A Valentine for Chess Lovers Holiday Card

Lovers playing chess, it's a scene that figures prominently in late medieval imagery of courtly love. This scene featuring two male lovers was inspired by and adapted from two illuminations (folios 13r and 262v) in the Codex Manesse (UB Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 848), a compilation of medieval German love songs (Minnesang) made for the Manesse family in Zürich in the early 1300s. The configuration of chess pieces reproduces a chess problem from the late 13th-century Book of Games of King Alfonso X (El Escorial BSL T.I.6, folio 22v). The verse is excerpted from the third canto of “Chess: A Poem in Four Cantos” by Charles Tomlinson (1891) and is set in East Anglia, a font by Bill Roach, both of which reflect a medieval style. Please note that while my designs are based on and inspired by medieval manuscript illuminations, they are not reproductions and they should not be taken as faithful representations of medieval art. While I follow the basic outlines, I make adjustments to gestures and postures and even replace whole items, animals, or figures. I also mix and match elements from different manuscripts and even different countries and centuries. Actually, that's the most medieval thing about them, their "hodge-podginess." If you'd like to see the original manuscript pages, they've been digitized by the University of Heidelberg Library: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.2222#0021 and https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.2222#0520.