Early Bird: The Secret Gospel 1

An excerpt from “Evangelium Secretum Marci”, a 6th-century Latin translation of a lost Greek original (presumed 1st century), discovered in a rock crevice near Mar Saba. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.” Specifically, I’ve used AI to generate the backgrounds in these two pictures. I wanted to have a background in the style of a medieval landscape painting, with that very particular layout that doesn’t rely on natural perspective, and my first thought was to simply use a scan of an existing painting. But then this seemed like the kind of thing AI might actually be useful for (I’m sorry to say I’m not a medieval painter myself). So the figures are hand-drawn, the bench is hand-painted, the backgrounds are AI, and the frames are Photoshopped and substantially altered from an actual medieval manuscript. In the end, it’s more like a collage than artwork, really.