I don’t know if I’m phrasing this right, but I just noticed that even royal portraits in Europe all looked very flat and un-detailed up until like the 1600s, and there was another massive improvement in the 1700s when paintings started to look infinitely more realistic than they did in the medieval era.
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Partly new techniques being (Re)discovered and used from then on, and new focus on different style aspects.
But the main part was financial. Europe centralized a lot after the medieval age ended, a lot more money was kept in the hands of monarchs, trade started to flourish much more than before.
So rich people could afford very lengthy drawing processes from someone who dedicated all his life to painting.
And well yeah “My ancestor/rival has such a detailed expensive painting, I need an even better one to show how great I am” starts to become a thing when you have more money than you can ever spend.
Renaissance paintings were all about the ideal portrayals of the human body.
Part of the art style of the Renaissance, especially with artists like da Vinci, was the idea of sexless beauty. So, they’d often make portraits of people with androgynous features.
Another part, such as the work of Michelangelo, would have portrayals of very toned and muscular people.
Botticelli liked to draw disproportionate humans performing impossible poses, but still portrayed his idea of a “perfect human”.
Artists weren’t always striving for realism. Realist art is actually fairly new. Medieval art was all about symbolism and color coding, Renaissance art, as I said, was all about the ideal “perfect people”.
One of the underlying precursors to the [Renaissance](https://www.history.com/topics/renaissance/renaissance) was the resurgence of humanism, which promoted embracing human achievements in education, classical arts, literature and science.
This philosophy shifted the individual back into focus, both as a subject of self-improvement and in representation in art – as opposed to the ornamental stylings of the prevalent Gothic art style.
This led to the development and use of techniques such as use of realistic proportions, foreshortening (creating the illusion of depth), sfumato (blurring and blending of lines for three-dimensionality), and chiaroscuro (light-dark contrast), which [Masaccio](https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/renaissance-painting/) was credited with popularizing.
Art is a form of communication. If you want to communicate something, you need a form of language. But what artists want to communicate and how they do that can vary wildly.
[Japanese ukiyo-e art looks very simplistic to a lot of people](https://www.google.com/search?q=100+views+of+edo&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwi5u4v75IvtAhWKD-wKHQ3nDJ4Q2-cCegQIABAA&oq=100+views+of+edo&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzICCAAyBggAEAUQHjIGCAAQBRAeMgYIABAFEB4yBggAEAgQHjIECAAQGDIECAAQGDoFCAAQsQM6BAgAEENQlXFY3oYBYPOIAWgAcAB4AIABRYgB0waSAQIxNpgBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1nwAEB&sclient=img&ei=g-q0X_ntFYqfsAeNzrPwCQ&bih=948&biw=1643&rlz=1C5CHFA_enNL916NL916). But there’s a clear reason for why it looks the way it does. Ukiyo-e translates as something as floating images or fleeting images. The idea was that the world is full of transient moments of beauty that are there for a second and then they’re gone. The smile of a woman walking through the market, a cherry blossom catching the light perfectly for a moment.
Ukiyo-e art aims to capture these brief fleeting moments in an art style that is just as ephemeral and fleeting. Painted in scant moments trying to catch that fleeting moment. In some styles, the goal was to paint subjects in a single flourishing stroke without lifting the brush from paper.
Picasso’s abstractionism is another style that people often criticise along the lines of ‘my child could do this’. Picasso wasn’t just scribbling though, he could be quite competent in more conventional paint styles when he wanted to. But he used his art to explore the essence of things. How much can you strip a subject down and still have it be recognisable?
[Picasso’s bull is a great example.](https://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/animals_in_art/pablo_picasso/picasso_bulls.jpg) He starts out with a fairly detailed bull and then explores dissecting this bull into its core essence. By the end, he draws a bull with just a few lines but it’s still clearly a bull.
Art isn’t simply about who can achieve the most realism. That beautifully realistic renaissance art you’re referring to was obsessed with beauty and perfection to the point where they often significantly enhanced their subjects beyond what they really saw.
A big part in learning to appreciate art is to move beyond ‘I like what I see’ and into understanding the underlying language of an art style.
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