How did everyone suddenly get so much dumber during the Dark Ages?

How did everyone suddenly get so much dumber during the Dark Ages?

...

Jews among the populations putting flouide non the wells

Yes, just look at this atrocity. Truly horrible. The based Romans would never have drawn something so ugly and vulgar.

I didn't even mention christianity though?

>Altichiero

I said dark ages.

Truly terrible. Blegh. Ugliness personified.

>How did everyone suddenly get so much dumber during the Dark Ages?
Unpopular opinion :brief decline of Christianity and proto-Western culture due to an influx of heathen barbarians.
Vargs need not reply.

I said dark ages. Show me one from the tenth century.

Now look at this BASED ROMAN MASTERWORK. Brimming with layers upon layers of physical and subtextual nuance. Truly a masterpiece. Why were medieval artists so bad by comparison?

The Germanics were well Christianized at the time.

OP, economic decline lead to less people pimping their walls out with adornments. As these things were spread purely through master-apprentice relationships, and the masters would only take apprentices during times of economic prosperity, a period of economic decline lead to less apprentices until eventually the trade just died off.

Roman Britain ground to a halt at one point because there was literally no one to build new buildings via Roman methods, let alone make sculptures and frescoes.

Not that guy but I'm not even sure what argument you're trying to make. Are you trying to say that people in the early middle ages were dumber because they preferred stylised art?

De urbanization

Yes, because that's a mediocre painting on a middle class house in Pompeii whereas the other two are some of the finest pieces of their time and were commissioned by wealthy religious leaders.

You're the kind of person that uses "kitsch" thinking it means anything, aren't you?

It's still better than art from the dark ages. Having a large penis doesn't make it a bad picture. The body aside from the penis actually looks like a person as opposed to the brain damaged three year crayon scribble looking people in dark ages manuscripts.

They didn't get dumber, Rome fell.

Basically the smartest guy in the room who got everything done and solved problems dropped dead. Everyone else was left trying to figure out how the fuck he did what he did.

Well they were smart enough to build this

That actually is pretty ugly though

A lot of the current structure such as the cupula doesn't date from Charlemagne's time. Early churches didn't look very good compared to Greco-Roman architecture.

Is this another one of those "my entire exposure to early medieval art consists of meme pages on Facebook and also all non-realist art is ugly" threads?

>it's another "contrarian defends shitty Medieval art and claims that it was intentionally bad" episode
They literally did not understand perspective. Byzantine artists weren't intentionally painting non-naturalistically, it was literally the best they could do.

There's a reason they call it "the Renaissance".

This.

Also many seem to not understand or simply ignore the reason many paintings where done this way.

Most the artists of the dark ages where monks. Early Christians took the "no graven image" thing very seriously, so they used this flat style as a way around that rule and to keep their heads attached to their shoulders.

see

>this is the best Christcucks can do
>it looks worse than some regular Pompeii fresco

Sad.

Note that a lot of Roman art is stylized as well, yet it doesn't look like shit.

So they intentionally shat on and ignored Greco-Roman artistic culture?

Gotcha.

Also remember that illuminated manuscript originally was something decorated with gold and silver. To get the best use out of the materials you're going to want to go for art that's simple and stylised, easy to draw and hard to make mistakes with, but still conveying the meaning of the literature as best you can.

Less of a focus on Arts.

You're putting words in my mouth my guy.

All I'm saying is that art doesn't need to be naturalist to be good.

For example look at the Saturn Devouring His Son painted by Paul Peter Rubens and by Francisco Goya. Rubens' is unquestionably a more technically proficient work but I don't think anyone would prefer it to Goya's, or claim that it's better than Goya's because it looks more realistic.

Their paintings were still shit though.

Yes they did, not because they didn't admire it or want to try something similar, but because it could cost them their lives, many monks where killed for simply trying to translate "pagan" texts.

Is this shit to you?

How did everyone suddenly get so much dumber during the XXth century?

