Well, rats! Apparently I didn’t delete my post after all. I’ll leave them both in the hope that between them I’ve made myself a bit clearer.
Well, maybe not.
I think there are two things at work here - one is that all the examples being held up as “stylized” (Chinese, Maya) are probably phenotypes where you aren’t socially trained to pick up the visual differences - an “All Chinese look the same” kind of thing, hence your insistence that that first personal portrait of the Emperor is stylized when it isn’t.
The second thing is hidden in plain site in your OP -it might be that for some cultures, if you wanted a realistic portrait, that’s what stone/clay/wood were for, because people are obviously 3-D. So you do your realism in sculpture, and don’t bother in 2D - this is a variant of the “Why make a photorealistic painting when photos are more accurate?” stance - “Why do a flat portrait when sculptures are more accurate?”
The Chinese and Japanese have a style that can be “realistic”, but it’s not particularly “depictive”. If you see a picture of one person, he’ll look like a person. But once you see twenty guys all standing right next to one another, you realize that the artist has drawn them all with the exact same face, and often all at the same angle.
That first one seems fairly depictive. The latter two look like they could have been anyone at all.
The second one is Khubilai Khan. The third one is Confucius. I think any reasonably-informed Chinese person would recognize them.
I’ll offer a few hypotheses (possibly already mentioned - I gave up reading about halfway down, with all the bickering). I suspect that the answer is a blend of reasons, like these:
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People naturally seem to represent the world in a simplified, symbolic form. When you ask someone to draw an eye, they draw a football shape with a circle in the middle. It’s a rough approximation of the real thing, but identifiable as an eye. Getting over this symbolic representation takes some effort and training. Whereas, there doesn’t seem to be any such tendency with sculpture, maybe because we can touch and contrast? Certainly, the first blind sculptor is going to kick the ass of any sighted sculptor, because he’s simply comparing touch to touch, and there’s no way he can do anything but that. So, pretty quickly, his sculpture is going to be your point of comparison.
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Historically, sculpture was seen as the real art form - possibly because of the clear difference in quality, as driven by hypothesis #1. Paintings and drawings were more like decoration. A statue might be hand-crafted just for you. Your average drawing might be “factory-produced” by slaves, on pots, that they’re cranking out for the local market. Depictions of events on temple and funerary walls were there to tell a story, not act like a photo, so there wasn’t much need in realism. A person who showed talent in the arts would be pointed towards sculpting. Anyone else got stuck with painting.
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The materials available in historic times may not have made it very workable to strive for photorealism. If you want to practice sketching, how do you do that? How many smooth, flat surfaces are there to practice on? What do you practice drawing with? Even if you have a nice flat, stone surface, you might take some chalk or coal to it, but these crumbly mediums are best for solid lines, not smooth shading. Try doing photorealism on a whiteboard with dry erase markers. The medium fights your attempts. If you want to paint, how available are the paints for you to practice? If the paint is owned by your employer, and you’re just a child, you can’t take some buckets home to practice with on the walls in your area of town.
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I suspect that a lot of apprenticeship training, in the days of yore, was quite prescriptive. “Here is how you draw a horse”, and then they would draw the correct, officially approved strokes for drawing a horse. If you drew something that was not those exact lines, then you were wrong. It doesn’t matter that you’re trying to inch the art towards realism, you’re the apprentice, he’s the master, and that’s not how horses are drawn. But so who decided these official methods of drawing things? The people before you, who had no good way to practice to overcome their innate inclination to draw things in a symbolized manner. There may have been one guy, centuries or millenia earlier, who simply had the most aesthetically pleasing stylized way of drawing things, the pharaoh - a living god here on Earth - chose him as the official 2D artist of the land, his art adorns all of the most important and holy buildings in the land, and if your art can’t rise to the level of the ancient great master, then it’s simply crap.
OP, I think you’re referring more to “symbolic” instead of “stylized”.
zoogirl, any comment on my response? Which is basically: looking at it from their perspective, they used visual arts differently than we would think to. As a result the % of visual art that was representational was very small - but they could do it. It didn’t become more important until the Humanist revolution, and science created practical *and *business value for the accuracy of the representation.
Cool?
Which then begs the followup question: Why is there any reason to have the actual person sit for the portrait?
My point is that “accurate” depends on the intent. What one human eye sees is not necessarily the most accurate representation of what the object is. The purpose of a drawing isn’t always to represent a geometrically accurate picture of the world. The purpose of a drawing is to represent certain qualities of the scene or subject.
I don’t think your description of a “regular child’s” drawing sounds like an actual regular child’s drawing, unless you’re talking about an older child. My idea of a standard kid’s drawing of Mommy would be basically a stick figure with a smiley face and a squiggle of hair. This would be typical of the “schematic stage” of children’s artistic development. What you’re describing sounds like a “transitional stage” or “realism stage” drawing. Some children never reach this level, and for those that do it typically would not be until they were upper elementary or middle school age.
I think you’re also making a lot of questionable assumptions about ancient artwork. I’m certainly not an art history expert and know little about Haida art, but I don’t think it’s safe to assume that any depiction of a human figure is supposed to be a recognizable individual. Maybe it was meant to represent the common person, some legendary or mythical figure whose true likeness was unknown, or an idealized depiction of a ruler. Most ancient art that’s come down to us was either religious or political in nature; we don’t have much in the way of family portraits of regular people.
