Western Civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire was miserable, riddled with plague and hunger and oppression. He points to the work of ancient Romans in the Pompeian Second Style wall paintings and the 8th century illuminated manuscripts, the Coronation Gospels of Charlemagne, which, although primitive, show clear use of realism and perspective. According to Harper, the first misconception is that humans never knew how to draw in 3D before the 1300s. James G Harper is a professor at the University of Oregon who specializes in the history of Renaissance art. How could the artists of the first millennia and before not know how to do this? It's as if the knowledge hung there in the air, unseen or ignored. It seems like a simple matter of sweeping your paint brush a different direction, of using darker paint for shadow and making things smaller if they're far away. Those processes took thousands of years to culminate in Karl Benz's Motorwagen and Henry Ford's Model T.īut to paint photo-realistically, that's different. For a car to work, you must learn thousands of separate skills and concepts, from how to make steel to how to drill for oil, and then piece them precisely together. Being able to paint in three dimensions is not like being able to build a car. They pop off the canvas in variations of darkness and light their faces detailed and proportioned. Then come the 1400s, and suddenly portraits become people.
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