How the hell did a collection of Aztec art lead a genius like Albrecht Dürer to declare, "I have seen nothing that has gladdened my heart so much as these things"? Sure, Aztec art is cute, but it doesn't even come close to European Renaissance art in terms of beauty. Is there a chance that the collection of Aztec art was actually a hoax, making use of Asian and European objects?
Imagine living before the internet and someone suddenly showed you a collection of Touhou fanart, that's probably how it felt
>>18753775Real recognizes real.
>>18753775I've never heard of this story. But maybe I can answer."Hyper-realism" isn't necessarily the "goal" of art. Tons of people today can make more hyper-realistic drawings and paintings better than Durer ever did. If looking as realistic as possible was the goal, the camera would have made all art obsolete by the 1900s. However, with the birth of the camera came the birth of abstract art. Abstract art was a form of art that a camera could never capture. Good artists are always trying to adapt to the outside world.Now apply that thinking to someone like Durer. Having access to a new form of art, foreign from another continent, probably ticked his fancy and gave him all sorts of new ideas, forms, styles, imaginations, etc etc that he could introduce into his own art style. Maybe even seeing a form of art, not influenced by any Old World style, excited him? Who knowsAlso hes probably being hyperbolic for the sake of poetical flavor in whatever he's saying. Lots of people did that back then.
>>18753775Because Aztec art wasn't just funny blocky drawings and stone carvings. It also included mosaics and objects woven from brightly colored iridescent feathers (pic related, an early colonial Christian example) as well as things like statues (which occasionally got fairly naturalistic) painted in a very specific aesthetically pleasing but decidedly unnatural color pallett that gave off a very psychedelic vibe. Mix it up with everything said in the posts above and you have an impressed Renaissance man.
>>18753775Northern Europeans are enthused by nonwhites easily
