I not that much versed with Art (I am obsessed about motorcycles though) , so who better than Charles Murray ,of the Bell Curve fame, to shed light on the Idealised Human Form of Graeco Roman Art. Some additional observation regarding Ancient Egyptian Art has also been thrown in:
The Invention of Artistic Realism. Greece, circa –500 OR 500BCE.[5]
For the first three and a half millennia or so after the beginning of Sumer, the world’s visual arts in every civilization followed a similar course. Conventions developed for portraying people and scenes, and the conventions became rules that each succeeding generation observed rigidly. The conventions did not have much to do with conveying the visual reality of the thing being portrayed. An ancient Egyptian artist did not try to show the person that was before his eyes, but what he knew belonged to that person. The face is in profile, but the eye looks like an eye seen from the front. The top half of the body is as seen from the front, showing the chest and both arms, yet the lower half is seen in profile, showing both legs and feet in the way that it is easiest to draw. These conventions for portraying a person were not followed so unvaryingly because Egyptian artists were not capable of anything else, but because that’s the way art was done. A good artist’s job was to execute the conventions in the most craftsmanlike way that he could. A break in that rigid tradition occurred in –14C, when the pharaoh Akhenaton encouraged innovation of many kinds, including artistic. The famous bust of his queen, Nefertiti, shows a woman who was unmistakably a flesh and blood person. A statue of Akhenaton himself shows a man with a bit of a pot belly and a dreamy expression, also definitely a real person. Some of the paintings surviving from his reign show people standing in informal poses that were intended to represent the way that people really stand. But the flare of artistic innovation did not survive Ahkenaton. A thousand years passed before Greek artists renewed the effort to reproduce what people saw before their eyes in everyday life. The beginnings were humble. “It was a tremendous moment in the history of art,” writes Ernst Gombrich, “when, perhaps a little before 500 b.c., artists dared for the first time in all history to paint a foot as seen from the front. In all the thousands of Egyptian and Assyrian works which have come down to us, nothing of that kind had ever happened.”6 Gombrich was referring to the discovery of foreshortening, ways of distorting the painted image or carved relief so that the result appears to the viewer as it would in real life. In the case of the foot, on a vase signed by Euthymedes, the artist shows us the front of the five toes, which the human eye immediately recognizes as a foot seen from in front. The revolution occurred in sculpture in the same era. The people portrayed in statues began to stand in natural ways, with more weight on one foot than another, the hips no longer in line, the axis of the body no longer a straight line. Knees began to look like real knees and smiles like real smiles. The invention of artistic realism is one of the cleanest examples of the meta-invention as a cognitive tool. The realization of the invention required more than a century of experiments and mistakes and improvements until classical Greek sculpture and, we are told, painting, reached the heights of realism, but the initial invention was simple and wholly in the brain: Pay attention to what you see in front of you, not what the rules of art tell you to do, and try to figure out how to translate what you see into your medium in a fully realistic way.
Artistic Realism is considered one of the 14 Great Inventions of Mankind
