I’m not an art expert or anything, but the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard is that art went through stages of technique learning, the same as any field, for things as “simple” as faces and bodies. And this surprised me because on the surface, you’d think that artists draw or paint what they see, and that technique goes into overall quality, rather than the actual ability to paint a face.

You can see this in old pictures like this with cats and babies. The babies have old people faces and the cats don’t at all look like cats. Artists collectively had to learn how to translate a baby’s face and a cat’s face onto paper, it was more than just painting what they saw.

Anyway, I’ve always thought that was an interesting tidbit.