Death Playing Chess is a mural painted between 1480 and 1490 by the Swedish medieval painter Albertus Pictor in Taby Church near Stockholm. It shows a man playing chess against a skeleton, accompanied by a now largely illegible ribbon that once read I play checkmate. Pictor, who worked on murals in 36 churches across two Swedish regions and is considered the most active ecclesiastical painter of his era, combined anatomically precise figures with detailed period clothing and weaponry, and the Swedish History Museum holds a copy in its Stockholm collections. The image became widely known outside Sweden after the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman drew on it for a 1957 film, The Seventh Seal. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Year Created LocationTaby Church, near Stockholm, Sweden 1 Medium
Medium (category) Connections
In Form
Source Death Playing Chess (Wikipedia)
In Genre
Entity-backed identity for the genre enum value this work already carries, resolved to an arts art-form by an explicit value-to-entity map (phase 3 bucket conversion, docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md). The genre fact itself, with its own citation, stays on the work unchanged.
In the Other Atlases
- Also in Geography Atlas: Sweden, located there.
Sources
1. Death Playing Chess (Wikipedia)
Lead paragraph, first sentence
Death playing chess (in Swedish: Döden spelar schack) is a monumental painting in Täby Church located just outside Stockholm, Sweden.
Analysis section, last sentence
The mural inspired Ingmar Bergman to create the film The Seventh Seal in 1957.
Genre reference
Death Playing Chess is a mural painted between 1480 and 1490 by the Swedish medieval painter Albertus Pictor in Taby Church near Stockholm.
- infobox year field: 1480
In Form: Painting, lead paragraph
Death playing chess (in Swedish: Döden spelar schack) is a monumental painting in Täby Church located just outside Stockholm, Sweden. It was painted around 1480-1490, by the Swedish medieval painter Albertus Pictor. The painting d
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