An artist drew what looks like a highly detailed photograph with a pencil. It made me think, did artists of the past have the ability to draw something like that? The tools? It doesn’t look like he used anything more high tech than a pencil and a piece of paper, but maybe I’m taking paper/pencil tech for granted?
Looking at old paintings and drawings they tended to be very stylized, they lacked this sort of realistic detail, and many I just don’t buy as accurate likenesses of the subjects.
Examples:
These people don’t look like human beings - more like aliens trying to look like human beings.
But could artists of the Renaissance at least (if not earlier) not have painted something like this if they so desired? Was desire the limiting factor? Did they just prefer stylized imagery and not realism? Did any artist back then ever even try to make a painting look like what their eyes actually saw?
the answer is easily yes but often they didn’t want to. They may have wanted to say more than mere reproduction of appearance or to follow the then current fashion… for realistic portraits done in 1BC Fayum mummy portraits - WikipediaFayum mummy portraits
In some ways art is a science just like anything else. Techniques develop over time and are transmitted from master to student. Students learn from reference materials by copying what came before, and then innovating. Innovation happened slower in ages past as data was more difficult to transmit and reproduce, so artists had less exposure to other thoughts, ideas, and influences. Then you have to think about how long it took chemistry to make quality paints, brushes, tools, etc. Realistic perspective art didn’t really come around until 1413 AD.
Theoretically, yes, a person could have just whipped out a pencil (or charcoal, or whatever) and drawn a realistic human portrait in 400 AD. They could have also invented impressionism, abstraction, or any other discipline.
The problem is they would have been working in an intellectual vacuum and have spontaneously invented completely new art techniques with no training. Instead, they did what everyone always does and built on what styles and techniques preceded them. There WAS innovation in art, it just took a long time.
Because the idea that “realism” is a good thing is extremely recent. The purpose of a portrait was to create an emotional state as well as a likeness. Many of the elements were allegorical and, of course, the likeness was designed to appeal to the person paying for the portrait. If you painted you patron “warts and all,” he may decide not to pay you.
There’s also style. Realism is currently in style and photorealism (which, of course, could not have been conceived without the photograph) is admired. If you did that in the 18th century, it would just look weird to the patron.
Not to mention the fact that the photograph changed our perception of what “realistic” is. Several of your examples are realistic portrayals – they’re just not the hyperrealism that you’re used to today. You’re comparing them to a camera, but in a society where a camera did not exist, they were considered very accurate likenesses.
This is yet another example of presentism, where the poster can’t understand that people in the past thought differently and looked at things differently than the way we do now. No one in the time frame of the paintings would argue they weren’t realistic, but you’ve internalized current style and wonder why people back then don’t think like you do.
“Why didn’t [something] happen before it actually did happen?” is a fairly common theme in GQ.
Everything human endeavour has a beginning, and few of them spring into existence fully-formed. Really, sometimes, the answer is “because it just didn’t”.
I’ve seen plenty of portraits from several hundred years ago that were very lifelike, but as others have said, that wasn’t usually the goal.
I’m trying to remember some specific names so I can link to them. More recently the realist painters were pretty, well, realistic. Self-portrait by Gustave Courbet. Not as precise as the example in the OP, but I’d buy it as an accurate likeness. (His work entitled The Origin of the World is also fairly, um, lifelike, but don’t Google it at work!)
And, as others have said, it’s a lot easier when you can draw from a still photograph.
Keep in mind that photo-realistic isn’t actually realistic. In real life, you never see 2-D people frozen mid-motion. Adults who have never seen photographs need to to fully understand what they are seeing. Photo-realism is not an intuitive concept.
Explain a bit further. Are you saying photorealism specifically, or accurate likenesses in general? Because it doesn’t really make much sense to me. If you were able to warp back into the 1500s or so and show somebody a photorealistic painting, I can’t see how they wouldn’t understand what they’re seeing.
I have nothing to advance the OP any more than has already been done, but here are some links to a person who lives in a neighboring county who has done really well in photorealism. (I’m not shilling for the site that sells them, just showing some other examples.)
Someone from the 1500s? They could probably make sense of it because they have plenty of experience parsing 2-D images. But there are multiple accounts of anthropologists contacting remote people who did have trouble making sense of pictures.
Notice when we look at photo-realistic art, we say “Wow, it looks just like a photo!” and not “Wow, that looks just like real life!” To someone who had never seen a photo, photorealistic art probably looks fairly odd, with a weird perspective (we are so used to how lenses distort images that we don’t see it), and none of the symbolism that gives other art forms meaning. They wouldn’t be used to how camera lenses manage focus and perspective.
Can I see what these studies say exactly? They may not understand what a picture is, but I have difficulty believing they wouldn’t recognize the items or people in the picture, if that is what you’re saying. I mean, there’s research that dogs can recognize other dogs in pictures, so I am curious as to the exact wording of these studies or reports. (Admittedly, there is training involved in the case of dogs, so maybe not the best example.)
Consider how long it took for artists to figure out how perspective works - not until the 15th century (or possibly 14th). Clearly it’s not an innate skill to be able to relate the 3D world to a flat image.
It appears that people generally do figure it out, but it takes a little bit of thought for them to make sense of what they are seeing. A straight picture of a cow in a field is relatively easy to parse, but a complex photo with perspective and multiple subject is tougher.
Going on memory from an art history class, near realistic paintings were first done in the Renaissance and needed some major innovations to be possible:
Perspective. This was not a minor achievement. No one really understood how to make buildings or objects look real and at the proper distance. This applies to landscapes, groups, and cityscapes more than portraits, but it is evident in portraits as well.
Study of anatomy. The fabled Renaissance men such as da Vinci study how humans were put together in large part to be able to better paint them.
Lighting and shading. This also increases realism and although it was used earlier than the others its use was much more advanced during this period.
One of the best examples my art professor gave was a full size portrait of Christ being lowered from the cross. It was done in a way that made it appear that the body was about to fall out of the painting. It was quite shocking at the time and first time viewers would run up and try and catch the body. By today’s standards, it is not even close to photo realistic, but it was leaps beyond what the average Italian of the time was used to seeing.
On the subject of tools/technology, is there any general agreement (or disagreement) in the world of art scholarship with the theory David Hockney put out about 10 years ago stating that some Renaissance artists made use of aids aids like camera obscuras to achieve their highly realistic results?
Yeah, I’m just talking regular ol’ photos taken with a normal lens (“normal” being used in the technical sense: 50-55mm on a 35mm film camera or 80mm on a 6x6, etc.) I mean, surely these primitive cultures have seen reflections before, so they do have some concept of 3-dimensional space being mapped onto a 2-dimensional plane, no?