There’s also a pretty big difference between depicting someone in just enough detail that a member of their immediate family could figure out who in the family it was supposed to be and depicting a truly recognizable individual who couldn’t easily be mistaken for any other blonde woman in glasses. If all you’re looking for is art that provides some clue as to the identity of the subject then there’s tons of ancient art that fits the bill. Famous mythical figures or historic rulers can often be identified, even if the face is generic or has been obliterated, because they’re depicted with a characteristic costume (e.g. Heracles with his lionskin, Nefertiti’s distinctive headdress) or other symbol. When it comes to depictions of historic rulers then it’s also important to keep in mind that many of these were made both by and for people who’d never actually laid eyes on King Whoever. The ruler might sit for a few official portraits, with other portraits being based on those or copies of those.
Beyond that, you seem to be failing to distinguish between artwork that is stylized because the artist never progressed beyond the little kid stick figure stage and artwork that is stylized because the artist wishes to work in a particular style. Note that the link above on children’s art places “intentionally stylized” art in the most advanced “realism stage” of children’s artistic development. The Ancient Egyptians had pretty rigid stylistic rules and valued art that followed these rules. Their artists presumably could have worked in a different style if they’d wanted to – and in fact during the brief Amarna period the rules did change – but would have had little reason to do so. If there were artists doing “avant-garde” work then it’s far less likely this would have been preserved than something traditional that was considered suitable for a king’s tomb.
Speaking of preservation…
It’s extremely unlikely that a charcoal drawing on a piece of bark would be preserved for a millennium. We have lots of decorated vases from Ancient Greece even though this was not a particularly respected form of art (I remember my Classics professor saying they were basically the equivalent of comic books or dorm posters) because pottery holds up well and vases were often buried in tombs. The “high art” paintings of the time are lost to us because they were done on wooden panels. We do have some examples of very detailed and realistic-looking portraits on coins. I don’t know if Eucratides I really looked like his portrait, but the image on the coin looks like a specific individual man and not a generic “noble king”.
A lot of classical art is, technically, not realistic at all. It is “hyper-realistic”, full of subtle exaggerations, to make things look better than life.
Statues usually had legs significantly longer than most real humans. The muscles were often exaggerated. The clefts between the muscles were sometimes so deep, they would be fatal wounds on a real human.
It is as realistic as an airbrushed photo in a fashion magazine. It is actually quite stylized. But it is the style to which we are accustomed. Other cultures became accustomed to different styles.
Missed editing. Albert, as I perfectly well know. Apparently my fingers don’t. It got lost somewhere between brain and screen!
So far, this reply is the closest to giving me what I wanted. I can understand the last part. If a young person could draw, well, I think he would be expected to do something useful with it. There wasn’t a lot of leisure. Everything was done to survive, so you drew what and how you were told. Ok, understandable.
Limited materials and lack of easily preserved drawing surfaces. This makes sense too. I thing I was wondering why I hadn’t seen examples of “ancient people doodles”. Obviously, because any examples rotted or disintegrated or just got tossed.
I’ve got to say, I’m a bit surprised at the tone of some of the replies. I asked a question, one that I ended up rephrasing several times, and it seemed to be taken as a good opportunity to make me feel pretty stupid. Not cool, folks. This is why people lurk instead of becoming a member of the community.
Personal Hypothesis: The board attracts people who are very “fact” minded and they tend to get a bit frustrated when they have nothing factual to offer, so instead they nitpick the question, sort of hoping that they can define it out of existence because they want to be able to post to it and can’t really.
You see it more in GQ, usually.
OK, how about this? Is an engineering drawing realistic? In some sense, it’s the most realistic form of drawing we have, because an engineer can use such a drawing to produce an exact replica of the actual item, something which is difficult or impossible with most pictures (and the first step would usually be to create an engineering drawing anyway). But an engineering drawing would never be mistaken for a photograph.
a) What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? The OP asked a question. In what way does this constitute anything like an attempt at a helpful answer?
b) :dubious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4XT-l-_3y0
I think there’s also a tendency for many Dopers to … forget? that there’s an actual person asking the question, and instead treat it almost like a detached test question.
Thank you Sage Rat!
I really, sincerely, fervently wish I had never said “photographic”. For the umpteenth time, I meant a representation of a person who could be recognized as a specific individual.
In late elementary school, somewhere around Gr 6 or 7, we all picked a partner and drew them. For the most part, it was easy to tell who was who. They certainly wouldn’t be mistaken for photographs but they were recognizable.
My question was, if schoolchildren could draw people who looked like individuals, why did so many civilizations seemingly only draw figures that had few, if any, individual traits? It seems really simple to me.
I’ve learned that I wasn’t fully taking into account how much art was actually more invested in telling a story or recording an event. I suppose simplified figures are better for that application.
I’ve learned that apprentice artists pretty much had to paint what the master told them too.
I’ve learned that there were, in fact, some extremely accurate portraits produced at the same time as the more stylized art. In particular, I’m thinking of the Egyptian mummy paintings.
I’ve learned that, given the materials at hand, anything that wasn’t on a wall or vase or preserved in a tomb wasn’t likely to survive. There may well have been people doing the very good charcoal and piece of bark portraits, but they are long gone.
I do, very much appreciate the answers I received. The people who got so hung up by terminology may want to look at their motives in posting. The words " deliberately obtuse" do come to mind. I was as clear as I could be. Again, (and again and again and again…) “photographic” was the first word that came to mind to describe “easily recognized individual person”. I don’t care about foreshortening, shadows, perspective or skill. It’s always been,simply, does the picture make me sit up and say, " Hey! I know him!"
I think that’s how most of us understood the term. And I think the responses are still valid: the purpose of a portrait is not always to portray a specific person in a realistic, recognizable manner.