Weren’t there artists at that time who could draw humans for what they actually looked like. For instance, look at the paintings of kings from the 17th Century or before.
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Also a little bit of painting the beauty goal that everyone was trying to reach at the time and lack of knowledge about anatomy.
There’s styles people liked throughout the ages, but mostly remember that artists couldn’t have as much time and materials to practise as today.
Lots of the good ones were sponsored most of their lives, before that became a habit the ones available might not be as good.
Can you go draw a hyper realistic depiction of the world? If you’re anything like me, then no you probably can’t. You gotta learn the techniques and practice first right? All these techniques you can just find online nowadays were discovered by someone and perfected by others. Ancient peoples may not have had all the tricks and tools that we modern humans take for granted.
What you might consider “a realistic picture” is actually fairly divorced from the perceptive experience of seeing a human face or figure in motion. It’s not actually intuitive to imagine and execute an ideally framed and posed static human figure in flat lighting. A *lot* of artistic theory had to be developed to get to a stage where we might consider art as truthful representation as opposed to symbolic shapes. There also had to be technological leaps: devices like the camera obscura and other machinations with mirrors helped early Renaissance artists freeze a frame to preserve fine detail. Even today if you asked an accomplished painter to paint a model human from memory, they’d struggle. We needed to develop artistic traditions like using models or photographic references, and for many human cultures the idea of sitting still and staring into space for a whole day so your face and shape could be accurately recorded would have been farcical.
My history teacher taught me that ancient Egyptians realized how perspective worked, but that the way in which they depicted people, where both eyes, arms, legs, etc. were visible at all times, was because it was necessary to depict all of those parts as a sort of blueprint. Presumably the perceived risks could be that incomplete bodies would be given to those depicted in the afterlife. As such, it could have been a practical choice rather than an artistic one or one of limitation.
One factor that may have played a part is that artists imitated each other or imitated the art that they saw. If all you ever saw were artworks in which human figures were depicted in a stylized or iconic manner, you might well reproduce that style — particularly if the art was made for religious purposes — rather than experimenting to try to achieve more ‘realistic’ results. This isn’t the whole story by any means, but I bet it played a part.
The purpose of art isn’t always meant to be accurate and realistic. The Renaissance really saw the growth of art method and the adoption of styles that closer replicate real life, including professional studios and guilds, the use of models, perspective drawing, paints and oils, etc. There’s a huge difference between the work from someone who is a full-time painter who learned his art from a master over many years, and a monk who spent years copying out the Bible and adding caricatures in the margins.
Basically because of the lack of medium (paper, canvas, etc) and tools (brushes, pens, etc). Ancient civilizations did not have medium and tools readily avalaible for an artist to spend hour and hours practicing till they were able to perfect themselves enough to capture a realistic depiction of a person. This basically changes siginificantly during the Renaissance, where these tools became more common.
Because it depends on what the painter is trying to do. Realism may not be the aim – it may be more about projecting an ideal type (typically of monarchy or nobility) or conveying a set of ideas about society and the place of the subject in it – for example the king as a blend of Solomon and Joshua. So what we see as distortions carry meanings according to widely-held archetypes. Often these are lost, but sometimes we can reconstruct the underlying patterns.
Even where realism can be done, it may not be – Romans were realistic in their ancestral portrait-busts, but imperial imagery is more stereotyped.
A picture gives information. The information an artist from a long time ago wanted to transmit might be very different from what we want to transmit now. For example, if you’re using a picture to tell a story (helpful if most people can’t read), and you only have one surface because the equivalent of paper is rare, you’re going to put most of your time and skill into getting the story told in a fixed space.
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