Why are humans depicted in paintings from ancient civilizations like different than now? Weren’t there artists who could paint realistic paintings?

Question

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.

In: Other

Answer 1

A number of reasons:

Style. Different people/eras have different preferred styles.

Materials. Not every era had access to good paper, brushes, etc.

Colors. We take for granted that we have access to every color under the sun, but that simply wasn’t the case back in the day. Some colors weren’t available, or they were so expensive as to be basically unavailable. If you don’t have access to, for instance, red, painting a realistic portrait is hard.