Required Daily: How does Early Christian and Byzantine portraiture represent both a continuation of and a break from the past? Look up the Fayum Portraits and the Ravenna Portrait of Justinian as a starting point for your thinking.
The early portraiture continue things from the past because they all depict an event that happened. Most of the modern pictures today show an event happening. They both used the resources they had at that time, and they made art. I know a few artists, and they do what they do because they love it. I am sure most artists then loved what they did too. Like the mummy's have faces pictured on them, artists painted portraits of people.
The early portraiture break from the past in many ways too. People began to express themselves more in art, and they got more creative and spontaneous. Artists began to focus more on details around the face, where in ancient art the focus was more on just depicting the scene. The resources they used differ greatly from charcoal to paint. In some old cave drawings, it is hard to tell what the artist was drawing, but in these pictures, you can clearly see the detail in each person. This is when you could also begin to see differences in race. Whether someone is taller, darker, brown haired, etc, you can tell the difference between people. Looking at the cave drawings it is impossible to tell one person from the next. The ancient pictures were basically the people's way of telling their story. In the early portraiture, the story didn't need to be told, the faces just needed to be seen. We have writers to take care of telling the story, the portrait just backs up the story. There are so many things alike about the two and a lot of things that are different between the two arts, but they each have meaning and that is why they are so important for us even today.
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