Creating Game Art

Over winter break I worked on the art for the game. 

In my efforts to stay historically accurate, I only used art from contemporaries of Lorenzo de' Medici, and I mainly focused on Florentine artists that he directly worked with. The list includes: Botticelli, da Vinci, Ghirlandaio, Gozzoli, Lippi, Michelangelo, the Pollaiuolo brothers, Raffaello, Uccello, and Verocchio. This is not an exhaustive list of all the artists I could have selected, but simply the list I settled on. There are some counterfactuals (for example, Michelangelo's famous frescoes were done in Rome long after Lorenzo de' Medici's death, but he was under his patronage as a young man), but I tried to represent a balance between two questions: 1) Who would Lorenzo have interacted with and given patronage to? 2) Who are the most important artists that define what is commonly thought of as Renaissance art during c. 1450-1500.

My main objective for December and January was to cut out many figures from paintings to use as the characters in the game. Most of them will serve as generic NPCs to flesh out the world of the game and make it populous, but some will serve as main NPCs that the player will interact with as part of the main story, like Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici. For the historical figures that we have real portraits of, I cut out their heads to attach to other bodies as needed. For those that we don't have historical portraits of, I plan on using one of the other unnamed figures to represent them. This is the same method I used for the video game I made on Russian Literature. 

I was able to make 118 of these "cut outs," as I am calling them. It was better for me to make more cut outs because I can use them as building blocks to make my scenes. I can simply use the ones that I like and discard the ones I don't. Since I have so many, I don't need to force any images to work with the scene when they don't, and I will likely not need to return to Photoshop to make more cut outs of humans. I did not make cut outs for objects that might be used in the game because I anticipate having very few, if any, objects that the player will need to collect or otherwise interact with. 

I looked for Renaissance paintings that had prominent architecture as well, My hope was to cut out the buildings or backgrounds the same way I had cut out the figures. I wanted to use artistic depiction of Florence and possibly the Medici Villa at Fiesole. However, I found that much Renaissance art was concerned with the "ideal" in architecture in addition to the human form. All of the architecture is fake. It is highly stylized and doesn't make much sense to stand in for the real city of Florence. Even if it was faithful reproduction, Renaissance art focuses so much on human scenes that cityscapes are almost totally covered up by figures. The work of cutting out all the figures and reconstructing the background behind where they were painted would be a huge time investment which might yield poor results. I was pretty stumped about where to look for backgrounds.

Madeline McMahon, a Princeton PhD student of this period, was kind enough to help me brainstorm the issue. She suggested using the idealized Renaissance art, sketches from the period, or modern photographs of Florence. I worried that photos or plain sketches would be too stylistically different to mesh with the existing cut outs, but looking outside Renaissance art seemed promising. I tried to find useful art of Florence from the neoclassical period, hoping that style would be similar enough to the classically-inspired Renaissance. I was disappointed; it didn't fit either. 

I brought this dilemma to Dr. Clulow, who encouraged me to prioritize the game's primary learning objectives over it being 100% accurate. Now I plan to reexamine Renaissance art and rework some of the stylized architecture into usable backgrounds for the game. I will simply include a note in my teacher's guide that explains where the art came from and that it is a necessary counterfactual. I will redirect their main teaching focus to the storyline.