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Comment by DocG | Hacker News Reader

As artist, you would want to draw persons facing towards viewer. It makes pictures usually more compelling. When drawing correctly, you would efficiently cover half the body or rotate the person away from the viewer.

Running is awkward pose, as half the body seems to be rotated the other way always. But in a art, it is preferable to have subject moving one certain way.

So it is only natural to pose people like this, if you are uncertain how they are in real life or it does not matter. Because it is way more aesthetically and understandable for the viewer. In creek example, you could show persons genitals and upper muscular body, not only one of them.

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Yeah, the article mentions in passing that it could be artistic choice. The observations at the end, where it appears it might be more natural to take the "wrong" stance when holding a running pose is probably the main reason. Couple this with the fact that painted art is fiction (and thus not that concerned about the details), so many painters primarily use other paintings as reference and its not hard to see why this error could survive so long.

Compare this to the portrayal of guns in film for instance, or the sound in space. The survival of the erroneous portrayals in both the case of painting and film probably have very similar explanations.

The comparison with films is a good one. There is a rich vein of cinematic tropes that are unrelated to the world we live in but dramatically useful. In the movies, everyone still has an answering machine, and cars start--or don't--as if they had carburetors and distributors instead of fuel injection and electronic ignition.

That occurred to me, too. Also, it would be easier to draw the unnatural pose. For one, it straightens out the body. Two, you can have a model stand in the unnatural pose, because it's stable. Once the masters used this pose, it would have become a kind of canonical pose that later artists imitated. The opinion of an art historian would be worth hearing.

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