Mosaics Revealed at Ancient Greek City of Zeugma in Turkey

> Turkish government has huge success for destroying historical remainings.

That would be weird since Turkey has huge interests in those "historical remainings": tourism is one of the biggest sources of income.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly.

But is the obvious discrepancy in accepted quality of public art linked to regions or the time period? Or just the platform for the art? I.e. some illustration in a book that is copied by a novice in some monastery probably has a lower minimum standard than something like a public mosaic in a large house.

For example, this mosaic in Hagia Sophia dates from 1261 and is pretty nice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deesis_mosaic_Hagia_Sophia...

Anyway, after reading of the state of roman and greek civilazations in the antique period and observing art like in the linked article I get often the feeling that the medieval period in europe really was quite dark to the point were it skews our perception of the achievements of prior ages. Against this background renaissance does not seem like an amazing birth of human achievement but actually the period where the european civilization just got it's shit together once again.

Well, yes, but understand that most of the surviving medieval European pieces of art are icons and other religious works, which put a number of requirements on the artist that dictated a less-than-precise portrayal. It was not a general lack of talent or technical understanding. Politically more important figures had to be drawn larger than everyone else, with their heads placed higher, regardless of their more realistic height and position in the scene. Being often used as sort of religious picture books, the depth dimension is present, but often used to depict passage of time, not distance from the viewer. And for a period of time, it was considered sinful to try to "compete with God" by making things look more realistic.

And like modern software projects, the artists had to work with the employees they could find and train on their own. It does no good to design a perfectly rendered scene when the only employees you have on hand to do the grunt and fill work are recent college undergrads who have only touched PHP or Java.

What surprises me in, for example, the image of the doves drinking from that bowl is how well observed the animals appear compared to the straight lines of the edge of the slab which look like something I would draw. It's like a primary school child roughed out the straight lines and then a master artist filled in the rest.

Does it speak to the ability for the mind to overrule what one clearly sees - it's almost like some sort of platonic perfectionism.

This sort of [trompe l'oeil] mosaic work seems to me now to foreshadow impressionism: an idea I find quite interesting.