>>4372845Historical painting serves no artistic purpose. It's essentially kings saying "painting my version of my exploits in a glorious fashion, and painting my enemies as defeated and ugly, is the best thing an artist can do". Historical painting today is a bunch of dated propaganda stuffing the history books.
Scroll down, the article details how as culture evolved and euros left their dark ages that the hierarchy changed. Landscapes, animals, and natural beauty in general were elevated. Even then, the hierarchy was colored with belief in religions we now know are objectively false, untrue loads of amoral, primitive horseshit, ie: "he who paints man is great because man is created in the image of yahweh" - we can no longer buy this. Humans were not created by yahweh. Humans evolved when a bunch of monkeys made the conscious choice to live better and gradually adapted to their decision to be the kings of the plains instead of jaguar food hanging from trees.
And with the invention of photography we put the nail in historical painting. What good is historical painting, over any other way of recounting events? A negative taken at the time and place has more verisimilitude than an embellished drawing.
