I don’t mean photorealism, but most art throughout civilizations has been highly stylized – each period and culture can pretty much be told apart by the art style, whereas today there’s infinite variation between individual artists. Shouldn’t realism be the first thing people try since it’s all around us? How did seemingly all art in history from different periods and cultures become so homogenic and specific to their eras?
In: Culture
It’s much easier to create a realistic image of a human by understanding how it works. This is why so many artists have a focus on learning anatomy: when you know where the muscles are and how the skin stretches over them, you can do something much more realistic than if you were guessing by just looking at a leg as you normally would: covered completely in skin with no idea what’s going on inside.
The Greeks weren’t above cutting up bodies, so there was a greater understanding of what connects to what and how it moves. Specifically within European art in the ‘dark ages’, religion and religious belief made many people believe that we cannot do anything to the body once it’s dead. Obviously you had some black market dealings, but nothing too mainstream. People had to guess. But during the Renaissance there was not only more study of the Greek classics, but more and more people were getting in on human biology and seeing how everything stretched and shifted.
As we understood the human body more, we got better at drawing it!
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