Over in the why-does-Jesus-have-long-hair thread, XT linked to this image. It actually dates from the 6th century CE and I was surprised how realistically the face was painted. When I think of painting of that time, I picture something more like this.
Now obviously the painting of Jesus has some distortions (eyes a little big; nose a little long?), but it does look like the artist was trying to depict an authentic face. It also looks like there was an attempt to make the background smaller. (I know that sounds obvious, but the standard line is that perspective wasn’t figured out until much later, in the Renaissance.)
Can anyone point me to something that goes over the history of realistic painting and/or other examples of realism when it might not be expected? I tried to google, but consistently got cites for the Realist movement in the 19th centure.
Here’s a page which goes into the history of the use of perspective in art, including some ancient art from Greece and Rome. There there are frescoes from Pompeii that show some cool tricks such as creating the illusion of a window into a three-dimensional outdoor scene (the fancy art term for that is trompe l’oeil).
Well… I dunno. Considering that Roman sculpture from the classical period is absolutelyfreakingmind-blowing, I’ve always thought that their paintings look rather sucky by comparison. Although I suppose that there might have been some really awesome Roman frescoes that are now gone.
An important point to remember here is that different cultures have different standards of what constitutes “realistic”. We consider a picture where nearby people look larger than distant people to be realistic, because that’s what our eye shows. But another culture might consider a picture where all the people are the same size to be even more realistic, because they really are all the same size, despite the deception of our eyes. And another culture might consider, say, a depiction of baby Jesus as larger than Mary or Joseph to be realistic, since he’s really so much more important than them, despite their physical forms.
Thank you for the examples, everyone. And if anyone else knows of other examples, I’d love to more.
Chronos, yes, I meant “realistic” as we would see it. It’s just fascinating, though, how some of these examples like the Jesus XT linked to, or the Pompeii trompe-l’oeil examples, are just so out different from most art at the time. They’re the artistic equivalent of the Antikythera Mechanism.
I like the Eyewitness Art series which we got for our kids (but now out of print). They have Eyewitness DK: Perspective which covers the topic quite well. It really helped us when we saw many of the same pictures in person at the National Gallery in London; I wish we would have had the book with us during the visit. The Amazon preview shows some of the first pages.
