Scaling Stories
Interactive Feature
While our projects remained separate in terms of research and broad findings, the methodologies we used were very similar. Each individual project found many repeated motifs and selected two that we felt would guide our future research. Below, we created an interactive image featuring the motifs from our projects. Each motif is clickable and will link you to a short discussion of its significance.
This bouquet of flowers is of particular interest in Clara Peeters’ work because of its varied appearances in her compositions. The version owned by the National Gallery of Art in D.C., Still Life with Flowers Surrounded by Insects and a Snail (1610), is the most attentive to the subject, and is likely the reference for the vase’s two other appearances in Vanitas (1610) and Still Life with Fish, Sea Food and Flowers (1612-1615). Though not identical, each grouping has a similar silhouette, with slight variations in the flowers depicted. Peeters is consistent in her color scheme, keeping the red and purple flowers towards the top, yellow and pale flowers in the center, and blue flowers at the base. The variation in these vases raises questions concerning the repetitive use of reference sketches and their evolution throughout an oeuvre.
Clara Peeters - Flower Vase
This stack of cheese appears in five of Clara Peeters’ canonical works: Still Life with Cheeses, Shrimp, and Crayfish (1612-1621), Still Life with Cheeses, Artichoke, and Cherries (1625), Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels (1615), Still Life with Cheese, Bread, and Pretzels (1630), and Cheesestack (1630s). Though they vary in size and proportions, Peeters consistently painted a half wheel of cheese plated with a large slice of cheese in front and another smaller slice on top. This arrangement is always topped with a small butter dish accompanied by a dinner knife and a bread roll. This repetition raises questions concerning Peeters’ studio practice and her creative process.
Clara Peeters-
Cheese Stack
The Minish Cap small key - The small key in The Minish Cap is round and silver with two teeth and no additional notches or decorative elements which makes it stand out as a base form for future silver keys that would add small decorative elements and as a simplification of the few silver keys before it that had different shapes or decorative elements. It is interesting then that it shares the most in common with one of the most unique small keys, The Breath of the Wild.
While we were not able to find a game mechanic or storyline reason for the design, The Minish Cap does feature the greatest number of unique ways to acquire the small key, perhaps necessitating a simple design that would stand out again any of the background color to be easily recognizable even when placed in puzzles like being contained in a block of ice in The Temple of Droplets. With Breath of the Wild standing apart in the Zelda timeline and referencing elements across the entire series, it makes sense that the Breath of the Wild small key is derived from the most simple expression of the most popular key shape and color.
We also know that The Minish Cap small key was a synthesis of two different small key styles, since The Minish Cap took art from Four Swords and modified it to fit The Wind Waker art style. While Four Swords was excluded from our data for being a multiplayer game, it was originally released in a cartridge package with A Link to the Past and uses the same small key sprite design. This style combination can be seen in the circle shape and silver color from The Wind Waker and the longer key body and lack of curves from A Link to the Past.
Zelda -
Silver Key
A Link to the Past small key. One of the most expected but enlightening aspects of the project of isolation specific item types and looking at them together was the different between official art work and in-game reality. A Link to the Past small key is one of the better translations between official art work and sprite with both sharing the horned shape, gold color, square hole, suggestion of a decorative element at the top of the key body, and key body extending past the teeth. It was the first small key to feature a horned shape with a square hole and two teeth. While the horned shape is not the most frequent, most future small keys would draw inspiration from at least one of A Link to the Past small key elements. Link's Awakening and A Link Between Worlds small keys would copy the shape with very little variation. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask small keys would use a simplified horn style minus the horns with an hexagonal hole. The majority of small keys with round tops would borrow the two teeth or the decorative band on the body or both.
The design likely came from both a hardware, story, and ludology source. A Link to the Past was the first Zelda game to release on the 16-bit SNES which would have allowed greater detail than the 8-bit NES. A Link the the Past is considered by Zelda Dungeon and other sites to be the game that set the Zelda formula and also the first game to have a "real tangible" art style (Zelda Dungeon, "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past"). It introduced many Zelda elements that would repeat in almost all future games including the Master Sword, Lake Hylia, dual world gameplay, Kakariko Village, and a robust musical score.
It is the third main Zelda series game but the previous game was a direct sequel to the first. Changing the key but keeping the gold color and general body shape (straight and extending past the two teeth) would have allowed it's use to be recognizable immediately by past Zelda gamers and prevented confusion with boss, dungeon, or quest keys while also establishing the game as not a sequel to it's predecessors.
A Link to the Past was also the first time treasure chests were introduced and small keys are often found inside them. The treasure chest sprite is gold and square linking it to the gold key and square hole shape. While the official treasure chest art is rounded on the lid, it shares the gold color, black outline suggestion of indentation, and white shine of the official small key art. Similarities that would visually link objects that are also linked in ludology.
Zelda -
Gold Key
The cabbage is often placed on the floor and in the foreground of the painting. Even when the cabbage is included in the very background of the painting, the color and its unusual placement on the floor of a home, draws the viewer's attention. Edmonds cabbages are never mirror images, instead, he pays close attention to these objects and paints them with the same detail one would find in a dutch still life.
Francis William Edmonds - Cabbage
The Whip is an object that appears throughout Edmonds paintings in various ways. Sometimes, the whip is placed on the floor and other times it is hung up on the wall. The whips featured in Edmonds paintings are primarily used for moving cattle and/or horseback riding; activities which might signal a person's socio-economic status. Someone - usually a man - who utilizes a whip often enough to hang it next to the door, is likely not riding in carriages or stagecoaches very often. Additionally, in some of Edmonds paintings, the whip is shown with a hat on top of it. When the hat is present with the whip, there is a male character within the scene that is depicted without his hat on. This might signal the character's recent arrival to the home. Like the cabbage, the whip is an "active object" that changes position throughout his compositions.