Iconography and the Game of Chess

"Iconography," in simplest terms, means the study of "image-writing" or visual symbolism. It deals with the identification and interpretation of standard, pre-established symbols corresponding to certain conventional subjects or themes. The earliest iconographic studies focused on the standard, conventional depictions of religious figures. Such studies have made it possible for art historians to recognize the identities of saintly figures in art by noting the conventional characteristics (i.e., held objects, gestures) that traditionally correspond to specific figures. Thus, in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, the saintly figure holding the large key can easily be identified as Saint Peter, who, according to the Bible (Matthew 16:19), was given the key to the kingdom of heaven. Here, the icon of a key serves both to identify the figure of Peter, and to symbolize his Biblical role as the keeper of the Christian church (i.e., the proverbial "house of God"). Similarly, by incorporating other conventional symbols or symbolic gestures into their works, other artists have provided us with the iconographic clues necessary to recognize the specific identity of various other religious figures that have been rendered in paint and stone.

Michelangelo's Last Judgment

Raphael's School of Athens

But iconography is by no means restricted to the domain of religious art. The use of standard symbolic objects and gestures to identify figures and interpret their significance has a long secular history as well. For example, if we turn to Raphael's School of Athens, we can recognize the figures of Plato and Aristotle, not only by their Greek costume, but also by the standard, characteristic gestures each makes. Plato points upwards, towards the transcendental realm of immaterial ideas, while Aristotle extends his hand outwards, gesturing towards the reality of the material world immediately surrounding him. These gestures correspond to Plato's and Aristotle's respective philosophies of transcendental idealism and down-to-earth materialism. Similarly, Alexander the Great is recognizable by his armor, Heraclitus by his scowling demeanor, Pythagoras by his blackboard and text, and Euclid by his blackboard and compass. Each figure in Raphael's masterpiece is thus iconographically marked with a gesture, object, or trait that at once identifies him, and conveys the special significance he holds in the world of scholarship.

While instances of classical iconography are helpful in defining the term, the interpretive strength of this approach to art will become clearer if we turn to a more contemporary and commonplace icon. Let us therefore consider the image of "chess" as it functions iconographically in art. The game, as we know, has several conventional connotations, including high-class status, intellectual virtuosity, political struggle, and artistic resourcefulness. Generally speaking, whenever chess appears in a work of art, it will symbolically evoke one or more of the above-mentioned themes.

The theme of high-class status is strongly evoked, for example, in Paris Bordone's painting, The Chess-Players. Here the obviously well-to-do players stare irritatedly straight out of the canvas and directly at the viewer (us), whose apparently unwelcome intrusion has interrupted their leisurely pastime. We are thus made to feel unwanted here, and strangely out of place among these aristocrats and their games.

Bordone's Chess-Players

Van Manders's Jonson & Shakespeare at Chess

In Karel van Mander's portrait, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare Playing At Chess, we are similarly confronted with a rather daunting scene. This painting clearly evokes the theme of intellectual virtuosity. The two giants of British Renaissance literature are enmeshed in an intellectual contest that allegorically represents their well-known literary rivalry. Chess here iconographically depicts their battle of artistic wits, a battle before which the world can only marvel.

The theme of political struggle in Sofonisba Anguissola's Chess Game takes the form of an overt feminist statement. This match between a group of armored men and a beautiful woman seems likely to be going the woman's way. Against the display of concentrated masculine prowess on the left side of the painting, the female figure blithely and cavalierly moves her pieces while scarcely bothering to glance at the board. All the while, it is she, and not her spectacularly armed male opponents, who captures the viewer's attention, even as (one imagines) she coolly captures her opponents' pieces. The painting thus urges us to recall that it is the queen that is the most powerful piece in the game. The masculine king, by contrast, is the most vulnerable piece, and the one most in need of protection.

Anguissola's Chess Game

Klee's Great Chess Game

Finally, Paul Klee's The Great Chess Game and Juan Gris's Chess Pieces iconographically evoke the theme of artistic resourcefulness through the image of chess. Klee's painting, rendered in the German Expressionist style, arranges the canvas into a kind of pattern or code of colored squares that take the form of a chessboard. This compositional system of squares recalls Kandinsky's notion of a codified language of abstraction, especially when we consider how the runic pieces are cryptographically evocative of hidden meaning. These pieces seem to spell out an abstract game position that makes no real sense in terms of actual chess, but plenty of sense in terms of artistic pattern and compositional arrangement.

Gris's late-Cubist painting similarly connects the ideas of chess and art by stressing how the abstract handling of lines (vertical, horizontal, and diagonal) across a two-dimensional field (the canvas) evokes not so much the concrete form of his chess pieces, but rather the spatial vectors of their movements across a chessboard. Thus, where Klee deploys the iconography of chess to evoke a sense of the abstract language of Expressionist art, Gris deploys this iconography to evoke a sense of the way Cubist art can consolidate different spatial orientations into a single image.

Gris's Chess Pieces

Chess, as we have seen, is a particularly versatile image in terms of its iconographic significance. As an iconographic trait, the image of chess serves to evoke one or more of the predetermined themes that have been traditionally associated with the game throughout the history of art. By studying the iconography of particular images as they have been incorporated into various works at various times, we can sometimes give ourselves a useful head-start in the difficult task of interpreting the meaning of a given piece of art.