alt Hacker News> The idea that these marvels of artistry were painted like my 10th birthday at the local paint-your-own-pottery store always seemed incongruous, at best.
Have you seen medieval art though? https://www.artistcloseup.com/blog/explaining-weird-mediaeva...
The technique is quite different from the "old masters" of later periods that we often think of as fine art.
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Weell, there's a reason the Renaissance is called "renaissance" and not something else.
"Written By Angelika Semynina" She writes exactly what we're taught in Russian universities; it's a textbook, almost word for word. Apparently, she's simply repeating the words of her teachers. I haven't seen anything like it anywhere else, and it comes not from professional art scholars, but from "philosophers." So I consider it more a form of coping than the result of scientific research. I have two Russian degrees, one in cultural studies and one in philosophy, and this is just my opinion.
The medieval period is different from the classical period. There's no reason to compare to medieval art when we have other examples of classical art that we can compare to.
Those are a few examples of weird art from hundreds of years of examples, but even then, those aren't super unskilled paintings. Medieval artists still used shading.
Medieval art isn't comparable to a 10 year old's paint by numbers kit either. As seen in your link, they understood how to use shading for light and shadow for example.
Sure, but medieval European art generally sucked. (Call this a hypothesis if that helps.)
Compare the damn cave paintings of buffalo to most medieval European art. Some of the 10k-year-old stuff is much better observed. Europeans between about 500 and 1300 mostly couldn't paint. I'm sorry about that.
It's just not always taste. Sometimes it's taste. Sometimes people are bad at making art.