I watched The Art of Eternity on BBC 4 last night and saw the most awful gaff by surprise surprise an Art Historian when referring to the arch of Constantine 315AD claimed that Raphael was incorrect when he wrote to the Pope expressing the idea that the Arch epitomised the decline from that great glory of Roman sculpture at the top, to the barbaric primitiveness of the post Christian relief further down. The Art Historian Andrew Graham-Dixon was supported in this strange belief by Heather Robinson, a Canadian academic. Their belief was that the somewhat feeble post Christian relief was artistically feeble because they had other priorities (religious) over and above perspective. Believe it or not I am happy to side with Raphael.

Do these people not realise, the contradiction in saying that these more primitive artists chose to dispense with perspective, and yet decided to include perspective which did not make sense.

Do they not see that the work itself is primitive and belies the idea that they were capable of better in any direction. They exhibit the classic clumsy big head little hands syndrome of primitives. This is typical of people who have not managed to understand and disentangle vision from symbols and can be seen in the work of children or visual illiterates i.e. people who have not made the necessary neural connections in the part of the brain which deals with visual literacy. This developmental deficiency is similar to that of tone deafness, dyslexia or infact clumsiness. And can be seen with MRI scanners.
The worry here is of course that the art historians contradicting Raphael are in the same boat as the primitives and are thereby not equipped to see the truth of Raphael’s statement.

It would be all well and good, if odd to say, a painter or sculptor had decided to incorporate some glaring mistake, if every other aspect shouted genius. But when every aspect of a work is screaming inadequate, primitive, then it is far to say that the work is by an inadequate primitive. Not only big head little hands syndrome, infact no understanding of proportions in general, poorly observed and executed material and anatomy, clumsy heads with big eyes etc. etc. etc.

Where as the earlier work shows a distinct artistic ability: well proportioned relationship between head, hands, eyes etc. Correct muscle definition, folds of material correctly observed etc. etc. etc.