I was walking around the Museum of Archeology in Naples the other day and the unbroken pottery from almost 5000 years ago was blowing my fucking gourd
Love artifact’s like this! Funny how man has been able to sculpt realistically for a few thousand years, couldn’t paint for shit until, when? Renaissance to my mind, but my education is Western based.
Ever wonder how rich one would have to be to have a bespoke statue like this? Below king and above laborer, but where?
Some of it is material (especially regarding the paints themselves), but painting skill waxed and waned in Europe with the rise and fall of interconnected cultural networks that could sustain the transmission of artistic techniques (and, in times of poor economic performance, had those same techniques die out as the artists could no longer make a living refining and passing those skills on). Check these Roman-era funeral portraits, for example:
it could have been a religious figurine and not a private statue 🤷
It looks so beautiful.
