Mmm both of those are from 1400s and OP do limit it to 1300. And that 1300 limit is for good reason. Renaissance is usually dated after 1453 and that's when European art quality exploded. So yeah, those examples instead prove OP's statement.
If you want to nitpick, I can point out that the full quote is "Europeans between about 500 and 1300 mostly couldn't paint"; stress on "about", and those aren't paintings.
Besides the comment started by saying that "medieval European art generally sucked", so it covers the work I mention.
That's if you want to nitpick. If you don't, both those works are hallmarks of medieval art and while they're not necessarily exemplars, it is important to remember that there were still artists who knew their stuff in and out in medieval times and the Renaissance didn't come out of nowhere.
Edit: I travel through Europe by train a lot (mainly France and Italy but also Switzerland and Germany occasionally) and I visit museums, cathedrals, and art galleries in every city I stay. I have seen a lot of medieval art because those places just seem to have it lying around by the bucketload. There is a broad range in quality, but I have seen some very high quality woodcuts and, indeed, paintings, although those tend to be religious icons. Sculptures also, but mainly in statues of saints on the outside of cathedrals (see e.g. the Rouen cathedral). I'm trying to say that I'm not some kind of art authority or expert on medieval art, but I have seen my fair share of it, and no, Europeans didn't just suck at art in the medieval. I think what happened is there was a lot of mostly religious art that was lower quality, sort of like you can find plenty of slop on the internet today, but there were still skilled artists that created shockingly good art. You'd be more likely to find it in the palaces of the rich and powerful, I reckon, because they were the ones who could afford/support talented artists, as opposed to more ordinary craftsmen, who would be paid less. For the same reason you might find less of the good art lying around than the rougher, cruder kind, because the former was more expensive and thus harder to obtain. This also goes for religious art, which tended to include a smorgasboard of art forms, from painted icons and sculptures to reliquaries and liturgical equipment like communion chalices. But good medieval art existed, I've seen it, and it wasn't that rare.
And if we move the cut-off all the way to 1450, fuhgeddaboudit. You have freaking Albrecht D\:urer by that time. No fair. I'm sorry. The challenge concerned a particular 800-year period, which I chose carefully.
Yes I hear you about the range of quality. You're right. Many of the best pieces may have been "exhibited to death." There was presumably lots of student art and whatnot, probably not considered very good at the time, but it happened to survive. I accept that. But I'm only asking for a single counterexample in an 800-year block of time. I think that's fair.
If you like, though, I'm happy to amend my claim to this: "No, medieval European art did not suck. European art between 500 and 1300 sucked. But from 1300 until whenever the Renaissance starts, watch out. Those folks did some really nice work."
Well then that's not nitpicking, it's cherry-picking, trying to fit your claim into a specific but arbitrary period. You start by saying "medieval European art", then you reduce that to "between about 500 and 1300". Why between 500 and 1300 specifically? What happened to the other ~200 years?
It doesn't matter. There was plenty of good art between 500 and 1300 too. I mentioned the Rouen cathedral, whose west front, the one with all the statues of saints and the hyper-detailed architecture wikipedia tells me was "first built in the 12th century, entirely redone in the 13th century, and then totally redone again at the end of the 14th century, each time become more lavishly decorated" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouen_Cathedral#West_front). That's just one example that fits your spec, that I have personally visited. As I say I'm no expert.
Here's another: the sixth-century basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, with some of the most famous mosaics ever, including those depicting emperor Justinian, his wife, empress Theodora, and his court, which again Wikipedia tells me were completed in 547.
With a cursory look online I can also find a bunch of other famous art pieces from your chosen period that I haven't seen myself, like e.g.the Diptych of the Virgin and Child Enthroned and the Crucifixion (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/16241/diptych-of-the-virgin-a...) which however is very typical of the ecclesiastical art I've seen in many museums and art galleries I've visited.
So I do think your claim is a bit exaggerated, even if you try to limit the time period carefully. There was always good art made in Europe.
Btw, I'm Greek so I'm not offended by your claim about Europeans, in case there was a lingering doubt about that. The Greek middle ages (i.e. Byzantium) are usually not included in the European middle ages but Byzantium produced absolutely gobsmacking art throughout the medieval so leaving it out is also a bit arbitrary (but that's not your fault).
The Rouen Cathedral is so impressive that I find it suspicious since there's nothing like it in that period. I think the "and then totally redone again at the end of the 14th century" (after 1300) carries the answer but I doubt I can find proof of what it looks like before that.
San Vitale is also so impressive that I think it heralds the end of that golden age. Nothing will be like this for 800 freaking years In contrast, that diptych from 1275 looks like it heralds the end of the dark age and it do looks like it (starting to be good but nothing like what'll come after it). So if we cherrypick again a little bit, 550-1250 is quite a long dark age.
Regardless of definition of "medieval" here, there still seems to be a very long contiguous era where there is dearth of good European, especially western/northern, art.
>> The statues depicted in the ancient artworks appear to be very delicately painted, often with large portions of the surface left white. A well-known example is the depiction of a statue of Mars at the House of Venus in Pompeii.
