This has never happened before and it’s never going to happen again: I’m talking about a stained glass window. Yes, an honest-to-God medieval stained glass window. The sort that usually shows bearded men with staffs and yellow plates behind their heads. But this one, photographed by a friend in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, depicts a man and a woman at a chessboard, perhaps because it came from a private house rather than a church.

I’m not sure how one makes a stained glass window,¹ but I imagine it’s very hard to draw the pieces accurately. As a consequence of this — or perhaps of too much ergot — the pieces don’t really look like each other This, together with the fact that they were using strange looking pieces in those days, made the reconstruction very hard.

I gave it a whirl nonetheless:²

Most of the pieces’ identities are conjectural, but it really doesn’t matter that much. Surely, the smaller pieces that look similar must be pawns, which makes the whole thing completely impossible. But even if this is somehow a legal position, it’s still a mess.

Probably, the artist wanted to stain the glass in another meaning, too. Or perhaps he just decided to knock off quickly that day, because this thing was just going to hang in some obscure lower lord’s minor manor and no one was ever going to look at it twice. Apparently, he didn’t predict a chess in popular culture blog.

Realism: 0/5 It is not known who made this stained glass panel, but you could probably find out by looking at the executions around 1500 because this sort of sacrilege was not taken lightly.

Probable winner: I have no fucking clue.³ I don’t even know where the kings are.

<sup>1. [Presumably it involves staining glass, somehow.] ↩
2. [This diagram editor — it belongs in a museum, too.] ↩
3. [I don’t even have a celibate one.] ↩</sup>