Flickrless Friday

Today's Flickr Friday post became Flickrless Friday when I was unable to find an image to suit my taste. I found a couple of photos worth adding to my 'Flickr Favorites' (see the right sidebar for the latest), but nothing worth further investigation. What to do? Borrowing an idea from last week's post Sotheby's Chess, I produced the following composite image of Flickr chess paintings. It shows the first screen of 4.118 images.

flickr.com/search/?text=chess+painting
(sorted on 'Relevant')

Using the same method of identification, based on chess notation, as in the 'Sotheby's' post...

Call the rows 'A' to 'C' (from top to bottom) and number the images in each row '1' to '7' (from left to right).

...is there anything here that will advance our knowledge of anything else? For example, what does that image in the upper left corner ('A1') have to do with chess? Titled Captain Rex Snow Assault, it's in four groups having names like 'Lego Star Wars'. The only association with chess is via a white tag assigned by Flickr, i.e. if the image looks like a group of chess pieces, let's assign it to 'chess'. We already saw this in Giant Chess Pieces in Mandalay (February 2016), and know that the Flickr robots are over-enthusiastic when it comes to tagging things.

How about the image in the lower right corner ('C7')? Titled Kayla, the description says, 'Her main work consists of murals depicting computers playing chess with genetically enhanced parrots.' That sounds like a sentence generated by a text-writing robot. Apparently, software robots in the year 2017 do not advance our knowledge of anything.

After this, there are a pair of similar images in 'B7' & 'C4' showing a yellow dog wearing sunglasses (or something like that). The 'B7' image is titled From gallery chess P1150440, which is as close to chess as the page comes. The C4 image is from the same photographer with a similar title. Why 'gallery chess'? Of the various searches I used to research this question, none answered it.

The image in the center ('B4') looks promising. At least it's a real painting and not a photo of a lego construction. Titled 1986.147 : Scene from a Novella, the extra long description informs,

This and its companion panel are from the front of a chest (cassone) and show two episodes from an as yet unidentified story, or novella. In one, a youth is smitten by a maiden who appears at a window. In the other, they engage in an erotically charged game of chess (she is about to lose). Both were common themes in the amatory literature of the Renaissance.

While this image shows the 'maiden who appears at a window', the mention of metmuseum.org and of Liberale da Verona eventually leads to Liberale da Verona | The Chess Players | The Met, a well known chess painting dated 'ca. 1475'. Another potential example from the 'amatory literature' of chess (seriously?) is in 'C2': The Chess Players by Jacques Clément Wagrez (1846-1908 France). While trying to find more about this piece, I was inundated by copies from Pinterest.com and gave up.

That's another lesson from this exercise. Images copied to Flickr or to Pinterest, without a smidgen of additional explanation, don't advance our knowledge of anything. I hope to have a real Flickr Friday post two weeks from now. If not, I'll explore those little colored boxes at the top of my screen capture.