But I’m not asking about portraits that aren’t meant to represent a recognizable individual, I’m asking about pictures that do represent a recognizable individuals. That’s the whole point!
But. . . but. . . you have been given plenty of examples of ancient portraiture that does show recognizable individuals and yet they have been dismissed because. . . reasons. It seems the reason is that there are no true Scotsmen portraits.
Ancient artists were not always trying to depict recognizable portraits. That’s not what their art was about. But when it was what they wanted to do, they did, indeed do it.
A picture may represent a specific individual, but that doesn’t mean the picture is intended as a realistic, recognizable image of that individual. These aren’t ID pictures or mug shots. A royal portrait may represent an ideal of what royalty should look like, not what they actually look like.
I think I only rejected that one Chinese portrait. The rest, I do agree, look like what I meant as a recognizable person.
I get that they may not have wanted to do portraits as I think of them. I now understand, from the examples, that they could do a recognizable drawing when they wanted to. I was just wondering why most of what they left behind was non representational if they were capable of doing drawings like the mummy portraits, etc.
Okay, but my question is, and always has been, why? Why, if people could do portraits that looked just like the person, didnt they? What was the reason that they chose to reject the individual? When I think of South American or Egyptian painting, I only remember the classic pictograph style art. That is, for the most part but not exclusively, as I’ve found out, just how things were done.
Why? Were people who could produce accurate portraits viewed as soul stealers? Was it a religious thing? Fashion? Too uncomfortable for the people who didn’t realize what they actually looked like?
We kind of got hung up on Egypt, Rome and China but the phenonomen is worldwide. Look at a Westcoast Native print or painting. All the people look just the same. Look at South American or Mexican art. Again, I can think of no ancient work that looks like a modern portrait. These people had talent and they had materials. Someone, at some point, must have sat down and produced something that looked just like the person in front of them. So why didn’t that become the way to depict people? Why did it take so long? These were fully human people. Their eyes saw things the same way we do. They had the same dexterity. Even though perspective, or was it foreshortening, wasnt “invented” until the Fourteenth Centuary, people must have realized it existed.I remember vividly being a small girl and noticing that the building I was walking away from was getting smaller. I was at the river, fishing with my dad, and we were walking across the open sand and field. I suppose it must have been one of the first times I was far enough away from buildings, out in the open, to really notice perspective. It sure made an impression. Fifty-odd years later, I still can see the building.
The point being, if untrained five year old me could “get” perspective, why didnt they, or at least why didn’t they copy it? Why did they get stuck?
What was the reason that so many civilizations, in so many locations, took so long to produce what we think of as the modern portrait, of the type that is a direct, faithful and accurate record of that particular person? I’m thinking of the type of portrait that would result if I were to pick up a mirror and copy every hair and wrinkle so as to produce a drawn record of exactly what I looked like at that moment. People can do it now. Why couldn’t, or wouldnt, they do it sooner?
That as clear as I’m going to get.
I agree with pulykamell. It’s clear what the OP meant in describing certain art as “realistic” and other art as “not realistic”. The observation that Picasso’s cubist style can capture some aspects of reality more faithfully than more “realistic” art is interesting, but it’s silly to suggest that that’s what “realistic” means in the context of this thread, and rather pointless to quibble with the OPs use of the term “realistic” when we all know perfectly well what was meant.
gnoitall seemed to suggest that terms which are vaguely defined at the boundaries are meaningless. That’s simply false. The classic example is baldness. A man can of course be “bald” even if he has a little hair left, and though I couldn’t identify precisely the point at which he was one lost hair away from being bald, this does not undermine the validity of baldness as a concept.
I think the big difference is, those people did not grow up looking at “realistic” 2-dimensional representations of 3-dimensional scenes. It’s not at all obvious that a 2-dimensional picture can be a realistic representation of a real-world scene until you’ve seen it done.
A mirror does not produce a 2-dimensional picture. Optically, it acts as a window into a 3-dimensional scene - i.e. the reflection in the mirror has depth. Not to mention, good quality mirrors are a modern invention. The only mirrors the ancient people had were polished pieces of metal, which weren’t very flat.
