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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It’s also got to do with cognition in my opinion. Early man who lived in caves probably had the mind and mentality of a modern day child. Therefore their ability to get dexterous in drawings were limited to stick like art. Further evolution caused betterment!!
Just my opinion, don’t destroy me!!
A lot of it was cultural. A lot of medieval art favoured expressionism over naturalism or realism, particularly religious works as it was more important to evoke feeling and encourage individual interpretation of the biblical stories than anything else. But if you look at a painting of Henry VIII (early 16th Century) or the tomb of Richard I ‘The Lionheart’ (12th Century) you’ll find they did do realism in certain instances, where it was deemed important to capture something as it appeared properly.
I’ve read a bunch of these comments, and think most of them are accurate. The one that I think is missing though is the quality of the materials at hand. I don’t know that even the greatest artists of today could do a very realistic painting with what was basically finger paints made from mud.
And if they can, I’ll bet it’ll take them a long time. Just going by what I’ve seen elsewhere on reddit, artists will do amazing work with just a ballpoint pen, but put in 200 hours. Not something you can really afford to do on a cave wall.
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.
it’s mainly related to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. that was when all the ancient texts on Euclidean geometry were brought back to Europe, which enabled people to calculate proportions and angles. one of the earliest examples of hyper-realistic art in the modern times goes back to Albrecht Dürer, who lived at the beginning of the 16th century
One potential answer is lenses.
The technology to make high quality lenses first emerges in Holland and Italy during the 15th century. These allowed artists to project images of a sitter onto a canvas and to sketch the main lines and shades, giving the hyperrealistic paintings the renaissance became famous for. (It’s also worth noting that many of the paintings involve subjects where this technique would be particularly effective, like shiny armour in a darkened room with a single ‘spot’ source of light. A renaissance artist’s studio would have resembled a photographer’s studio today)
On the other hand, Classical Art (and some [Egyptian Art](https://images.app.goo.gl/UBSvomimxSBWgb2J7)) made sculptures that are near perfect, and their mosaics are also close to realism, and that can’t be explained with lenses.
I think it’s clear that stylisation played a significant role: it wasn’t just that people *couldn’t* do ‘realistic’ (that is, as we know from photographs) portraits, it was that they weren’t trying to. They were often aspiring to something else: to show the power of a ruler, to represent the Gods, to communicate something or exhibit a particular aesthetic sensibility. The Greek philosophy of art (Plato and Aristotle) *did* expressly see mimeticism (looking-like-the-thing) as being the purpose or measure of good art though, which explains why Greek and Roman mosaics, sculptures, and [sarcophagi paintings](https://images.app.goo.gl/nRjmXVgYTeoiaWLo9) are as realistic as they are.
There was a period when the popular style lacked perspective. They could do it, but they chose not to because that’s what people of the period liked in their art.
There are many theories as to why. But the one JI subscribe to is it was a stylistic choice of the time. Notice, for example, in Greek paintings that buildings have angles that almost always draw a line to a single point, creating a skewed perspective that differs from the otherwise realistic humans.
I think it really just depends on the cultural context. Nothing fundamentally changed about human abilities (although as someone mentioned things like mirrors and the camera obscura during the renaissance did help). For an example, search for “Fayum Portraits” from Ptolemaic Egypt about 2000 years ago. Many of them are nearly photorealistic.
One way you can look at it is that realistic drawing and painting is a language that needed to be developed over centuries to reach the current level of sophistication. The rules of good grammar seem obvious once you’ve learned how to speak fluently, so children who make grammar mistakes seem quaint or unsophisticated, as their mistakes seem obvious to the more fluent speakers. Simply learning the rules of an already existing language when you are surrounded by fluent speakers is relatively easy and almost every child does this eventually.
That is a totally different thing than reverse engineering a visual language from scratch, which was what the process of discovery of the rules of realism was. As mentioned by others here, humans didn’t have mirrors for a long time, photographs are a relatively recent development technologically. Translating a 3D scene to a 2D surface is incredibly challenging and not obvious at all. How many kids draw in correct perspective innately, using vanishing points and foreshortening? Probably zero. If left to their own devices, how many kids would spontaneously develop those techniques on their own if they were never exposed to more sophisticated art?
I’m a professional artist and it took me years of practice to be able to draw and paint fairly photorealistically and I had the benefit of the entire history of artists before me, as well as patient art teachers. All the techniques are easy available to study online these days, but what percentage of the population can draw a recognizable portrait? Probably a low percentage. That’s because drawing realistically is hard even if you know the rules!
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