system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why are humans depicted in paintings from ancient civilizations like different than now? Weren't there artists who could paint realistic paintings?

Weren't there artists at that time who could draw humans for what they actually looked like. For instance, look at the paintings of kings from the 17th Century or before.
gpt
What you might consider "a realistic picture" is actually fairly divorced from the perceptive experience of seeing a human face or figure in motion. It's not actually intuitive to imagine and execute an ideally framed and posed static human figure in flat lighting. A *lot* of artistic theory had to be developed to get to a stage where we might consider art as truthful representation as opposed to symbolic shapes. There also had to be technological leaps: devices like the camera obscura and other machinations with mirrors helped early Renaissance artists freeze a frame to preserve fine detail. Even today if you asked an accomplished painter to paint a model human from memory, they'd struggle. We needed to develop artistic traditions like using models or photographic references, and for many human cultures the idea of sitting still and staring into space for a whole day so your face and shape could be accurately recorded would have been farcical.