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Rome: The chess puzzle, the mind-racking brain food now printed in many an upscale newspaper, may have had an early and accomplished aficionado in one of the greatest artists that ever lived: Leonardo da Vinci.
Experts say the Renaissance genius may have drawn the puzzles found on a long-lost chess treatise recently recovered in the library of an aristocratic family in northern Italy.
The manuscript was penned around 1500 by Luca Pacioli, a mathematician and friend of Leonardo, and experts believe the artist may have come up with the striking and elegant chess pieces that illustrate the puzzles the treatise discusses.
"The pieces are exceptional for that era," said Milan-based architect and sculptor Franco Rocco, who studied them. "Even today they look futuristic."
The treatise, titled De Ludo Schaccorum (Latin for "Of the Game of Chess"), includes more than 100 chess problems - puzzles that challenge the player to reach checkmate in a certain number of moves.
The sole copy of the treatise was thought lost for centuries until it was identified in 2006 among 22,000 volumes collected by the Coronini family in their palace in Gorizia, on Italy's border with Slovenia.
"It was like a Holy Grail of chess," said Serenella Ferrari Benedetti, cultural coordinator of the foundation managing the Coronini estate. "We knew it existed but nobody had ever seen it."
But the red and black pieces used to draw the problems were themselves a puzzle. Their slender and abstract design was so unusual that Ferrari Benedetti asked Rocco to study them.
After a year of research, Rocco has come to the conclusion that Pacioli enlisted Leonardo's help to draw the innovative figurines.
In a recent phone interview, Rocco noted that the two had already worked together in Milan. While Leonardo was painting the Last Supper, he helped Pacioli illustrate a treatise on proportion.
At the time the chess work was written, the two had moved together to Mantua from Milan.
Sharp contrast
The futuristic style of the figurines is in sharp contrast with the way the pieces in chess puzzles were represented in those times, either letters or realistic forms.
Each piece maintains a fixed proportion ratio to each of its parts and to the other pieces, a trademark of Leonardo's art, he said. Also, some of the pieces directly recall other works by Leonardo: The queen, for example, is designed after a fountain drawn by Leonardo in one of his own manuscripts, Rocco said.
Not all the figures display the same quality and some pieces were drawn with a right hand and others with a left, he observed. This indicates that Leonardo, who was left-handed, may have only drawn a few pieces to provide examples, or that he simply suggested the designs to Pacioli, he said.
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