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Death Playing Chess

History, Religious and Mythological Paintings

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
1480 1
Medium
Mural 1
Location
Taby Church, near Stockholm, Sweden 1
Classification
Genre
Painting 1
Medium
Medium (category)
Mural 1
Connections

In Form

Painting, Art Forms
Source Death Playing Chess (Wikipedia)

In Genre

Painting, Art Forms

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
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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