The Middle Ages

Lets see some dark or odd images from the middle ages.

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Why did art during the late Roman Empire and Middle Ages get worse. I look at art from the early Roman Empire and the Greeks before that and their ability to make beautiful art was so much greater than their later counterparts.

It was simple yet intricate, brutal and powerful but still beautiful.

Most "medieval art" that you see are doodles in the margins of texts, sometimes only a few centimeters big. You can't really make realistic art at that size, even if you were a professional arist, which these guys weren't. Monks and scholars had their own considerations when making art that meant that realism wasn't important. Look at full-sized medieval paintings and frescoes and they're much more naturalistic.

Naturalistic art did become less popular, but that's because what people regarded as "good art" changed, realistic art was seen as being low-brow or sometimes pagan. They could still make it, lots of Late Roman knick knacks have pretty realistic depictions of people and medieval sculpture was pretty consistently good, but it wasn't fashionable. There's a very good essay an acquaintance of mine wrote on Late Roman sculpture that I'll have to dig up and post at some point.

A point some people make is that even Roman and Greek paintings weren't very good, only their sculpture (I'm not sure I'd agree but I've seen it said). Sculpture is a lot easier than painting because you're reconstructing three dimensional reality in a three dimensional space, whereas with painting or drawing you have to do it in a two dimensional space. Artists didn't really begin to understand drawn perspective until the Late Middle Ages, for example.

>Also
If you really wanted you could cherry pick to show the opposite argument, pic related

You need to look deeper. Greek vase art is shit and just as bad if not worse due to a lack of color and basic expression than medieval illuminations. Neither are really shit, stop judging art without context and understanding, you look like a dumb, normie pleb

>Naturalistic art did become less popular, but that's because what people regarded as "good art" changed, realistic art was seen as being low-brow or sometimes pagan. They could still make it, lots of Lat
Oh boy going down this path this soon... This has nothing to do with realism

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Did people actually do this?

nb4 snail wars.

fucking subhuman wh*Tes

>pagan rome has beners

stop posting this meme from Amnesia

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Was the bored Monk the greatest shitposter in history?
Compared to them Pompey graffiti is facebook tier

The reasons behind the style of the art I've known for a long time but the context has always been a mystery to me.

I agree with you that Medieval art is good BUT the reason Romans drew penises was because they didn't demonize the phallus but saw it as a source of creative energy. Which it is. Fuck prudes and anti-males.

it is said simon the zealot died this way


But "The Boats" is by far the worst execution method:

"The Persians outvie all other barbarians in the horrid cruelty of their punishments, employing tortures that are peculiarly terrible and long-drawn, namely the ‘boats’ and sewing men up in raw hides. But what is meant by the ‘boats,’ I must now explain for the benefit of less well informed readers. Two boats are joined together one on top of the other, with holes cut in them in such a way that the victim’s head, hands, and feet only are left outside. Within these boats the man to be punished is placed lying on his back, and the boats then nailed together with bolts. Next they pour a mixture of milk and honey into the wretched man's mouth, till he is filled to the point of nausea, smearing his face, feet, and arms with the same mixture, and so leave him exposed to the sun. This is repeated every day, the effect being that flies, wasps, and bees, attracted by the sweetness, settle on his face and all such parts of him as project outside the boats, and miserably torment and sting the wretched man. Moreover his belly, distended as it is with milk and honey, throws off liquid excrements, and these putrefying breed swarms of worms, intestinal and of all sorts. Thus the victim lying in the boats, his flesh rotting away in his own filth and devoured by worms, dies a lingering and horrible death."

—Zonaras, Annals

Yes.

They also would pull your flesh off with red hot pincers, pour liquid lead into your wounds, pull your tounge out, poke your eyes out, cut off your skin, break every bone in your arms and legs, tear them off by horse and if you still were alive, they would burn your torso on the stake.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered#French_quartering

Their faces say it all.

Christ, imagine being turned into a literal breeding ground for bugs if all kind.

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