Oh, I see, if you look at the statue with the right eyes it's really obvious what they did. They started with a white primer then gave it a red-tinted wash all over, thinned down for the body parts so that they look flesh-coloured (ish... ) and progressively darker for the spear, helmet and shield, then the cape, and then the hair. This really helps to keep the mo... the statue together in terms of colour, and it's very efficient since the entire palette is tones of a single tint. I guess they gave the helmet and the spear the old non-metallic metal treatment, then they highlighted the helmet, the cape, the shield and the spear, and blended the feathers on the helmet.
That's a really classically modern paint job that you might find in any miniature painted to modern miniature-painting standards [1]. In fact it's surprisingly modern, I'd even go as far as to say that the one-tint wash job is positively avant-guard. I'm certainly trying that next time I paint a model with nice, big, flat areas like that one... like the statue, I mean.
>> I have given an example of this below a famous mosaic depicting a statue of a boxer, from the Villa San Marco in Stabiae. Note the subtlety of color recorded by the mosaic, in which the boxer is reddened and sunburned on his shoulders and upper chest, but not his pale upper thighs. There is nothing here to suggest that the statues depicted would have struck a modern viewer as garish.
Oh and here I guess they started with a zenithal primer, with the lighting coming from below and the right, then they did some dry-brushing with a darker tint. Nice job!
No but seriously, it's a bit dumb to think that the ancients would just apply a thick layer of basecoat and call it a day. If we do all those elaborate things today on plastic miniatures, I can imagine what they did.
Just for some context, is the guy on the left with the white shirt a vegan who however supports ethical farming practices or did I get totally the wrong impression?
It's certainly not the food industry that decided to brand some of its own foods as Ultra-Processd and harmful for health. That kind of categorisation is the work of nutrition researchers of various kinds. The way I understand it the food industry's interests trend the opposite way, trying to convince you that everything they sell you is good for you.
>> You’re always going to look at the Costco chicken and wonder why you are doing it.
It depends. My friend's dad has chickens and the meat is tough and grey-dark, very much not like the supermarket white and soft meat. Also the meat tastes of... chicken; I guess. And you can see even the bones are significantly harder (I can't snap them with my fingers like the supermarket chickens' bones). I always assumed this is because of the way they're raised, allowed to roam freely (within an enclosure, but it's a big one) and feed on scraps and everything they can forage for, in addition to grain.
What does your chickens' meat look and taste like? If it's the same as supermarket chicken then, I don't know, but if it's the other kind then it's definitely worth it. Although it takes a couple hours cooking to soften it :)
They're simply completely different breeds. Factory-farmed supermarket broiler breeds are optimized for producing as much bland, white meat as possible in as short time as possible. Everything else, like the ability to walk, is secondary, they're never getting enough space to walk anyway in their two-month life.
Breeds optimized to egg-laying are an entirely separate category, and they don't produce much meat, and the meat is… different, as you described. Apparently some hybrid breeds are also available for backyard meat+egg co-production. I don't know what their meat is like.
People didn't really eat that much chicken meat before the 70s, at least in the West. Wouldn't have been even possible to consume this much chicken meat, before these fast-growing breeds and industrial-scale farms.
It looks like supermarket chicken. I tried something more like a heritage breed once but I have young children who want massive white meat chicken breasts, so that’s what I’m doing for now.
But I will say, when you buy chicken at the grocery store, the quality can vary. Mine has always been good.
>> I tried something more like a heritage breed once but I have young children who want massive white meat chicken breasts, so that’s what I’m doing for now.
Heh. Over here (UK and the rest of Europe I reckon) the kids love chicken thighs. Acquired tastes eh?
>> scalpers are the unjustly persecuted heroes of our economy. they are apostates from Queueing, our national religion.
Right? Scalpers are only the latest in a long line of wrongly persecuted financial minorities like black market sellers, smugglers, drug lords, pirates, slavers, pimps, and Ponzi scheme entrepreneurs. Freedom to the heroes of our markets!
No, I said reselling pokemon cards. That's an example of scalping. You lumped them all together.
Scalpers are only the latest in a long line of wrongly persecuted financial minorities like black market sellers, smugglers, drug lords, pirates, slavers, pimps, and Ponzi scheme entrepreneurs.
Why won't you confront what you actually said? Why are you trying to twist words around instead?
>> the high ticket prices incentivise the creation of new venues and the entrant of new artists into the market.
How does scalping, which transfers money from fans, artists, and the music industry to ticket touts who have nothing to do with music, "incentivise the creation" of anything? Except, I suppose, bot farms and clickfarm sweatshops?
That's a little happy fairy tale with extra sparkly fairy dust on top but what all that free markets have given us in practice is misery, despair, war, destruction and environmental catastrophe.
Capitalism is “the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.”
P.S. It doesn't help of course that "free" markets are never really free because they are very quickly taken over by the "nastiest men" etc. and the last thing those people care about is freedom, particularly that of the markets they make their money from.
See for instance the subject of ticket touts. There is no free market in online ticket reselling because the entire market's cornered by bot farmers who buy tickets in bulk automatically the moment they are made available and leave none for anyone else. "Free" market, my sweet little hiney.
And btw, in the UK the same thing happens with driving test slots:
the shortage of driving test slots is entirely the fault of inefficient government bureaucracy. people are rationally responding to the scarcity by using bots.
if the supply of tests were allowed to rise naturally to meet the existing demand, this problem wouldn't exist. we are only in this situation because the government artificially limits the supply.
this is a very common pattern where people get upset at high prices but are completely incurious as to where the shortage really comes from.
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