Why do we rarely see ultra-realistic paintings from ancient/medieval times, given the fact that many humans have a natural talent of creating them today with minimal items?

Question

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

In: Other

Answer 1

This is mostly because perspective was not “invented” yet. Humans know about depth perception since forever, but how to translate that into a flat surface was not known until the 12-13th century (I’m not exactly sure when). After that art changed completely, as you can see that churches started painting deep corridors to give the impression of more space, and also all this helped on how to position elements in a painting that ended those trends of huge humans or animals, or skewed settings.

Another thing you have to understand is fashion. Of course humans are capable of more detail, we have seen that in the roman statues for example, but that doesn’t mean that during medieval times it was not fashionable to draw every human like a caricature. Also the cost of materials was high, and since churches were the only ones commissioning art you needed to be careful on how to use the materials, so maybe you couldn’t experiment as much.

Another extra point: anatomy started being really studied around the times of the renaissance, which also explains why babies are just mini humans in the paintings. And it was not an exact science either: just look at paintings of Michelangelo, where humans have an absurd amount of muscles everywhere. They probably knew that humans didn’t look like that, but those details where the trend of the time.

So TLDR, advancements in perspective and anatomy changed the way that paintings were drawn, as well as changing trends and fashion of the time.