Couldn’t they tell that objects farther away appear smaller?
In: Other
When you look at the world, you don’t see what your eyes show you. Your brain interrupts the stream to show you icons instead. These icons save your brain processing power but they distort what your see.
Art is a luxury. The further you go back in time the more expensive it was to produce and the more difficult it was to source quality materials for it. The further back in time you go the more rare artists were and trained artists, building on their predecessors work were even more rare… and expensive.
The artists’ patrons were focused on other aspects of the image, like having their likeness preserved, telling a story, or imparting a message. They weren’t concerned with really real realism or perspective because they hadn’t seen it before. They didn’t know what they were missing or that such techniques are possible.
Over time artists developed better materials and techniques. They sought to one-up each other. And through that process, they learned to *see*. They developed methods to cut out the iconographic middle man and actually see what’s in front of them. With that they found that realism was possible and the objective measure for their art became reality.
For more about this check out Understanding Comics by Scott MacLeod and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. Edwards “scientific” explanations have been debunked but the exercises get results and you can see the iconographic phenomenon occur for yourself with them.
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