Dice have been thrown and rolled by people throughout recorded history. Early dice were often irregular, made of bone or stone and used primarily for gambling. Although they don’t appear to have played any significant role in mythology, their role in the events of the Crucifixion is well recorded in the New Testament Gospels.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s huge and magnificent Crucifixion from 1565 depicts the biblical account of guards gambling with dice, as seen in the detail below.

On the left of this detail, two men are gambling with dice in a small rock shelter suggestive of a tomb. To the right of them, a gravedigger has just started his work with a spade.

The Christian Church has generally taken a dim view of gambling, and shunned dice. Several artists have expressed this in paint, but none so forcefully as Hieronymus Bosch.

For Bosch and his patrons, gambling was definitely one of the cardinal sins. It appears in the garden of Hell in the right panel of his magnificent Garden of Earthly Delights from about 1495-1505. In this damning conclusion, figures are mutilated and tormented in a nightmare landscape dominated by non-human creatures and alarming objects, where gambling takes the foreground.

In the foreground, a huge blue bird, wearing a cauldron on its head and swallowing a whole human, presides over the scene. Two main groups of victims here are clustered around objects associated with gaming and gambling, and those for making music, then associated with the work of the devil, and immoral activities such as dancing. Playing cards are scattered on the ground beneath an overturned gaming table, and dice are balanced precariously on an index finger and on the head of a naked woman. From among that cluster of figures, a pair of dark blue non-human arms holds high a backgammon board with three dice.

Not all cultures have been as damning, though.

Albert Anker turns to classical times to put his spin on gambling games in his Knucklebone Players (1864). Three youths are here playing a game of greater skill, but still frequently the basis of gambling. The distinguished men in the background are hardly the sort to frequent a gambling den, surely?

Nevertheless, playing with dice continued as a cardinal sign of sin.

Alcohol, and that other vice tobacco, are cited in David Teniers the Younger’s The Dice Shooters (1630-50). In common with other paintings of card-playing and gambling in this period, it’s set in a dingy room in a rough tavern. Drawing on their clay pipes and with glasses of beer in hand, a group of men are completely absorbed in gambling large stacks of coins on the throw of their dice.

William Hogarth’s successor Thomas Rowlandson painted his Gaming Table in watercolour in 1801. Players here are putting their stakes on dice, which are about to be revealed by the man at the far right of the table, who seems to have been raking the money in.

Although Gustave Courbet’s portrait of the operatic singer Louis Gueymard (1822–1880) as Robert le Diable (1857) shows the last scene in Act 1 of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable (1831), its message is clear. In this scene, Gueymard’s character Robert gambles away his entire estate on dice; in the opera this is marked by the aria L’or est une chimère: ‘gold is but an illusion’.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is less convinced. In his watercolour of Hesterna Rosa from 1865, he shows a moment from the contemporary play Philip van Artevelde, written by Henry Taylor in 1834. Van Artevelde was a Flemish patriot who lived between about 1340-1382, and led the Ghent rebellion in 1381, only to be crushed to death in battle the following year. In Taylor’s play, van Artevelde has a relationship with a woman of lower class; in this scene, his lover has paused to reflect on her life while he plays dice with a friend. The painting’s title means yesterday’s rose, and draws on the theme of the fallen woman, so popular with Rossetti.

Murillo’s Young Boys Playing Dice of about 1675 adopts a different theme, of gambling among the poor and vulnerable. Two scruffy urchins from the streets of Seville are throwing dice for the small piles of change which are probably their entire fortunes. A third stands over them, chewing at a bread roll while his dog looks up longingly at the food.