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Originally Posted by willravel
Read a book maybe? Travel? There were Arabs in Europe even before 0 B.C., one could easily seek them out. The idea is that when you depict a historical character, you make SOME effort to make them look at least something like the original. Not doing so is massively lazy, and also ignorant as they assume the people who view their art are discerning enough to figure out that they are just painting some dude and calling him Jesus.
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That may be the idea NOW, but it wasn't then. You're looking at history (and art history in particular) with revisionist glasses. What started out as a tool for recruitment turned into the standard of the day and then tradition. By the time the Renassiance rolled around, I'm sure most artists didn't even give it thought. After all, most of them were working without access to most of the information we have today about the actual conditions in Palestine at the birth of Christ. If you've ever taken an historigraphy course, you know what I mean. Accurate histories are a very recent invention.
Quote:
Originally Posted by willravel
I'm saying they were idiots. I've stopped, thought, and agreed with myself. Had they been trying to make a political statement painting or depicting Jesus as a white man, I'd call them each and all brilliant and way ahead of their time. The simple fact of the matter is that was not the case.
Also, just because someone can paint does not make them smart. It makes them talented or skillful, but not smart. Da Vinci would be the obvious exception, BUT eve though he was a brilliant inventor and free thinker, he can't figure out that Jesus wasn't white? It's ignorance and lazyness.
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Here's what I don't get - you're admitting that any artist that depicted Jesus as an Arab (or anything other than white) would be "way ahead of their time", yet you've cast the entirety of artists from Medieval times up to about 30-40 years ago as "idiots". Any artist that did anything "lazy" or "ignorant" according to your definition is resigned to idiocy, and I just can't accept that in any way, shape or form. You may not like the fact that it was the practice of the day, but that in no way makes the artists in question idiots. Are you going to find it acceptable if I say that anyone who didn't accept gay marriage as an exact equal to heterosexual marriage AND go against the grain to make a reality an idiot? That would include lots of very smart people who are dead, including Kennedy, Edison and Einstein. So, are some of the brightest minds ever idiots because they don't agree with you (who has the benefit of hindsight and a worldview that encompasses the globe instead of a city)? What may be the accepted practice of the future in no way condemns those in the past.
Basically it seems to me that you're practicing the same bigotry that you find so distasteful in Fundamentalists.