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
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.
Also a little bit of painting the beauty goal that everyone was trying to reach at the time and lack of knowledge about anatomy.
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.
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.
Latest Answers