Gaul Atreides (@gaulatreides)

True, I've wondered about that as well. The technique evident in this 13th Century illustration is comically juvenile. Why was so much Medieval art so bad? Turns out there are many answers to that question. One, most Medievel Europeans were simply bad artists, just like most people today are bad artists. A lot of the lowbrow and middlebrow graphic illustrations drawn back then were done by random joes, who felt the spirit, but not the painter's brush, move them. There were talented Medieval painters but their works were less common and usually hanging in some rich aristocrat's castle. Two, the rules of perspective didn't get formally established until the early 15th Century in Italy. Untrained amateur painters and illustrators before that time would not have been acquainted with proper rendering techniques. Three, there is a lot of great Medieval art, but it was usually found in decorative works like book bindings or music boxes, not so much in painting. Four, it is possible that Europeans lost a lot of Greco-Roman realistic painting techniques after the fall of Rome. Five, there is a theory that Medieval Europeans held the belief that realistic paintings using perspective were "an affront to God", becaue it hubristically mimicked God's creation. This is a controversial theory, though, because realistic paintings were created during that time.