I was just thinking about how pop culture reinforces this sort of temporal chauvinism that's just like "wow people sure didn't know how to do good stuff back then" that completely erases context like the materials they were working with, the materials and styles that were durable enough to survive the intervening centuries or millennia, or who was making a piece and why.
Like even the really weird, hyper-stylized styles aren't too weird or crude when compared with something like cartoon styles over the past 100+ years: even with modern tools and modern methods we still make janky weird little pictures that serve a different purpose and convey different things. Even things like perspective and scale get played with for effect despite the "advances" of perspective and the idea that scale should be consistent. Like I'm thinking about how much of what we associate with medieval European art was just shit like bored monks doodling cartoons in the margins of books, creating works that look like cartoons and use similar visual cues as cartoons to convey information.
This is something that gets hammered on in Archeology and Anthropology - People have always been extremely skilled and inventive within the limits of the tools they have available. There's no such thing as "primitive" people or primitive tools. People making stone tools selected the best materials and often transported obsidian and other desirable materials hundreds of miles. Impressive mining operations were conducted to exploit veins of flint and chert. Skilled workers could produce many different kinds of tools and blades. A skilled flint-knapper can visualize and then produce a desired shape rapidly using a very nuanced understanding of how the stone flakes and chips. A single cobble could be shaped to produce numerous different tools, or the worker could focus on making one specific, highly refined tool. And the result was the sharpest blades that it is physically possible to make without bonkers 21st century material sciences.
In all these survival video games you see stone tools that are just a rock tied to a stick, but irl stone tools were made with great care and precision.
This is true. Renaissance perspective painting builds upon mathematical work from the muslim world brought to Europe during the crusades. Doing perspective on the human face is a lot simpler and more intuitive than drawing, for instance, the interior of a building.
Man growing up I was always told "nobody really figured out perspective until the Renaissance"
I was just thinking about how pop culture reinforces this sort of temporal chauvinism that's just like "wow people sure didn't know how to do good stuff back then" that completely erases context like the materials they were working with, the materials and styles that were durable enough to survive the intervening centuries or millennia, or who was making a piece and why.
Like even the really weird, hyper-stylized styles aren't too weird or crude when compared with something like cartoon styles over the past 100+ years: even with modern tools and modern methods we still make janky weird little pictures that serve a different purpose and convey different things. Even things like perspective and scale get played with for effect despite the "advances" of perspective and the idea that scale should be consistent. Like I'm thinking about how much of what we associate with medieval European art was just shit like bored monks doodling cartoons in the margins of books, creating works that look like cartoons and use similar visual cues as cartoons to convey information.
Yeah, it’d be like future archaeologists calling all our art crude based on the figures on “Walk” signs and CPR guides.
We will be harshly judged for corporate memphis.
Imagine getting the vibes of this era's art from funko pops and bathroom stall graffiti.
Dudes were drawing dicks on walls in Pompeii
Exactly.
This is something that gets hammered on in Archeology and Anthropology - People have always been extremely skilled and inventive within the limits of the tools they have available. There's no such thing as "primitive" people or primitive tools. People making stone tools selected the best materials and often transported obsidian and other desirable materials hundreds of miles. Impressive mining operations were conducted to exploit veins of flint and chert. Skilled workers could produce many different kinds of tools and blades. A skilled flint-knapper can visualize and then produce a desired shape rapidly using a very nuanced understanding of how the stone flakes and chips. A single cobble could be shaped to produce numerous different tools, or the worker could focus on making one specific, highly refined tool. And the result was the sharpest blades that it is physically possible to make without bonkers 21st century material sciences.
In all these survival video games you see stone tools that are just a rock tied to a stick, but irl stone tools were made with great care and precision.
This is true. Renaissance perspective painting builds upon mathematical work from the muslim world brought to Europe during the crusades. Doing perspective on the human face is a lot simpler and more intuitive than drawing, for instance, the interior of a building.
There's cave art that does what the cubists and futurists were doing in the 1910s at the forefront of the avant-garde.
Link?
https://www.ancientartarchive.org/modern-ancient-art/
Neat
Yeah Euro art historians have a lot of weird opinions.