the swedish director ingmar bergman didn’t invent death’s chess game. death was already playing chess on a church ceiling north of stockholm, in the 1480s. bergman’s father was a pastor; as a boy, ingmar went with him by bicycle to the country churches near stockholm where he preached, and looked up at the paintings. one he remembered this way: in a wood sat death, playing chess with the crusader.
decades later he filmed it just like that, in the seventh seal (1957). the film’s last vision is another picture he remembered: across gentle hills death led the final dance towards the dark lands.
ingmar bergman didn’t invent death’s chess game. as a boy he looked up at the paintings in the churches where his father preached.
look
up.
01 · look up, as he did
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“while father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang or listened, i devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the coloured sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceiling and walls. there was everything that one’s imagination could desire: angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans.”
ingmar bergman, 1956, of the country churches near stockholm where his father preached. he never named them. these are the vaults of täby church, north of stockholm, painted in the 1480s by albertus pictor; the ingmar bergman foundation says its painting of death playing chess inspired him.
02 · death playing chess
death leans over the board beside a man in a hat, one hand on a piece.
albertus pictor, täby church, 1480s, painted where a vault meets the wall, by the stairs up to the organ loft. bergman remembered one of the paintings of his boyhood this way: in a wood sat death, playing chess with the crusader.
decades later he filmed it just like that, in the seventh seal: a knight home from the crusades plays chess with death, to buy time. he loses.
03 · the final dance
“across gentle hills death led the final dance towards the dark lands.”
the film’s last vision is another picture bergman remembered. no medieval dance of death survives in a swedish church; the bergman foundation’s essay on him and visual art thinks he most likely knew this one, from st mary’s church in lübeck, from a reproduction in a book. bernt notke painted it in 1463: almost thirty metres of the living, from the pope to a baby, each led by a dancing death. this is its copy of 1701, photographed before it was destroyed in 1942.
swipe along the dance
