This is a very, very ignorant question, but why is are from that era so basic? Like I'm pretty sure most people could paint less goofy looking faces than that.
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it's deliberate stylistic convention
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linear perspective wasn't (re)discovered/developed in Europe until the renaissance
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economic scarcity of pigments severely limited what could be painted
summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical)#History
linear perspective wasn’t (re)discovered/developed in Europe until the renaissance
what the fuck
it's not exactly unintuitive
when I say linear perspective was rediscovered I don't mean the very idea of it, which is obvious to anyone with eyes, but how to make it happen properly in art.
the idea of 3D linear perspective is obvious, but its actual execution on 2-dimensions requires dexterity, planning, and an abundance of materials we now take for granted. Early medieval Europe had an economic scarcity of artistic materials, and a lack of erasable media (think pencils) leading to an inability to erase and redo art at ease. The process of making parchment from animal hides was intensive prior to the mass manufacture of wood-based paper. There was also a lack of widespread artistic education on how precisely to achieve linear perspective using vanishing points, coupled with artistic conventions that deliberately prioritized other things over realism. Everyone understands that things get smaller the more distant they are, but they didn't draw things that way for cultural reasons. The earliest art paintings and drawings typically sized many objects and characters hierarchically according to their spiritual or thematic importance, not their distance from the viewer, and did not use foreshortening.
I say re-discovered because there was a primitive system of perspective in late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire art. See this fresco painting from the first century BCE
It's entirely plausible that there were classical art traditions that rivaled the later renaissance ones and these have simply been lost due to the fragility of the highest quality pigments the Romans had, is it not? There are a scant few pieces of amazing detailed and realistic art from that era still remaining (to the point that I only know of two) while the vast bulk of Roman paintings and murals that have survived are mass-produced basic shit or the faded remains of the sturdiest-but-hardest-to-do-detail-with pigments, and the fragmentary peak of what's remaining implies the existence of at least some more skilled artists whose works have simply been completely lost.
There are a scant few pieces of amazing detailed and realistic art from that era still remaining (to the point that I only know of two)
Excuse my ignorance, but which two are you referring to?
A painting that IIRC depicts Alexander in a battle, of which there's a heavily damage later (though still ancient) reproduction of the original that survived, and the other piece was one done on the inside of a shell IIRC.
Let's see if I can find these, because I only know of them from having read an historian explaining the subject of Roman painting and the difficulties with the different sorts of paints they'd use. Ok, the first one is this heavily damaged mosaic of Alexander which was a reproduction of an at-the-time-still-extant painting. Unfortunately I can't find the other piece I was thinking of, nor the original post that I had in mind. I did find this thread that links to pictures of a lot more high-quality mosaics, mostly realistic portraits on par with the much later Renaissance portraitures. That thread also points out that we know of other paintings that didn't survive to the modern era, either by classical references to them (which included discussion of how they were already decaying and fading at that point) or because some of them survived into the Renaissance but were since lost.
Very interesting, thank you!
I had been aware of that tiny bit of Alexander in that mosaic there but had never seen the full thing, very stunning. Interesting how the depiction looks a bit different than the Apollonian figure we typically see him portrayed as. The portraits in that thread genuinely look incredible, the Roman art I was familiar with was typically very flat and rigid and pretty boring, so seeing something as realistic and beautiful as something that would come out of Renaissance Florence is a bit of a shock.
I wish we brought mosaics back as an art-form, they're pretty popular in Orthodox churches where I'm at but I feel like they have a lot more potential than just a boring portrayal of Saint Whoeverthefuck in a basic static pose. The socialist era mosaics that we have left over are a million times more stunning and animated with like a million colors, they looks really cool.
Fuck man art is so awesome, I wish I had the time to just sit down and study it all day :NOOOOO:
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Nah getting to that point takes a fair amount of dedication and practice. Those faces are actually pretty good, I quite like them. People just massively underestimate how difficult drawing is
a deep dive on your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-7PkUAYPcc
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