A young man sits at a chessboard, chin in hand, staring at the pieces as if the floor had just dropped away beneath him. Across the table his opponent leans back, calm and amused. It is the Devil, and the stake is the young man's soul. Behind the player stands an angel, silent and sorrowful. Moritz Retzsch's The Chess Players (c. 1831) is a small panel that has had an unusually long afterlife, first as a popular engraving and later as the painting everyone calls "Checkmate". Quick facts Artist: Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch (1779–1857) Date: c. 1831 Medium: Oil on panel, about 32 x 39 cm Collection: Private collection (sold at Christie's in 1999) Notable fact: Also known as "Checkmate" or Die Schachspieler ; it circulated widely as a print and became the subject of a famous chess legend Moritz Retzsch, The Chess Players, c. 1831. Oil on panel. Private collection. Image via the Sapiens Verbum print shop. The Painter of Faust Retzsch spent h...

He has no horns, no tail, and no fire at his feet. Ludwik Stasiak's Satan wears a crown-like cap, drapes himself in a bishop's red and a monarch's green, and smiles the unbothered smile of someone who has never once been told no. Painted around 1900 in Austrian-ruled Kraków, Alegoria szatana (Allegory of Satan) has spent the last several years resurfacing again and again on social media, usually shared with some version of the same question: why does this look less like a monster, and more like somebody we'd recognize? Quick facts Artist: Ludwik Stasiak (1858–1924) Date: c. 1900 Medium: Oil on canvas, 200 × 145 cm Collection: National Museum in Kraków (inv. MNK II-b-3252) Notable fact: Held by the same museum as Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine Ludwik Stasiak, Allegory of Satan (Lord of the World), c. 1900. Oil on canvas, National Museum in Kraków. Public domain (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons. Who Was Ludwik Stasiak? Stasiak was never just a painter. Born in...