I mean, you take one look at Greek statues and Roman busts and you realize that people figured how to aim for realism, at least when it came to the human body and faces, over 2000 years ago.
Yet, unlike sculpture, paintings and drawings remained, uh, “immature” for centuries afterwards (to my limited knowledge, it was the Italian Renaissance that started making realistic paintings). Why?
I literally just saw a video on cave paintings the other day and one of the oldest set of cave drawings ever found in France (dating almost 14,000 years ago) are some of the most detailed, and realistic depictions of animals in artwork I’ve seen.
I don’t think it took long to be realistic. It started realistic and evolved into stylization. And then looped back to realistic being cool again.