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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Brett devereaux has some discussion on this on art and institutions coming out of the fall of Rome going into the Middle Ages: a lot had to do with the change from hyper realistic art of early empire to what was becoming more stylized art in the late republic to what become hyper dtylized art in the Middle Ages. Brett comments most college history students skip the art section around the fall of Rome until the carolingian period. https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/
There are quite realistic paintings on cave walls–definitely moreso than silly medieval illustrated manuscript art (which was done by bored scribes). The cave paintings aren’t as realistic as today in part because of art technology.
They weren’t painting with a wide variety of tools and paint consistencies. The most versatile media they’d have had access to would be something like chalk or ash, which doesn’t last very long.
Ancient *sculpture* is often photorealistic, so there’s no reason to believe they couldn’t produce 2D work equally realistic.
I’m gonna bring up a point I haven’t read yet and that is the difference in human consciousness.
In early human development every action and effect were the consequence of a great force or other God like being.
As we became more dense in the material world as beings, we started to see the world around us in a different way. Especially with the development of science, we started to give more weight and reality to the material world. Seeing the same things with a different eye and mind.
They didn’t have a form of “realism” because they experienced reality very differently.
That’s my two cents anyway.
When modern day artists make photo-realistic paintings, they are copying photos. An ancient painter would have a subject sit for hours. During that time, they would move, the light would change, sweat would bead, drip, get wiped away etc. a modern artist can zoom in on the photo and copy every little glint of light exactly as it was in the photo.
Greek and Roman painting was relatively “ultra realistic” it was just done on materials that didn’t survive.
There are a few exceptions: tomb murals from Etruria and Macedonia, murals from Pompeii, and the Fayum portraits.
There were paintings from individual artists that we know existed for centuries, because they were constantly referenced, and were very famous across the Greco-Roman period, but virtually all of them were lost during the seismic cultural and political changes of Late Antiquity. The famous Alexander the Great mosaic is a copy of an ancient painting for example – the original long gone. Less realistic stylistic changes, especially in the late Roman Empire, were also intentional, just like they are today.
Realism lends itself well to accurate depictions, which can be achieved easily with photography since its widespread adoption. Because painting isn’t bounded by needing to depict the world like photography is, it offers more freedom for expression from the artist. With an open canvas where anything is possible, the opportunity opens up to paint what’s inside us.
Ancient Greeks were know to strive for realism and it was believed they had realistic paintings that mirrored their highly detailed marble sculptures. We can see in their surviving red figure pottery that potter’s were striving for realism in a difficult medium. There’s also 1st hand written accounts staying how hard it was to tell the difference between the painting and real life.
So we know there were ancient cultures that pushed towards realism. But as many have said not every culture put weight on realism. Style tended to be the first focus.
Put simply you don’t know what you don’t know. Back then they didn’t even know how well they could create. Now there’s a measure of everything since. More technique and style, plus everyone’s seen everyone else’s work.
Because the purpose of art is not necessarily to be ultra-realistic. There’s actually a wide mix of art styles present in ancient art, and the style depends largely on where you are looking, even when they were areas with a wide amount of trade.
When people are openly mixing and there’s still this kind of distinct style, it implies that it’s not simply down to individual talent, but down to some manner of cultural choice.
For the opposite, you can see that Greek statues very early on made a huge leap from the earliest Micenean Greek statues (extremely stylized, very static poses) to trying to emulate Egyptian Ka statues (more realistic, and implying movement) once those gained favor in Greece. Unfortunately we have to look at the statues because that’s often a lot of what survives.
It’s often claimed that something like the Renaissance is an improvement on the past because they invented things like 3-point perspective. This isn’t true, and we actually have Roman villa paintings depicting 3-point perspective, as well as some of the hallmarks of the early Renaissance style. But it should be noted that not even all the Renaissance painters were trying to perfectly represent reality in their paintings either.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/247017
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/247009
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Pompeii_-_Casa_dei_Vettii_-_Ixion.jpg
Art isn’t strictly about capturing reality, and the existence of the term “warts and all” is a reference to this, with Cromwell demanding that he be depicted perfectly and not embellished.
Zeuxis and Parrhasius…… And the realistic painting competition……. One of the most famous stories about Zeuxis centers on an artistic competition with the artist Parrhasius to prove which artist could create a greater illusion of nature. Zeuxis, Timanthes and Parrhasius were painters who belonged to the Ionian School of painting. The Ionian School flourished during the 4th-century BC.
Pliny the Elder described Parrhasius’s contest with Zeuxis in his book Naturalis Historia: The latter painted some grapes so perfectly that a flock of birds flew down to eat them but, instead, only pecked at their picture. Zeuxis had fooled the birds with his picture. Parrhasius and Zeuxis walked to Parrhasius’s studio whereupon Parrhasius asked Zeuxis to draw aside the curtain and witness his own masterpiece. When Zeuxis attempted to do so, he realized that the curtain was not a curtain, but a painting of a curtain.
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