51:21.244
or even—again for the more
chess-inclined among us—

00:51:21.244 --> 00:51:25.348
the first Renaissance painting to
feature only women chess players.

00:51:25.348 --> 00:51:28.518
All of that is surely true.

00:51:29.886 --> 00:51:37.060
But put in its proper perspective, all of those artistic
innovations seem dwarfed by another much larger one:

00:51:37.060 --> 00:51:43.200
that The Chess Game was the first group
work of entirely genuine female characters,

00:51:43.200 --> 00:51:47.637
without any hint of the knee-jerk
idealizations or standard tropes

00:51:47.637 --> 00:51:54.778
so often invoked to portray officially endorsed
feminine ideals of what women could or should be

00:51:54.778 --> 00:51:57.881
according to the strongly
patriarchal zeitgeist of the day.

00:51:59.749 --> 00:52:03.019
The figures in The Chess
Game, in other words,

00:52:03.019 --> 00:52:08.859
once more fully in keeping with Sofonisba's
extraordinarily penetrating style,

00:52:08.859 --> 00:52:13.163
seem unquestionably, unmistakably real

00:52:13.163 --> 00:52:21.304
in a way that strikingly distinguishes them from virtually every
other female figure previously depicted in the history of art—

00:52:21.304 --> 00:52:25.942
producing a painting that
has a shockingly modern feel.

00:52:25.942 --> 00:52:32.816
Forget about the stiff formal attire, the
rigorously coiffed hair, or the elaborate jewelry,

00:52:32.816 --> 00:52:39.789
and just concentrate on the remarkably lifelike
faces that Vasari enthusiastically wrote about.

00:52:39.789 --> 00:52:43.493
The expressions we're
witnessing in The Chess Game

00:52:43.493 --> 00:52:47.164
might well have come from
a recent Instagram post,

00:52:47.164 --> 00:52:54.604
abruptly telescoping the 470 years that
separate our world from Sofonisba's.

00:52:54.604 --> 00:53:05.182
It's not, in other words, so much of a statement of feminism,
or class structure, or the longstanding appeal of chess,

00:53:05.182 --> 00:53:07.217
or any of that.

00:53:07.217 --> 00:53:13.957
It's about the ongoing importance, and
significant challenge, of improving ourselves;

00:53:13.957 --> 00:53:20.697
and it's also, undeniably,
about sheer unadulterated joy.

00:53:20.697 --> 00:53:29.472
In short, it’s about the human condition— in
all its varied, often contradictory splendour.

00:53:29.472 --> 00:53:32.475
No wonder it's so popular.

00:53:41.952 --> 00:53:49.559
Sofonisba's Chess Game left the private domain of the Anguissola
family at some point in the latter part of the 16th century,

00:53:49.559 --> 00:53:53.430
likely after Amilcare died in 1573,

00:53:53.830 --> 00:54:01.705
and eventually made its way into the possession of the
Roman humanist, historian, and archeologist Fulvio Orsini

00:54:01.705 --> 00:54:09.112
before becoming the property of the powerful
Roman cardinal and art patron, Odoardo Farnese.

00:54:09.112 --> 00:54:17.220
From there, it eventually made its way to another one of the
Farnese family possessions, the Palazzo del Giardino in Parma.

00:54:17.220 --> 00:54:21.725
By the late-1700s, it
had migrated to Naples,

00:54:21.725 --> 00:54:27.330
where the French engraver and future director
of the Louvre, Dominique-Vivant Denon,

00:54:27.330 --> 00:54:31.034
made a decidedly
underwhelming copy of it.

00:54:31.034 --> 00:54:37.173
It was transferred from Naples to Paris by
Lucien Bonaparte in the early 19th century,

00:54:37.173 --> 00:54:40.310
where it was sold to an
unknown buyer in London,

00:54:40.310 --> 00:54:46.216
before being purchased by the Polish count and art expert,
Atanazy Raczyński,

00:54:46.216 --> 00:54:49.352
where it became part
of his Berlin gallery,

00:54:49.352 --> 00:54:57.360
eventually moving to the National Museum of
Poznán, Raczyński's birthplace, in 1903,

00:54:57.360 --> 00:55:01.531
where it remains today.

00:55:01.531 --> 00:55:06.803
So much for the documented
wanderings of the painting itself,

00:55:06.803 --> 00:55:13.810
but what's considerably more interesting to examine
is the broader impact of Sofonisba's early work,

00:55:13.810 --> 00:55:17.013
of which The Chess Game plays
such a significant part,

00:55:17.013 --> 00:55:22.018
on other 16th-century painters,
particularly women painters.

