I don’t mean photorealism, but most art throughout civilizations has been highly stylized – each period and culture can pretty much be told apart by the art style, whereas today there’s infinite variation between individual artists. Shouldn’t realism be the first thing people try since it’s all around us? How did seemingly all art in history from different periods and cultures become so homogenic and specific to their eras?
In: Culture
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1. Paint is stupidly expensive. Only in modern times have people been able to access industrially-produced paints at a cheep price, and even more recently, digital art tools. Before then, practicing was difficult at best.
2. A lot of times, the studies of light, optics, anatomy, and such were also unavailable. Most photo-realistic paintings of people come from artists who have a very extensive understanding of the positioning of muscles, bones, fat, skin, etc. and how it all influences the shape of the body. Ancient painters rarely had access to that sort of information and could only copy surface-level details.
* The more exotic something is, the less likely the painter is to have an actual reference to work with. That’s why you often get such distorted animals.
3. Certain styles were popular. If your patron doesn’t care about photo-realism, then why go to that extreme?
4. Humans love symbols. As long as the meaning of a piece of art is conveyed, it is a good symbol. It doesn’t matter if it’s realistic.
Great question! I am only an amateur art historian, so corroborate my statements here.
1. Plenty of older artistic traditions did focus on realistic human figures — ancient Greek sculpture, Italian Renaissance painting, the Dutch masters, etc. Other traditions strove for realistic depictions of landscapes or buildings, like during the Chinese Song Dynasty.
2. Art isn’t as homogenous within cultures as it might seem at first. Within every tradition, you’ve got artists challenging and complicating it. However, it’s important to be aware that in most cultures throughout history, being a professional artist required some sort of official sanction. You’d either need to be part of a religious order, or sponsored by a rich patron, or you’d be the court painter or sculptor for a monarch; you’d be much less likely to just create and sell your art on the open market. This means that much of the art that reaches us from the past is, in some way, “approved.”
3. Most cultures determined the value of a piece of art by standards other than realism. For example, folk art created by the lower classes might be used for religious purposes, in which case its stylization was a way to grant it ritual power. This is one proposed reason for the earliest cave paintings — people would hit the painted animals with spears and arrows in order to make their hunt for real animals more successful.
4. The easiest way to learn to draw, paint, or sculpt isn’t to look at examples of the thing you’re trying to depict; it’s to look at the ways other people have depicted that thing. Without access to Google, you’re mostly going to reference other works that already exist within your local traditions.
It’s much easier to create a realistic image of a human by understanding how it works. This is why so many artists have a focus on learning anatomy: when you know where the muscles are and how the skin stretches over them, you can do something much more realistic than if you were guessing by just looking at a leg as you normally would: covered completely in skin with no idea what’s going on inside.
The Greeks weren’t above cutting up bodies, so there was a greater understanding of what connects to what and how it moves. Specifically within European art in the ‘dark ages’, religion and religious belief made many people believe that we cannot do anything to the body once it’s dead. Obviously you had some black market dealings, but nothing too mainstream. People had to guess. But during the Renaissance there was not only more study of the Greek classics, but more and more people were getting in on human biology and seeing how everything stretched and shifted.
As we understood the human body more, we got better at drawing it!
Each historic period used art as a means of communication above all else.
Images communicate thoughts, ideas, rules that broke through all barriers of cultures, languages and religion. Illuminated manuscripts, sculptures, paintings served to communicate a religious doctrine because most people couldn’t read.
Rich powerful people, patrons and churches needed a means to express their power, and communicate to less powerful people to explain why if they didn’t believe the ‘right’ ideas, they would burn in hell
Leaders were painted as idealized. Perfect forms, faces, bodies so they could be represented as worship-able. Religion is power, power controls people, controlled people create a society.
It’s a type of evolution.
It’s like how did people create indoor electricity?. Lots of little steps backed by need, prior knowledge and power. Artist could always take a piece of charcoal and draw realistically. But there wasn’t a need for this, people didn’t do art for arts sake, for leisure or personal growth. Art was purpose driven historically. Art was a way to communicate an idea or instruction.
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