There's a difference between

>It's shit because I meant it that way to convey x, y, and z

and

>It's shit because I literally cannot paint in any other way

You mean smart enough to hire Byzantines to build that for them.

The Moors weren't dumb during that time.

>writing big letters is an artistic accomplishment

now you are just being silly.

I see no difference

user please, you are being obtuse

Just look at the breathtaking detail in one small part of it

>Having a large penis doesn't make it a bad picture.
No the unrealistic proportions, lack of perspective, and poor grasp of anatomy make it a bad picture.

>OP makes a bait thread and then manufactures replies to argue what he truly believes
Better luck next time.

not him, but he does have a point: take this sculpture of Akhenaten as a less extreme anecdote: he didn't actually look this feminized, he deliberately had his proportions skewed to make him seen more feminine and symbolize a blending of both genders.

Whether you think it's degeneracy or a historical repressed tranny, what remains undeniable is that they had the means of generating a more realistic sculpture, they simply chose not to make it and preferred something more stylized.

Also, generating good art before the modern era was a question of patronage: if you had a rich sugar daddy who paid you to exist and make art, then you had access to more money, and larger and more impressive artistic projects could be commissioned. Less rich people = less art being commissioned, while the only ones making it on their own were clergy illustrations.

"This illumination of St Dunstan is not trying to depict him realistically. To begin with, Dunstan is not likely to have sat as his desk to work on a book while wearing his full bishop's regalia, complete with his mitre on his head. He's depicted this way to tell the reader who he is. Nor would he have been writing on a bound book - it's depcicted that way to indicate that he was the author of a famous book. And the book's pages are turned to the viewer so that the text can be read. This is to show that the book in question is his Commentary on the Rule of St Benedict. The emphasis of the picture is on who the figure is and why he is important, not on realism."

t. Tim O'Neill

Already been addressed, see I'm not saying that something has to be realistic to be good, or that stylization is bad. What I'm saying is that there is a difference between Akhenaten (In your example) choosing to look like one of the Bogdanoff twins because it was a different artistic technique and pre-renaissance medieval art where the artist simply did not have the techniques necessary to do anything else.

Akhenaten had a choice as to what style is depictions came out as, and how Duccio (for example) painted.

>Medieval art isn't shit, they just deliberately chose to not draw naturalistically
>lol this Roman painting is shit because it's not realistic and the proportions are all fucked up
Fucking pick one.

Not to mention a lot of the "bad art" in question is marginalia that's literally the size of a postage stamp.

>hurr durr I don't understand why it's not as detailed as a giant mural some Roman had painted on a wall in his brothel stoopid medieval monks can't draw.

I'm just saying if you're going to call the Medieval piece shit because it's not drawn realistically there's no reason to pretend that the Roman painting with the same problems is some how better just because it's Roman.

Just to illustrate that stylisation could be a deliberate choice and isn't done because the artists didn't know any better or didn't understand complex artistic techniques:

These are both depictions of the four authors of the Gospels, one being from Germany and one being from Ireland, both being from the 9th century.

Could you say one is definitively better than the other, without it coming down to personal taste? Would you say the German illustration is better than the Irish one because it's more realistic?

I can see a German monk looking at the Irish one and thinking
>pagan """"""""""""art"""""""""""""

>Could you say one is definitively better than the other

Yes.

>Would you say the German illustration is better than the Irish one because it's more realistic?

Yes.

I don't get this "stylistic" meme. It's not like they came up with some cool altered state of reality to depict art with like Van Gogh did. They just drew really bad, flat stick figure looking people. It looks like the sort of drawings children make where you can tell their concept of what a human face looks like is just a circle with two circle eyes, an L shape for the nose, and a line for the mouth.

I didn't write those posts and I don't believe people living in the dark ages were actually intelligent. Those posts don't even make sense since the two examples he gave for "dark ages" art are from well after the dark ages.

>I don't get this "stylistic" meme
I think I have an idea why but I don't want to be crass and point out your specific mental quirk.

