I’m asking because paintings, whether on the wall of a cave, or on generally of a King or Queen in ancient times look quite weird. Not necessarily in a bad way, it has its own cool art style, but they are not realistic or anywhere close.
If human beings have a natural talent, photographic memory or incredible artistic ability today where they can make TikToks of painting ultra realistic art with fire, chalk or charcoal etc Why do we almost never see realism in painting/artistic history? I’m talking paintings specifically not sculptures btw
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Photorealism was never the intent of art.
Art -drawings and paintings – was supposed to tell a story: who people were, what they did, what happened. What they looked like wasn’t really important. This is why you find paintings and drawings of people, not still life, from a long long time ago. When most people couldn’t read, a painting or a drawing was probably the best way of telling many people far away and in the future what they needed to know.
Even once technique evolved, for example, portraits were only for famous people, and you usually got whole body portraits. It was only with the advent of cameras, and their limited field of view, that the idea of a painting of just a head and shoulders of someone became commonplace.
Historically, art told a story, not described a person’s looks. The poses they took, the things they held in their hands, the clothes they wore, were all signifiers of who they were and what they did. Halos around people’s heads didn’t mean they were saints – it just meant they had died. A group of people important enough to have a painting made of them would mix the living and the dead. A halo just told the viewer who was dead as opposed to who was alive when the painting was made.
But of course, the only people Worth including in an artist’s time and effort were important people, and historically many of them became saints, which is why halos became associated with saints.
Realism in art wasn’t important. It likely never occurred to make things any other way to many artists and viewers, in general.
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