Lukas van Leyden, J. Huizinga, And the Space of Play

Abstract

Lukas van Leyden, a Dutch artist of the early 16^th century, was born in Leyden and spent there almost all his life and the 20^th century Dutch scholar of the history of culture Johan Huizinga was a Professor of Leyden University for more than three decades. What they have in common is not only the city of Leyden, to which they below, but their interest in the play. Huizinga proposed a theoretical account of the phenomenon of play in Homo Ludens, a book, which has remained to be the most fundamental in the field till our days and Lukas depicted a play in a number of his art works. The paper is intended to effect a semantic analysis of Lukas’ painting, Chess Players (in parallel with some other play depicting art works), and critical reflection on some key passages of Huizinga’s book. The painting, Chess Players, is reviewed against the assumption of presence a matrimonial oriented meta-narrative in it. A correlation of the painting’s narrative (given in a plot) and meta-narrative (the painting’s assumed content) leads to a super-narrative, which allows to figure out in Lukas’ work a kind of “conceptualization” of a phenomenon of the play, which is peculiarly interesting in regard to the features of the play in Huizinga’s theory of play and a notion of ‘play-element in culture’, which he coined. Huizinga proposed an influential idea, according to which the play has a normative function in culture. So far, this function does not belong to the play only, one should specify it in the context of the play, better on a basis of deeper differentiation of various plays performing the normative function in diverse ways. This deals with such kinds of play as play-competition, play-ceremony, play-examination, play-training, and so forth. Additionally, a discrimination of the play as sociocultural phenomenon and phenomena which contain play-element is needed. A set of the play features, which Huizinga figured out, and their relevance to play-elements in culture should be accepted as a basis of such discrimination.