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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Because art, like any other skill is build upon the skills and knowledge of the previous generations.
It’s way easier to learn a skill if you don’t have to invent it first
The people making incredible art with charcoal on tiktok weren’t born that way. They spent a long time practicing art learning from and most often being taught by people that are also very good at art.
Modern artists have excellent reference material. Your subject doesn’t need to pose for hours, you can zoom in 200% on something to get to that exact detail. You can project your subject onto your canvas, and trace/paint away.
Check out a documentary on Johannes Vermeer called Tims Vermeer [(LINK)](https://youtu.be/94pCNUu6qFY?si=psIObLShOLrTIJsK). This is probably what you’re looking for, an artist making near photo realistic paintings in the 1600’s.
Two reasons :
1) Artistic technique progresses like everything else.
2) Different cultures want different things with their art – for many artists, realism is not a particularly relevant goal (that applies to medieval icon painters just as well as today’s anime artists !)
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.
It may have to do with references. You couldn’t just stare at a picture in a screen for hours back then for you to copy 1:1. And in case you ask about landscapes, remember the light is always changing, the wind is moving things around constantly… things like that.
It also may have to do with the material at our disposal. Nowadays you can just buy colors at the store, perfectly functional and sharp pencils and for cheap… back then, it was basically all DIY.
It could simply be… because we have more time nowadays to do what we want. Back then, you were the apprentice under a master (if you were lucky enough), as knowledge was something only the rich could readily access (so very little people that were rich enough + interested in arts).
Partly it’s a question of preservation.
Many great painting works are mentioned in ancient writing, including a famous artistic competition between Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Zeuxis unveiled a painting of grapes so realistic that when unveiled birds flew up to it. When he confidently demanded the curtain to be lifted to reveal Parrhasius’ work, he was shocked to discover the curtains *were* the painting and had to concede the prize.
All these great works have been destroyed and lost to time, while being big lumps of stone sculptures are much more likely to survive (although the paint hasn’t, all those ancient sculptures weren’t plain white but were painted to be realistic, with the paint flaking off over the centuries).
They weren’t bad they just didn’t aim to be realistic from the start. There are several factors at play here, the first one being that the available tools and materials back then were far more limited. Brushes were not the fine tuned instruments you can easily get today, a good brush was a luxury item made by a skilled craftsman, and most artists used whatever brush they could find which was not always good. Things like pencils didn’t even exist. The mediums on which they painted on themselves were not ideal, often being stone (different kinds too) or wood, with paints that were all hard to source and made very differently and didn’t always play nice with each other or the material they were used on. Being able to layer different paints on each other back then was a feat in itself. A lot of ancient artwork has lost most of its pigments over time, but not all, pointing to how the different paints had different compositions and properties. Many of them did not survive the test of time and this is important because it tells us that a lot of art is forever lost, such as art on wood/canvas that may have existed which could have been different to the murals and pottery we’re used to seeing.
However the most important aspect is that most of the art styles found throughout history were generally deliberate, with clear guidelines as to how it should be and how it shouldn’t be, be it for religious or cultural/aesthetic reasons, they were making them in a particular way. Artists were few and far between and generally trained each other with somewhat centralised aesthetic and artistic guidelines that few ever veered away from. The majority of their works was made on demand and especially for religious uses certain styles were preferred and maintained. Once again we should mention that there’s a lot of art that probably has not survived but it’s clear even from what we do have that the aesthetic choices were very much outlined in some way seeing as how statues and murals with the same structure and cues can be found spread across vast distances, such as in ancient Egypt or Greece, with statues and murals all sharing some core aspects despite being made by multiple different artists. Even then while murals and pottery art may look rudimentary contemporary realistic sculptures show that they were not at all unaware, or incapable, of rendering realistic forms, they simply chose not to in some mediums.
Lastly while it’s a bit difficult to look up this subject matter, since Google seems to confuse any searches with the 19th century realism movement and doesn’t provide relevant information to what we’re after here, you can find a lot of artwork from Roman and early Christian times, 1st-3rd century AD, that is fairly realistic even by today’s standards. Some notable examples include the Egyptian Fayum portraits (which look very simillar to later Byzantine art), or the very well preserve Pompeii murals. It’s hard to know just how far back these types of art styles go, since tempera paint and canvas/wood don’t usually hold up well in time, but it’s a fair guess to assume that the art style went further back since what we have looks fairly refined so they weren’t just exceptions from individual artists. After that period it wouldn’t be until the rennaisance again when we would see realistic styles emerge in art since, at least in Europe and the Middle East, art was dominated by almost exclusively religious art, which again had strictly established and defined aesthetic guidelines which prioritised modesty as making very impressive or flamboyant paintings was seen as vain and not pious.
Because learning how to draw people realistically was only done in late medieval era. It’s not “natural talent” it’s the centuries of accumulated knowledge about correct proportions, 3d projection, light and shadow effects.
Part of it is because that wasn’t “the style at the time”. Someone hundreds of years ago could have painted something hyper-realistic, but those that could, who were making money off of their work, were painting things in a specific style for someone who requested that and was paying for that.
That and finding a willing model to sit still for long enough to make a hyper-realistic painting was tough.
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