4 ideas
An image can be read backwards from its surface to the physical decisions that produced it: the medium, the tool, the speed of the hand, and the order in which marks were laid down. Asking how something was made, rather than only what it depicts or symbolizes, shows which effects were deliberate, which were imposed by the material, and where the maker's skill or struggle lies.
In the Chauvet cave in southern France, painters working over 30,000 years ago drew horses, lions and rhinoceroses. They often placed the animals so that bulges and hollows in the cave wall became flank, shoulder or head, and they used shading and overlapping outlines to suggest mass and movement. This shows that sophisticated, deliberate image-making appears at the very start of the archaeological record rather than developing gradually from crude beginnings.
Artistic styles are not sealed national or civilizational properties. They develop when trade, conquest and religious missions carry forms between cultures.
Single-point linear perspective, codified in Renaissance Italy, is one solution among several for putting a three-dimensional world onto a flat surface. It is not the correct endpoint that other cultures failed to reach. Chinese handscrolls with shifting viewpoints and Egyptian figures combining profile and frontal views each encode different priorities: movement through time, completeness of information, or the fixed position of a single viewer.