Historians can learn a great deal about a culture from the ways in which its visual artists and sculptors depicted the human figure. For centuries, artists had been struggling to capture the appearance of human beings realistically. The Sumerians showed people who all looked more or less the same. Although the Egyptians managed to portray a variety of human types, they were confined by their two-dimensional treatment of space.
This development of realism in a particular culture can be compared with the way that a child learns how to draw people: first with scribbles, then stick-figures. Ultimately, something that looks like a person appears. Along the way, the child picks up all kinds of details: eyes are not just dots, nor mouths just lines. To draw a face requires careful study. As the child matures, his or her ability to "see" matures as well.
So it is with a civilization. Western realism in art reached its height in Greece and Rome but would decline along with the Roman Empire. As the glory of Rome gave way to the Middle Ages, portraits of people again began to take on an unrealistic appearance: already by the 300s and 400s, human figures in sculpture were starting to look more or less the same. This also signified a loss of individual identity that came with the "Dark Ages," a time when the great masses of people were subject to the church and to feudal lords.
With the support of what remained of the army, declared himself king of Italy. He sent the imperial standard, a symbol which had once meant a great deal in Rome's glory days, to the eastern emperor Zeno. Zeno recognized him as a vassal king, and the troubled history of the late Roman Empire ended.
World History