>if you can't appreciate bad art as though it were good it's because you're autistic

OK.

>potatonigger scribbles are as good as beautiful German art
Lmao

>>Would you say the German illustration is better than the Irish one because it's more realistic?
>Yes.
...why?

>because it's more realistic

You literally quoted the reason already.

read an art history book you philistine

>indoctrinate yourself with my cultural relativism propaganda, goy

No thanks.

Already diagnosed, boy?

>you're not allowed to have subjective personal preferences goy, because it's not objective

I'm mentally healthy desu. I don't think a literal autist would be able to pick up on your implied armchair diagnosis.

They thought that Christianity was the only learning they needed. Science was largely forgotten.

I hope your shitposting.

Christianity caused them to stop believing in science.

poor bait

so this...is the power...of shitposting...

Look, the entire purpose of art is to reproduce the physical world with as much accuracy as possible. It's not about "deeper truths" or "non-representational concepts" or whatever incoherent nonsense you want to attach to it.

Crackpot theory alert:
Because "Antiquity" never existed.
The Middle Ages were literally the start of human civilization.
That "ancient" art was made during the Renaissance and falsely attributed to an earlier age.

Rome collapsed and all relevant art from the period comes from regions that were formerly barbarian. It's not like all those people would have been able to inherit all the intellectual and artistic development of the classical age overnight.

Holy shit do you actually think that?

Wait you're saying a post-apocalyptic society won't be immediately capable of the same level of sophistication it enjoyed before the collapse?
Uncanny!

It took too long for art to start looking good again though. The Italians would only give us sculptures and paintings on par or better than Roman ones almost 1000 years later. The only thing that really improved was architecture around the mid middle ages.

You know I would read his theory if it wasn't thousands of pages long.

>romans weren't whi-

ayooo hol up

Is Aachen a good place to visit as a tourist interested in history?

they werent dumb, they were just going through their post-modern period you stupid loser!

My God these monks had a lot of time on their hands!

GIBBON SKRONG!

When did Byzantine figures start to look like they're made out of fucking wood?
Early on it was just a somewhat cartoonier continuation of Greco-Roman painting.

Christcuckery kills artistic talent. The same thing happened with Roman sculptures. They started looking weirder and weirder as Rome became Christian over time.

Unchecked immigration diluted the population centers, persecuted the educated classes, and rejected the culture of learning and experimentation.

there was a massive war that caused the dark.
we lost , earth stood ageist yahwh and was torn asunder when he talked mosses into betraying us.
all history ever after has been lies.

>Unchecked immigration diluted the population centers
Population centres were not "dilluted", they were dilluted during the height of empire. Cities were abandoned in favor of rural life.

Or wait, was it a Subtle /pol/-bait?

>Christcuckery kills artistic talent
???

Also there was plenty of stylised artwork made during Rome's pagan years and plenty of realistic artwork made during their Christian years. Try reading a book on Roman art history.

The Renaissance produced better art because it was influenced by pagan traditions.

Which pagan traditions would those be

how did Veeky Forums suddenly get so much dumber when Veeky Forums was created?

sculpture

sculpture

>the concept of sculpture was a pagan tradition
Fucking what

Are you seriously claiming medieval Christians didn't sculpt

It's not about dumber. It's about people not having the cash to waste throwing at cultural achievements.

Do you think that sculpture has anything to do with renaissance art?

>13th century
>Renaissance

>Cities were abandoned in favor of rural life.

Because they were flooded by foreigners looking for the Roman equivalent of "gibmedats", which eventually lead to the collapse of the Roman economy and government.

They moved to the rural parts when they finally destroyed their host species in the cities.

Not him but sculpture from the Gothic period onward was influenced by classical sculpture. You have artists like Pisano in the south and Sluter in the north who were looking directly at Roman marbles.

>Dark Ages
when will this meme finally end

Out of interest have you ever read a book on Late Roman history?

still has nothing to do with rennaissance art, its completely static. theres a reason most medieval scultpure fits well as pillars