Page 32 - Francis Cotes - A winning end-game
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Fig 15. GIULIO CAMPI, La Partita a Scacchi, Turin, Musei Civici.
ponders her move. (This painting is well known delight in the game. It also suggests that girls too
to aficionados because it shows a medieval can share the particular kind of logical
variant, chess ‘courrier’, with a piece, like a intelligence, usually linked to men. Another
modern bishop, moving along the diagonals).8 interesting portrayal, of around the same time is
Giulio Campi’s La Partita a Scacchi, (Fig. 15.
So women were players, but were they any Musei Civici Arte Moderne, Turin), in which
good? The first known group painting of women a bosomy, elaborately attired woman, surrounded
with a chessboard, Sofonisba Anguissola’s
painting of her sisters, Le Gioactrici de Scacchi 8. See H.R. Murray, A History of Chess (1983)
(Fig. 14. Muzeum Narodwe w Poznaniu,
Poland), shows their sheer, almost physical,
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