ELI5: Why Do Medieval Paintings Look Flat?

Medieval paintings look flat because the artists were trying to tell an important story rather than take a realistic snapshot like a modern camera.

Think about drawing a picture of your family today. If you draw your dad twice as tall as your house just to show he is the boss of the barbecue, you are using the same trick medieval artists used. In everyday medieval life, people did not care if a table looked 3D, like you could put a glass on it. Instead, they cared about what the painting was trying to teach them, especially since most ordinary people could not read books.

Here is why their paintings turned out so flat:

• Importance over distance: Today, things far away look tiny. Back then, painters used a trick where the most important person—like a king, a queen, or an angel—was drawn huge, while ordinary farm workers or soldiers were drawn tiny, even if they were standing right in front.
• No painted shadows: To make an apple look round, you need to paint a dark shadow on one side. Medieval artists filled in shapes with solid, bright colors because their goal was to make the symbols easy to see across a dark, candlelit room.
• Missing math tricks: Artists back then had not yet practiced the math rules of linear perspective, which is the trick of making roads and fences get narrower as they head toward the horizon.
• Focus on heaven, not earth: In everyday medieval thought, the physical world was just temporary, but heaven was forever. Painters did not want viewers to get distracted by real dirt, depth, or grass. Instead, they often painted plain, flat backgrounds made of pure gold leaf to show that the scene belonged to a magical, holy world rather than a real backyard.