Most "medieval" digital art is a fantasy illustration with a Celtic border around it — torchlight, cast shadows on stone, weathered faces. The Illuminated style is built on what a Gothic workshop actually did, and the order of operations is the whole secret: gold goes down before the paint, and lines go on after it. The gilder lays burnished leaf on raised gesso first; the painter fills flat fields of mineral colour up to its edge; a quill restates every contour on top of the dry paint. A page made in that order physically cannot produce a glow, a falloff or a soft shadow — the flatness of a medieval miniature is not a stylistic choice but a consequence of the process. Our renderer obeys the same order.
The technique plate this style calibrates against: Psalter of Saint Louis, fol. 1v (BnF Lat. 10525). Burnished gold leaf as the ground, figures silhouetted against it, fire as a stack of flat vermilion tongues.
What evidence the Illuminated style is built on
The style is defined against twenty-six adjudicated plates collected across three research rounds: fourteen survived as first-class evidence, six were kept as zone-restricted witnesses, and six were rejected with written reasons. The keeps span four French court workshops — the Psalter of Saint Louis (Paris, c. 1270–74), the Limbourg Brothers' Belles Heures and Très Riches Heures, the Bedford Hours, the Grandes Heures de Rohan — and the English Luttrell Psalter.
The rejections teach more than the keeps. Nine candidates came from the Très Riches Heures, the most famous manuscript in the canon, and only three survived as first-class evidence — because that codex is precisely where Gothic illumination turns into panel painting. The rejected folios carry graded skies, blue-haze distance, towers modelled as lit cylinders, and in one case gold armour painted with specular highlights: gold as a lit metal surface, the exact inversion of gold as a material. We screen on the pixels, not on the attribution. From the plates that survived, the operative rules:
- Gold is three materials. Leaf under the paint as a tooled ground; a flat disc or ruled rays over the paint as a halo; shell gold as a drawing ink for hems, brocade and lettering. All three are enforced — naming only one produces gold-tinted wallpaper.
- A ground is never a plain fill. Not one validated plate puts a figure against an unmodulated colour field. Every ground is one of five species: tooled gold, a two-colour lozenge diaper, a saturated field strewn with small motifs, a gold-worked lattice, or bare vellum. A night scene is the same scene on a patterned dark ground strewn with gold stars — darkness is patterned, never dimmed.
- Cloth gets three layers, skin gets one. A fold is a line event: flat field, a darker line of the same hue in the trough, one to three lighter lines along the ridge, all hard-edged. A face is one unbroken pale field with the features drawn on it — dot pupils, brow and nose as a single stroke, a short mouth line, and nothing else. Age is a beard and a hairline.
- Distance is height, not haze. One Psalter folio stacks a crowd six to eight heads deep in rising rows at unchanged scale, unchanged saturation and unchanged edge crispness — the back row as hard-edged as the front. That plate is the rule; recession, haze and shrinking are the boundary where the tradition ends.
How a chess game reads in Illuminated
Chess already runs on the things this tradition invented conventions for: hierarchy, ceremony and speech. When you render a game as a chess comic in Illuminated, importance becomes a materials budget — the medieval page signals who matters by giving them more paint and more precious paint. The king under attack stands against burnished gold with a frame around him; the pawns that shield him are quill line on bare vellum. A queen's decisive entry gets the treatment the Luttrell table folio gives its lord: larger, denser, more gilded than anything near her.
Dialogue rides on banderoles — flat white scrolls with rolled ends whose text follows the curve of the ribbon, crossing in front of figures on the topmost layer of the page. A tense exchange between kings becomes a three-party scroll dialogue staged the way the Grandes Heures de Rohan staged one, c. 1418–25. Battle is heraldic, not atmospheric: a sacrifice is a stack of flat vermilion flame-tongues, never an explosion with falloff. And the margins work: drolleries — the small grotesque figures that live there — and the strip along the bottom of the page carry the reaction shots, standing on undecorated vellum below the main miniature.
Pick Illuminated for a game with a principal and an arc: a king hunt, a promotion, a long siege. A quiet manoeuvring draw between equals gives the page nobody to gild.
The bar an Illuminated page has to clear
Writing the style down ends in a test list — the same measurements the historical plates were graded against, now the standard a rendered page is judged by. The largest ground region has to survive a no-gradient test: a graded sky is a fail. Unpainted vellum has to hold at least 25% of the page area, and that is a floor, not a target — the evidence base runs 50–75%. Gold has to read as a contiguous flat region with a hard boundary, never a gradient blob. Count the marks on the largest face: more than about six non-hair marks, or any modelled socket or jaw shadow, fails. Nothing casts a shadow onto any ground. Lettering is held to the period idiom: blackletter blocks opened by outsized red and blue pen-drawn initials, speech on banderoles with rolled terminals — never an outlined, drop-shadowed comic balloon. Fixing those numbers is the last step of the four-step method behind every Chess2Story comic style. The list is a validation checklist for the style, not a filter running silently inside the renderer: a person applies it at review, and the only check that runs on every page is the lettering and artifact pass.
The result is a comic that reads like a codex your game was entered into — a precious object with your moves illuminated inside it.
