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 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
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.
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 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.
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!!
Until the Greeks, the idea of humanism wasn’t particularly valued. The time, costs, and effort required to make artwork meant that artists focused on cultural significance over physical representation (also heavily limited by resources like pigment). Vénus de Renancourt is a 23000 year old totem of virility (there are quite a few Stone Age Venus totems ranging from 25000 years ago), as such you have emphasis on the breasts and hips. These sculptures share a striking resemblance to our own perceptions of the human body with regards to emphasis and importance.
I can’t find the exact source, but there was a psychological experiment where they mapped the human body with regards to importance, the hands, head, eyes, sensory organs, and reproductive systems were much larger than other areas. This is akin to most stages of art development as well, novice and intermediate artists will often draw the hands, eyes, and head larger in proportion. (Sensory homonculous)
Christianity and the concept of god as human (Jesus) led to more life like depictions of ourselves and gods. The flatness in perspective is attributed to an idea of how it was thought the human eye saw things, like an inverse projection.
Humanism made a major comeback in the renaissance, the explosion of scientific and technical development emphasized humanity as having a likeness to the gods, as a result the gods became more human and a pinnacle of human form developed. This has shifted over time with different forms, like the more portly Rubenesque forms, or the masculine dominated forms of Michelangelo. Furthermore we got the camera obscura, the pinhole camera, which allowed artists to directly trace over projections. Something interesting to note is the number of left handed depictions of people during this time, likely because this method mirrored the subject.
TLDR: art is a time consuming and expensive process, as such we focused of representation of significance. Technological and philosophical growth lead to more human centric representations.
I would guess that besides the technical limitations of art, a lot of it would just boil down to stylistic preference. I’m sure everyone knew that the paintings didn’t look exactly like people, but knew what the art was depicting and rolled with it, similar to how we consume a lot of our animated stylized media.
I’m just imagining someone in 2000 years looking at the remains of our civilization through the plethora of anime- and cartoon-styled art. “Why did humans depicted in paintings from the 2000s look different than now? Weren’t there artists who could paint realistic looking people?”
A lot of comments here have art theory and history well covered,
but what occurs to me is different and I think may be what most non-artists think of: The basic goal of replicating a form faithfully.
This requires no creativity, rather the theory is and always was, to simply copy proportions as they are observable, as accurately as possible. It’s hard to imagine that nobody was trying to do this before the Renaissance.
So this goes back to a similar question of “Why do medieval paintings look so childish?”. You look at some depictions of Edward IV and it looks like it was done by a 4th grader.
There are two parts to this, the first is that the skill to make something have depth (not deep emotionally but depth where there appears to be a z axis) is pretty challenging to do on a 2d surface. The Romans didn’t do it particularly well. They were getting there, but then *dark ages!!*
We tend to undersell how impactful the Renaissance was, IMHO, and it is in the Renaissance where the techniques to draw in three dimensions came to form. More info below;
[https://theweek.com/articles/459667/how-did-humans-learn-paint-3-dimensions](https://theweek.com/articles/459667/how-did-humans-learn-paint-3-dimensions)
Perspective drawing was only made popular after the Dark Ages in Europe. I’m sure some people could do it, but the focus was more on capturing a larger scenario like a battle or a royal ceremony than depicting a photorealistic apple, y’know?
Arts like painting and drawing weren’t sponsored or even encouraged as a practice until patronage was possible (in a society with unequal wealth distribution funny enough), so likely nobody had the time, money, or resources to develop their own style of what we consider “realistic” art.
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