WI: Roman 'Renaissance art'

I know that this is something of a misnomer, as of course the Renaissance was based on Classical art and culture, but I've often wondered why the Greeks and Romans didn't produce portraits and paintings like the ones produced 1500 years later. What is the reason behind this?

And this being alternate history, what would our perception and knowledge of Classical civilisation be if this had been the case? Could it even have impacted world history?

They did. It's just that few survived. They had a mastery of naturalism and perspective very similar to the Renaissance.

Here are some examples.

Skokie said:

They did. It's just that few survived. They had a mastery of naturalism and perspective very similar to the Renaissance.

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its the same as the later art due to one thing...the Renaissance was a rebirth of classical art, ie: the Romans and Greeks...so the romans didnt really have a renaissance in a sense

The Greeks and Romans did in fact incorporate many of the hallmarks that later figured in Renaissance painting. Perspective. Naturalistic portrayals of humans. But the paintings that survive are few--mostly frescos. Pigments fade over time. Paint supports fall apart. There are descriptions of paintings that incorporated techniques only slowly rediscovered hundreds of years later.

Thanks Skokie for illustrating my post.

jkarr said:

its the same as the later art due to one thing...the Renaissance was a rebirth of classical art, ie: the Romans and Greeks...so the romans didnt really have a renaissance in a sense

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They needed to have a "renaissance," though, after the crisis of the 3rd century, when Greco-Roman art became more simplistic and stylized. I heard once that this could be blamed on a whole generation of artisans who died or gave up their craft in the civil wars/economic depression without transmitting their knowledge to the next generation.

They did; it's just that most of them have been lost to time, weather, and armies. Probably the best-preserved examples of Roman painting are the murals at Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Opis(discussed here http://www.art-and-archaeology.com/roman/painting.html) and the mummy portraits from Faiyum(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayum_mummy_portraits), as well as various descriptions of lost paintings by artists like Apelles in Pliny's Natural History. Perserving this tradition uninterrupted would likely require one of the following: the lack of a Byzantine collapse in Syria or the survivial of a more Syrian-oriented caliphate so the Classical tradition is not overtaken by the more Persian manner that was coming to dominate under the Abbasids and the Selujiks. In Western Europe you probably need an earlier growth of parchment manuscripts because panels just don't survive well in cold and wet climates and possibly the Franks having more mss. in the style of, say, the Vienna Genesis(very different that high classical roman painting, but about what you can realistically expect given the massive artistic shifts in the late antique world).
If you instead mean "why do the extant classical paintings discussed above not fit the Renaissance model", that's a different discussion and one that likely requires far more intensive research; I'll see what I have time to plow through. Possible reasons to start from include the development of Christian pictorial cycles, the emergence first of tempera and then of oil as a medium, the love of fine detail that comes from the International Gothic style and the growth of manuscript painting in that style, and the mathematical development of geometry that drove so much Italian painting.

Skokie said:

They needed to have a "renaissance," though, after the crisis of the 3rd century, when Greco-Roman art became more simplistic and stylized. I heard once that this could be blamed on a whole generation of artisans who died or gave up their craft in the civil wars/economic depression without transmitting their knowledge to the next generation.

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Ehh, I have a lot of trouble with this explanation. It's probably true in the sense of "people didn't have as much money for art period" but "simplistic" and "stylized" are not ipso facto bad things in art(if anything, they are foundational to very nearly any coherent system of aesthetics in various forms) and the simplification of Western painting in late antiquity had as much to do with the fact that people had different goals for pictures and buildings, especially the religious pictures that by and large have survived best. And they did take over what was useful to them from the classical tradition(c.f. the fact that the church designs then in use were modeled on the classical manner or the traces of Classical painting still visible in the Vienna Genesis http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Vienna_Genesis).
EDIT: Setting aside the point made above that classical painting=! renaissance painting in terms of style, subject, or iconography. Related, but not identical by a very, very long shot.

Roger II said:

Ehh, I have a lot of trouble with this explanation. It's probably true in the sense of "people didn't have as much money for art period" but "simplistic" and "stylized" are not ipso facto bad things in art

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Of course! It's a value judgment.

(if anything, they are foundational to very nearly any coherent system of aesthetics in various forms) and the simplification of Western painting in late antiquity had as much to do with the fact that people had different goals for pictures and buildings, especially the religious pictures that by and large have survived best. And they did take over what was useful to them from the classical tradition(c.f. the fact that the church designs then in use were modeled on the classical manner or the traces of Classical painting still visible in the Vienna Genesis http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Vienna_Genesis).
EDIT: Setting aside the point made above that classical painting=! renaissance painting in terms of style, subject, or iconography. Related, but not identical by a very, very long shot.

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Don't get me wrong. I absolutely adore Christian/Byzantine art. I love all the great art styles from history, on a fundamental level. But I often wonder if, given the knowledge and exposure to classical technique, they wouldn't have used perspective and a more naturalistic rendering of the human form. In other words, I'm not sure if post-classical symbolism/stylization was a choice so much a function of lack of knowledge of technique. So perhaps there were a generation or two of naive artists whose work became ossified into an imperial style.

Skokie said:

Of course! It's a value judgment.



Don't get me wrong. I absolutely adore Christian/Byzantine art. I love all the great art styles from history, on a fundamental level. But I often wonder if, given the knowledge and exposure to classical technique, they wouldn't have used perspective and a more naturalistic rendering of the human form. In other words, I'm not sure if post-classical symbolism/stylization was a choice so much a function of lack of knowledge of technique. So perhaps there were a generation or two of naive artists whose work became ossified into an imperial style.

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Disclaimer: I am not by a long shot a specialist in late antique and byzantine art; I'm just going off what I see in Weitzmann's essay "The Survival of Mythological Representations in Early Christian and Byzantine Art"
Hmm, first of all that theory comes from Vasari, who A) had Very Strong Feelings about byzantine art and B) doesn't seem to have known it very much beyond certain somewhat provincial(if still interesting) Italian representatives. In general, Vasari is best taken with a few grains of salt for that reason. Second, it seems hard to claim that the break is really that from the Byzantines to the Romans when a more classical style persisted for quite some time. It seems from my brief glance at the subject that the stylization happened over a period of time roughly from the 4th to the 7th century and was far, far more pronounced in religious subject-matter than in secular subject-matter. One sees secular mythological topics depicted in a more or less orthodox late classical style well into the 5th/6th centuries, the same time period as the byzantine churches of Ravenna if not somewhat later. There was also a restoration of classical models in the 9th and 10th century during the Macedonian dynasty(see the Paris Psalter), which again suggests that the simplification and symbolization of Byzantine religious art was very much intended with its liturgical uses in mind.