00:55:23.853 --> 00:55:31.394
Because it can't be a coincidence that only a few decades
after Sofonisba became known throughout Italy in the 1550s,

00:55:31.394 --> 00:55:39.336
several other female artists also produced famous portraits
of themselves, precisely like Sofonisba and her sisters,

00:55:39.336 --> 00:55:42.939
as proudly accomplished
and cultivated figures,

00:55:42.939 --> 00:55:52.048
such as this highly detailed and musically accurate self-portrait
widely attributed to Marietta Robusti, Tintoretto's daughter,

00:55:52.048 --> 00:55:53.616
now in the Uffizi Gallery.

00:55:55.085 --> 00:56:01.825
And, perhaps even more significantly, two
notable self-portraits by Lavinia Fontana,

00:56:01.825 --> 00:56:05.562
one showing her contemplating
ideas in her studio,

00:56:05.562 --> 00:56:10.066
and another casually demonstrating
her proficiency at the keyboard,

00:56:10.066 --> 00:56:13.937
with all three paintings dated
to the mid-to-late-1570s.

00:56:15.472 --> 00:56:23.780
Interestingly, none of these works—all three of which feature a
woman-in-three-quarter pose forthrightly looking at the viewer—

00:56:23.780 --> 00:56:30.420
has copied Sofonisba's own habit of portraying
herself in simple black clothing with no jewelry,

00:56:30.420 --> 00:56:34.324
but instead have opted
for a much dressier look,

00:56:34.324 --> 00:56:36.726
particularly those by Fontana,

00:56:36.726 --> 00:56:41.865
where her intricately constructed clothing,
complete with ornate ruffed collar,

00:56:41.865 --> 00:56:47.070
seems much more in keeping with The Chess
Game than any Sofonisba self-portrait.

00:56:49.739 --> 00:56:52.375
There are, of course,
reasons for this.

00:56:55.912 --> 00:57:03.720
Fontana's 1577 self-portrait at the spinet was a
wedding portrait painted for her future father-in-law,

00:57:03.720 --> 00:57:08.091
where the artist was keen to highlight
her social and economic credentials

00:57:08.625 --> 00:57:13.430
through her fine clothes, jewelry,
and a servant in the background,

00:57:13.430 --> 00:57:16.633
along with her upright and accomplished character
and explicitly virginal status, à la Sofonisba,

00:57:16.633 --> 00:57:18.968
along with her upright and accomplished character
and explicitly virginal status, à la Sofonisba,

00:57:18.968 --> 00:57:26.409
in order to demonstrate her worthiness of marrying into
a family living in a higher social world than her own.

00:57:27.076 --> 00:57:31.614
And there are other clear
Sofonisba-related references too.

00:57:31.848 --> 00:57:37.787
The servant holding the music inevitably
brings to mind the maid in both The Chess Game

00:57:37.787 --> 00:57:42.725
and even more explicitly in the
musical portrait mentioned earlier.

00:57:43.193 --> 00:57:49.699
While perhaps most striking of all is the fact that
the position of Lavinia's hands at the keyboard

00:57:49.699 --> 00:57:54.003
are almost identical to the
hands of Lucia in The Chess Game.

00:57:55.772 --> 00:58:01.344
While Fontana's tondo Self-Portrait,
painted two years later in 1579,

00:58:01.344 --> 00:58:08.551
was known to have been prompted by a request from
Alfonso Chacón, a Domenican scholar living in Rome,

00:58:08.551 --> 00:58:16.125
who requested a portrait of her as a model for an engraving
to be included in his collection of 500 famous men and women,

00:58:16.125 --> 00:58:20.196
where she was promised to
appear alongside Sofonisba.

00:58:20.797 --> 00:58:24.834
Chacon's collection of
engravings was never published,

00:58:24.834 --> 00:58:30.406
but this portrait Fontana sent him for the
occasion is a magnificently revealing one:

00:58:30.406 --> 00:58:36.346
once again dressed to the nines—this
time, presumably, for posterity—

00:58:36.346 --> 00:58:39.949
as she gazes straight out
at us from her studio desk,

00:58:39.949 --> 00:58:46.189
where she’s contemplating her next work of art
with a rigorously-acquired cool self assurance.

00:58:46.189 --> 00:58:51.194
Exactly like, we're once more
immediately prompted to think,

00:58:51.194 --> 00:58:54.697
Lucia Anguissola, in The Chess Game.

00:58:57.300 --> 00:59:05.742
Sofonisba Anguissola, a woman whose many captivating self-portraits
played a significant role in catapulting her to fame,

00:59:05.742 --> 00:59:10.947
is not, of course, directly
in any of these paintings.

00:59:10.947 --> 00:59:19.088
But her looming presence in all of them, and many others
throughout the following centuries, is unmistakable.