I’ve always found it interesting how drawing and paintings from the ancient era through the medieval era look almost cartoonish. Then (seemingly) all of the sudden people discovered how to make realistic artwork during the renaissance era. Why is that the case?
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It’s not so much that no one knew how to do something more photorealistic. Rather, it just wasn’t in style in that place at that time. Yes, even back in the medieval times and beyond, society had trends and fashions just like it does today. Literally ye olde meme.
For most of human history, if you wanted to make a living as any kind of artist, you earned your bread by the graces of nobility. These were the people who could actually afford to commission your works. And if you were a smart artist, you would tend to make the kinds of things that they liked, the way they liked it. All those nobles were constantly trying to stay hip and trendy. And often, those trends were to be surrounded by stylized art that was decidedly *not* photorealistic. So, a lot of surviving art from those periods are not photorealistic, not because artists were bad and couldn’t do it, but because that’s simply what the art *buyers* expected to see.
Because if you want a realistic depiction of an animal, just go outside and look at one. Art was meant to be flashy. It wasn’t meant to be reality. It’s like asking “Why are Tarantino movies so unlike real life?”
Actually professional artists spent most of their time painting boring portraits of rich men and their wives and children. If you look at surviving Egyptian or Greek portraits, they were quite realistic. The stuff you see on temples depicting heroes, gods, and mythological events were stylized for a reason.
There were always somewhat “realistic” artwork throughout history, but as other commenters point out a lot of the ‘cartoonish’ art you see in history was just the predomenant style at the time.
[Here are some fairly realistic portraits painted in Egypt around 100-200 A.D.](https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/depicting-dead-ancient-egyptian-mummy-portraits)
And [here is an attempt at fairly realistic art in a fresco from Pompeii.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/House_of_Julia_Felix_still_life_eggs.jpg/800px-House_of_Julia_Felix_still_life_eggs.jpg?20110721202131) It’s not quite as realistic as reneissance masters, but neither were most artists from the reneissance period that we do not remember today.
The Renaissance is when artists started using [perspective](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical)). It hadn’t really been well developed until then.
Edit: switched to desktop URL.
I can confidently tell you that they absolutely understood the uncanny valley and had no way to overcome it.
They (after centuries of failure) decided that trying to draw realistically was a losing battle and their art naturally turned towards impressionism.
As this is an art discussion, I will assert that I am correct; as art is all about interpretation or something.
Humans have always enjoyed stylistic art. Don’t forget about the ancient Greeks, though, who were making beautiful, realistic sculptures (with some creative liberties taken) long, long before the middle ages. The Romans also liked this style of sculpture. Renaissance artists were not the first by a few thousand years.
To a large degree, people didn’t make art that looked realistic because that wasn’t what they felt was important. They wanted the art to tell a story or convey information about the subject, not to be an accurate illustration of what things looked like. The notion that art should be an accurate depiction of exactly how things looked was just not the goal of the artists, so they didn’t produce art like that.
My best guess is that at a certain point in time, certain inventors an scientists did some science and inventing on how to properly do realistic visual representations. Ya know, perspective, proportions and stuff like that.
Many of the works you’re talking about were not meant to convey realism so much as to convey something to people who couldn’t read.
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