Couldn’t they tell that objects farther away appear smaller?
In: Other
The short answer is that it’s not something recent. There is amazingly realistic art from many periods in history. There are two major components to why not all art is like that.
The first component is practical. Time and money. Learn how to produce realistic art and actually doing it is very time consuming and expensive. It’s pretty much a full-time vocation, which means patrons need to be willing to pay for an artist and his apprentice’s livelihood. Not every place and time in history allowed for such luxury.
The second component is a bit more complicated. Art is a form of communication and expression. And if you want to communicate, you need a language to communicate in. Artists create these languages for themselves.
For instance, realism is a great language if you want to depict an accurate picture of reality. A realistic art style studies things like perspective, texture, light, and shadow. But even here, things aren’t always what they seem. Renaissance art for instance idealizes perfection. It looks photorealistic to us but the artist often embellished reality to make the subject seem more perfect than they really were. Sometimes to the point where subjects are twisted and stretched in ways that are physically impossible despite looking realistic.
And many artists explored ‘languages’ of expression that didn’t require realism at all. Picasso was a superbly artist for instance capable of realism. But he pursued many artistic explorations. In Picasso’s bull, he explored what the essence of a bull is.
He starts out with a fairly realistic bull and then in a series of sketches tries to simplify it until he arrives at [a composition of just a few lines that still clearly communicates that the subject is a bull.](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/62/d4/9f/62d49f0a3cef55653565fe0d287acd9a.jpg)
Another example is Japanese ukiyo-e art. This art style often looks simplistic to people, simple colours and strokes with stylized figures and shapes. But ukiyo-e means something like ‘images of a floating world’.
The idea behind the art style is that life is full of moments of fleeting beauty that are here one moment and gone the next. A ray of sunshine that hits a cherry blossom just right for a brief moment. A pretty girl walking the market who flashes a smile for a second. A glance that is shared between two lovers.
Ukiyo-e art is meant to be painted as quickly as the moment itself. In some styles, the entire painting is done in a single flourishing brush stroke. No master painter who works on a realistic painting for months but an act of appreciating, as quick and fleeting as the moment it aims to capture.
Realism is just one paint style. There are many more because there are many different things people wish to communicate. And art styles are like languages, each conceived to explore and communicate a different kind of message.
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