The idea that a 2-dimensional image can be a realistic representation of a 3-dimensional world is not at all obvious. A modern 5-year old may be able to do it, but only because he/she has grown up looking at photographs and perspective-correct drawings. There are lots of things that are obvious to a modern 5-year old that took millennia for humanity to discover.
Ok, if the people aren’t drawing at all, it would make sense that they couldn’t yet translate 3D to 2D. They were drawing though and in a lot of cases drawing quite detailed scenes. What caused the jump between what you would see on a tomb wall and the picture I drew of my boyfriend? I have no particular talent but it looks like him, not a somewhat filled out anonymous stick figure. If they could draw one, why not the other - actually, there is evidence that some groups could but for the most part, didn’t.
Paper. It allowed people to noodle around with different ideas privately and cheaply. (Or, this would be my guess, at least.)
Yup. As I said in my last post, and which zoogirl hasn’t spoken to, advances in technology made: a) the ability to make representational art more available and a LOT less expensive; b) it much easier for folks to see the value of having accurate representations, e.g., with maps and portraits and scientific diagrams, so the race to become more accurate got tied to money.
Yes, it’s this to a large extent. People didn’t draw or doodle because they didn’t have cheap paper available. Of what paper they did have, it didn’t last to be viewed by us now.
As far as why people don’t always do art that is a recognizable portrait: they had a different goal, such as communicating a mood or an idea; or perhaps they had a different measure of what constitutes a recognizable portrait.
Now, when it comes to representing scale and perspective in a way that it appears to mimic how we see, that took some science to figure out. Decent linear perspective didn’t start to show up in art until the 13th century.
If the question is “realism” vs. other styles, it’s just because what we think of as “realistic” is just another style, and not one that happened to be popular in many cultures, and one might as well ask why impressionism or cubism isn’t more popular today.
If the question is about depiction of specific individuals, ancient peoples did that sometimes, too. Just, not always. In a lot of art, it doesn’t really matter who the individuals are, so why bother distinguishing them?
I am finding out that a lot of people could actually produce the type of portrait that I’m thinking of. I can see how paper made a huge difference in the practical side of things. I guess what I’m having trouble letting go of is the idea of people wanting some way to “see” the people who weren’t around, in the same way we collect family photos. To me, that would have had value. Vanity and sentiment have always been moneymakers.
Ok, so, what about non Greco-Roman images? If Europeans and Egyptions were, in fact, capable of doing artwork that was not stylized, what happened to the rest of the world? From Inuit to Inca, it seems that nobody could manage the leap.
I do get that pictographs were more valuable for conveying information.
As it happens, today I spent time with a dear friend whose father was a professional artist. In addition to his later landscape work, he paid the bills with Harliquin covers, about eight hundred of 'em. My friend agreed with what I said earlier. His father had to draw. No choice. If a pencil came his way, he couldn’t put it down without producing something. The urge to copy the world around him was simply part of him.
Now before anyone chimes in about “trained artist”, there certainly are instances of naturally gifted people who could do very impressive work without any training. They just see the world a little differently. So what stopped the natural artist from producing that realistic work and what stopped others from saying, “Hey! Look at that! Maybe I could do that!”, at which point “realistic” pictures would become the usual way of drawing
I’m beginning to think the answer is just that, nope, never happened!
I should say, despite all the nitpickerybickerybumph, I do appreciate all the efforts to educate me! I have learned quite a bit. Things I take for granted were actually much more recent that I assumed, or much older. I’m thinking of mummy portraits and the realization of perspective, in particular. Thank you.
IMO, people were *always *capable, but they didn’t see the need. And they didn’t see the need because the idea that people you knew wouldn’t be around is, in the main, not a common one. Most people didn’t travel that much. And if someone was dead, you had time to make a death mask/sculpture. There’s a lot more sculptural memorial stuff around than pictorial.
I would suggest the difference is the intent (goal). You were trying to create an identifiable drawing of a specific individual, perhaps focusing on his distinguishing features. Which is how most modern people think of portraits, because of our society’s focus on individualism and the ubiquity of photographs. But I suspect most older drawings were not done with the same goal in mind.
That makes sense!