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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

Clearly art has regressed even further. If you look at Pablo Picasso’s works from the 20th century you can see there is even less understanding of perspective and form. If you look at others like Kandinsky you’ll see modern has actually lost all sense of objectivity and merely reduced to shapes and colors.

(I’m being sarcastic and yes, the two artists were chosen for also for the joke some of you may be thinking of).

Not all art styles throughout history valued realism.

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> Not all art styles throughout history valued realism.

While there is true, it's also heavily misleading wrt europes history.

The techniques really were lost in the dark ages, because the church killed everyone that was talented and didn't join their ranks, effectively wiping out a lot of knowledge (by design)

And a lot of medieval European art was clearly aimed at realism, they just weren't very good at it because they didn't know the basics.

This is incredibly ignorant. The Church didn't kill anyone for being good at art, and in fact did more for the development of fine art than any other institution in human history.

So if someone was a good pagan artist, the church was cool with that?

As I understand it, being an artist was a trade. If there were no customers asking for pagan art, there would have been no pagan art.

Customers were not allowed to ask for pagan art, on penalty of death for large portions of the time we are talking about.

Owning art that was too lifelike was also a death sentence.

Anything that detracted from the grandour of the church was evidence of satanism. So, if you got a painting that looks better then what's on display in church, you were gonna get executed eventually.

Looking at religious art and thinking religion destroyed/hampered art is a hot take honestly.

If anything the opposite argument would be that without relgion art has devolved has more merit than this.

Yes, hence there being a lot of obviously pagan art at the Vatican.

> the church killed everyone that was talented and didn't join their ranks, effectively wiping out a lot of knowledge (by design)

Citation very much needed

I believe they are relating this to Church and religion, with the God almighty only giving us a short life to suffer on Earth, after which we are perished.

So ultimately, "Church" killed everyone.

You need a citation that the dark ages happened, and how they came to be? Really?

It's well documented how the Church categorized everything as witchcraft that didn't strengthen their hold back then, effectively wiping out progress all over Europe back then.

That is not how the "dark ages" came to be, and that is not how the Church functioned.

The Church didn't think witchcraft worked and saw belief in its existence as heresy! Institutionally-backed witch hunts were mostly an Early Modern phenomenon, not Medieval!

So I guess you need one? Because the dark ages came upon Europe after the fall of Rome and the following rise of power of the church back in 500-1k AD.

In the time 1100++ the church however started to be a force for progress, and that's the time y'all seem to think about.

So you attribute the golden era of Church influence, around the 12th century onwards, as the "not bad medieval era", yet the Church is somehow evil and not the new barbarian kings?

I never said the church was evil? Do you need help? You seem to be hallucinating a lot and making up random shit about strangers you know nothing about. And after throwing a casual glance at your comment history, that seems to be a common theme with you. Seeking help would likely be advisable.

The "rise of power of the church" was not the cause of and did not exacerbate the collapse of Roman state power in the Early Medieval period. It was in fact in the Early Medieval that the Church was most instrumental in propagating and preserving knowledge.

Since you seem allergic to sources, here's a pretty good layman-aimed overview of actual up-to-date historical view of the arrival of the "Dark Ages" (i.e. the Early Medieval).

https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

https://acoup.blog/2022/01/28/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

(From the narrative you put forward, I suspect your likely citation would be Gibbon. Who's... um... a bit out of date.)

I mean, you should look citations up, because any self-respecting modern historian disagrees with most "dark ages" myths you were probably taught in school. We have even traced back the myths to their origins, lots of them being propaganda by French revolutionaries and puritans

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