Chess pieces designed by a great master!
In 1499, when French soldiers, under the leadership of Stuart d'Aubigny, the Count of Ligny, and Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, the Milanese Marshal in the service of Louis XII, invaded the Duchy of Milan, two friends, Luca Pacioli, an Italian mathematician, also known as “the father of accounting” and Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest artists that ever lived, were brought to Mantua under the protection of the dedicated chess enthusiast, marquise Isabella d'Este.
It is to her that Luca Pacioli dedicated his De ludo scachorum, a manuscript on the game of chess. The manuscript consisted of twenty four sheets of paper, approximately sized 150 x 220 mm, folded in half to form 48 folios of 150 x 110 mm, amounting to a total of 96 pages (shown is a sketch for the portrait of Isabella d'Este by Leonardo da Vinci).
Each of these pages contains a drawn chessboard with one or two game pieces depicted on it and beneath the drawing there is a text that sets out the problem. For a long while it was supposed that the text was either lost or destroyed, however, on December 20, 2006, Dr. Serenella Ferrari Benedetti, the cultural coordinator of the Fondazione Coronini Cronberg in Italy, brought to the attention of the bibliophile Duilio Contin a precious late fifteenth-century manuscript on the game of chess from the foundation's library.
Fondazione Palazzo Coronini Cronberg Onlus was created after the death of Count Coronini in 1990, for administrating his patrimony and amongst it, the library of one of the noble families in Gorizia, Italy. When the directors realised that they had this important manuscript, or as Serenella Ferrari Benedetti named it “A Holy Grail of chess," the need to conduct a deeper study on it became apparent. They, therefore, turned to Adolivio Capece, the president of Italian Chess Players Association, who suggested they contact Franco Rocco.
Franco Rocco, a Milanese sculptor and architect, researcher of the Renaissance neo-platonic geometry (particularly Luca Pacioli's De divina proporzione) and very famous in the chess world since 1977 after his innovative design of the chess set entitled “Scaccomatto«, spent more than a year researching the issue for the owners of the manuscript.
THE CONCLUSION OF HIS STUDY WERE SENSATIONAL - THE MANUSCRIPT TURNED OUT TO BE, ABOVE ALL, A CONCRETE RESULT OF A COLLABORATION BETWEEN LUCA PACIOLI (AUTHOR OF TEXT) AND LEONARDO DA VINCI (AUTHOR OF THE PIECES DESIGN).
And now, after all these years, the pieces from the drawings, exceptional and futuristic even for today, finally came to life. Handmade by skilled craftsmen, packed in an artistic handmade box and escorted with a certificate of authenticity, Franco Rocco’s study and a freehand drawn chessboard are available to collectors and chess enthusiasts.
