Couldn’t they tell that objects farther away appear smaller?
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That’s a common misconception. People have known how to paint with perspective for thousands of years.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayum_mummy_portraits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayum_mummy_portraits)
The thing is that (1) not all art from the ancient world survives and (2) different art styles were appropriate for different media and different situations.
Additionally, art, like all trades at the time, was the work of a master and his apprentices. The master would teach what he knew to his apprentices, and they would go on to teach theirs. But sometimes this chain was broken, especially after conquests and cultural conversions. Styles would not only go in and out of fashion, but also be lost and rediscovered.
In addition to the very well put earlier comment, another reason that perspective does not show up very often in early paintings is money. (Simplistic, but it’s ELI5)
The people with the money were the ones paying for the paintings to be made, be it the church or a nobleman. Those people had a very specific message to get across and they wanted it done as efficiently as possible.
A painter can fit a lot more saints into a painting if they can just cram then in every which way. They can also fit in symbols like birds or whatever, much more easily. If they filled the canvas with unnecessary buildings, it takes away room that could be spent making a point. Same deal with perspective, if things get smaller, you can’t see them as well. (See ‘Madonna Enthroned’ c1280 by Cimabue as an example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cimabue_-_Maest%C3%A0_di_Santa_Trinita_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg )
There is an awesome example of a religious artists trying out perspective with the landscape/environment, but not really mailing it with the people, because the people were important and wanted to be seen more fully. It is (title and link will be added when I can remember the title!) I can’t find the painting in thinking of, but thus one does just as good a job, of not better. It’s by an anonymous painter. You can see how on the left, they *attempt* perspective, with people and buildings, but on the right, all perspective is thrown out the window, the building is straight on, etc. And that is because the most important people were on the right side, so the painter kept them big. (https://springsemester2015artz363.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/william-of-tyres-histoire-doutremer.jpg)
King Tut’s dad (Akhenaten) actually changed egyptian art a ton for his reign. He and his wife (Nefertiti) are depicted more realistically- they are chubby, they have unique, more realistic and unflattering facial features, etc. They are also not positioned in the way earlier ( and later) egyptians would be: showing the most recognizable part of the body (which is why the eye is facing forward, the have to the side, the torso forward, etc.) But Akhenaten did this because he created a new religion and God, and when he lost power, the religion and new, more realistic at movement died with it. (See ‘Akhenaten and his Family’ creative commons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Akhenaten%2C_Nefertiti_and_their_children.jpg )
When you look at the world, you don’t see what your eyes show you. Your brain interrupts the stream to show you icons instead. These icons save your brain processing power but they distort what your see.
Art is a luxury. The further you go back in time the more expensive it was to produce and the more difficult it was to source quality materials for it. The further back in time you go the more rare artists were and trained artists, building on their predecessors work were even more rare… and expensive.
The artists’ patrons were focused on other aspects of the image, like having their likeness preserved, telling a story, or imparting a message. They weren’t concerned with really real realism or perspective because they hadn’t seen it before. They didn’t know what they were missing or that such techniques are possible.
Over time artists developed better materials and techniques. They sought to one-up each other. And through that process, they learned to *see*. They developed methods to cut out the iconographic middle man and actually see what’s in front of them. With that they found that realism was possible and the objective measure for their art became reality.
For more about this check out Understanding Comics by Scott MacLeod and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. Edwards “scientific” explanations have been debunked but the exercises get results and you can see the iconographic phenomenon occur for yourself with them.
It begs a couple of questions. The idea that we should represent reality on a 2d object is not intuitive. Why do humans find it interesting to reproduce the things that we see. Similar to music. Why do we find the sound of vibrations in different tones interesting? It’s rather arbitrary.
There is nothing intuitive about this concept. So I think it’s more of a cultural fashion than something inherently useful or practical.
Similar to how ancient maps focused more on visual cues rather than accurate measurements as this wasn’t necessary or helpful.
Something that probably arose in the renaissance due to the ideas about science and understanding the world and nature.
Secondly but related is that human 2d representations often have different purposes than to mirror reality. After all why would we want to make a copy of something we’re looking at? Art even in contemporary art is more about creation of visually compelling images and meaningful concepts.
The short answer is that it’s not something recent. There is amazingly realistic art from many periods in history. There are two major components to why not all art is like that.
The first component is practical. Time and money. Learn how to produce realistic art and actually doing it is very time consuming and expensive. It’s pretty much a full-time vocation, which means patrons need to be willing to pay for an artist and his apprentice’s livelihood. Not every place and time in history allowed for such luxury.
The second component is a bit more complicated. Art is a form of communication and expression. And if you want to communicate, you need a language to communicate in. Artists create these languages for themselves.
For instance, realism is a great language if you want to depict an accurate picture of reality. A realistic art style studies things like perspective, texture, light, and shadow. But even here, things aren’t always what they seem. Renaissance art for instance idealizes perfection. It looks photorealistic to us but the artist often embellished reality to make the subject seem more perfect than they really were. Sometimes to the point where subjects are twisted and stretched in ways that are physically impossible despite looking realistic.
And many artists explored ‘languages’ of expression that didn’t require realism at all. Picasso was a superbly artist for instance capable of realism. But he pursued many artistic explorations. In Picasso’s bull, he explored what the essence of a bull is.
He starts out with a fairly realistic bull and then in a series of sketches tries to simplify it until he arrives at [a composition of just a few lines that still clearly communicates that the subject is a bull.](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/62/d4/9f/62d49f0a3cef55653565fe0d287acd9a.jpg)
Another example is Japanese ukiyo-e art. This art style often looks simplistic to people, simple colours and strokes with stylized figures and shapes. But ukiyo-e means something like ‘images of a floating world’.
The idea behind the art style is that life is full of moments of fleeting beauty that are here one moment and gone the next. A ray of sunshine that hits a cherry blossom just right for a brief moment. A pretty girl walking the market who flashes a smile for a second. A glance that is shared between two lovers.
Ukiyo-e art is meant to be painted as quickly as the moment itself. In some styles, the entire painting is done in a single flourishing brush stroke. No master painter who works on a realistic painting for months but an act of appreciating, as quick and fleeting as the moment it aims to capture.
Realism is just one paint style. There are many more because there are many different things people wish to communicate. And art styles are like languages, each conceived to explore and communicate a different kind of message.
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