And yet the idea of realistically rendering a large 3-D creature as a smaller 2-D image is really quite ancient and found in a great many cultures.
I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of this painting by Masaccio, a student (I think he was, anyway?) of Brunelleschi. Supposedly, the perspective and depth made it look absolutely real to Masaccio’s contemporaries.
That’s the one, right…?
This one from 1661 looks pretty close to photorealism to me.
When was the last time you saw Jurassic Park?
I remember when it came out. Those dinosaurs looked real. Not close to real - REAL. The weight, the shadows, the movement, they just looked as real as real could be.
Now, of course, they look kind of cheesy. Stiff and fake, and like something you’d see on an amusement park ride made of plaster and pleather.
Amazing. And that’s just 20 years of changes in art.
Most shrug at Hockney’s study. In some cases it’s highly unlikely (“Renaissance” artists like van Eyck), in some cases it’s more possible/ likely (Vermeer-- 1660s, not Renaissance) and in some cases ‘yeah, duh’ (like Canaletto, whose camera obscura with his name on is sitting in the British Museum or somewhere); the reasonable parts of his argument had been done earlier and done better, and the not so good parts are not so good. And how artists used those technical instruments is a real question-- when they write about it, they say “wow, that’s neat-- you should look at how this thingie projects images of those thingies. Pretty damn hard to trace from, though-- good thing I know how to draw!”
We’ve been trained to understand a photo as what ‘real’ looks like, disregarding things like, oh, grey-scale, and monocular flatness, etc. And, IMO, drawing from a photo is much much easier than drawing from life (and even having seen photos a lot makes it easier) as the machine mechanically translates that three dimensional volume to two dimensions, which is most of the mental/perceptual work.
Might be something like Caravaggio’s Deposition, which plays a bit with the fourth wall.
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These people don’t look like human beings - more like aliens trying to look like human beings.
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Actually in this painting there is a mirror in the background. In the tiny mirror the entire scene is painted in reverse. So I think the skill level may have been there, but the motivation wasn’t. Who knows tho
There are plenty of examples of extremely realistic sculptures… Tutankhamun’s Death Mask, Roman emperor busts…
But take it to a canvas, and realism goes out the door.
Official gubernatorial portrait of Jerry Brown, circa 1983.
I don’t see the connection. Reflections don’t map 3-D space into a 2-D plane. An image in a flat mirror is exactly as 3-dimensional as the original object it’s an image of. If you’re three feet in front of your bathroom mirror, your reflection is three feet behind it.
See the sculptures of Prince Rahotep and Princess Nofret.
There were plenty of artists who could, and did, paint very realistically. Guys like Caravaggio(1571-1610) and Rembrandt1606-1669 spring to mind. You have to bear in mind that until the early Renaissance, realism was not highly valued in art at all. Medieval artists would learn mostly from copying earlier works, not from drawing live models. Once perspective was developed, some of the earlier conventions about the human form were still maintained.
Also, in my experience, drawing from life is immensely more difficult than drawing from a photograph. Even when a model is trying to sit absolutely still, they will still have subtle movements. This will be magnified if you are doing multiple sittings across several days or weeks, trying to complete a painting. In the days before electric lighting, it would be pretty much impossible to have consistent natural light or candle light for the entire time, so you would have to guess and fake stuff. There is a theory that even the Dutch Masters in the 1600s would use a camera obscura in order to do their more realistic cityscape paintings.
I did consider that, but wasn’t sure as to how to make an addendum. What I mean is, if you see a reflection, you have experience seeing the “real world” projected onto a flat surface, so I would think that if you saw a photorealistic drawing of the “real world,” you would know immediately what is being represented. Now, I might be wrong, but the whole thing sounds to me of condescending nonsense–that primitive people would not recognize or understand what a photograph represents.
I’m an artist, and in my opinion that portrait gives me a lot more information than most realistic portraits I’ve seen. And if I really wanted to, I could re-learn how to render a photo-like painting (it’s been a while). . . but why should I? When I look back at the centuries between the Renaissance and the beginning of Impressionism, what I see are some amazing techniques, but mostly rather boring content. It wasn’t until the Impressionists broke away from these techniques that some really interesting paintings were made, conveying some emotional content that was impossible before. And it’s no coincidence that Impressionism took off at the same time as photography. People back then were beginning to think, “If you want something that looks like a photo, take a picture.” And as photography evolved, they were saying it more and more . . . and their paintings became more and more abstract.
As for myself, I’m a pretty good photographer, and I’m currently working on ways of combining photography and painting. It’s starting to get interesting.
In his book Don’t Sleep: There Are Snakes, Daniel Everett recounts his time spent living with and studying the Piraha people of the Amazon Basin. I seem to remember from the book that he was eventually able to make them understand what a picture was, and they were eventually able to realize what was being represented, but that at first glance it was essentially meaningless to them. It wasn’t that they were cognitively unable to grasp the concept, but rather with no previous frame of reference the little square piece of paper with different colors on it just looked like a square with different colors on it, not like an image of a tree or jaguar or whatever. It took them time to learn how to perceive the patterns of color as a real object, not basically just an inkblot.
It seems likely that almost all humans could do this quickly, once exposed to some 2-D images. After all, dogs can do so rather readily.
I think part of the difference is that photos are excessively, mechanically realistic. For example, we get unwanted shading and lighting variations, inappropriate poses when captured in mid-motion, etc. A photographic portrait (normally) goes to great lengths to moderate lighting extremes, and remove unflattering highlights, bad contrast, or mis-poses. A painting will have smoothly lit skin except where the painter wanted highlights or shadows to be. The classic photos are either deliberately or accidentally also excellent compostions meeting the same criteria as good paintings.
If you asked a renaissance painter to do a photorealistic painting and showed him, I suspect he’d ask “Why would-a I want to ruin my picture like-a that?”
In fact, I recall an article by a dentist/ dental surgeon, where he analyzed the Dutch Masters’ paintings and and said specific medical tooth problems from all that Indies sugar was evident from how accurately the jaws were painted.
In an episode of James Burkes’ great series The Day the Universe Changed he covers the time in European history when what we today call one-point-perspective was discovered. After the artist painted a reasonably realistic portrait of a building, he put a small hole in the center of the canvas and had people look thru the back of the painting at the actual building, then he moved a mirror in front of the hole to reflect the painted image back thru the hole, and people were amazed at this demonstration of realistic perspective! Here’s the scene on YouTube (the entire series is really great!)
Before that, even though to us the idea of visual perspective (that things further away are smaller) seems obvious, before this a person’s or object’s size in a painting was determined by its importance. Most European paintings were religiously themed so God was always the biggest, angels smaller than him, then humans, animals etc.
Here’s a sampling of Roman busts–from the Republic to the Late Empire. The ability to create a “realistic” image was there from the first. But the artist (& the patron) might be more interested in conveying a message. And the patron was always right–especially when he was an Emperor!
Lots & lots of relevant text…