Quote:
Originally posted by asaris
And the fact that he was depicted as white has more to do with the nature of medieval art than anything else. Until the renaissance, and the "Age of the World Picture", painters painted everyone (that's right, everyone, not just Jesus) as a European, most often dressed as a typical inhabitant of that reason. So a Tuscanese painter would paint Charlemagne as a Tuscan nobleman, a French painter would paint Caesar as a French nobleman, and so on. They didn't have the same sense of historicity as we do, and so were quite freely anachronistic.
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Fascinating. Would you say this was on the basis that the people wouldn't want to see such art, or that the artist was not exposed enough to the world to conceive of the possible differences?
Or indeed is there some other reason behind this fact?
Perhaps taking this point the question could ask 'why has the depiction of Jesus remained Caucasian, despite evidence to the contrary?'