Perfectly parted beards, frozen hand gestures and identical marble faces are not glitches in old painting, they are the point. Once the visual code behind them becomes visible, the supposedly solemn canvas can suddenly read like a deadpan joke.
What now looks stiff once functioned as a high‑bandwidth protocol. In court portraiture, every angle of the torso, every placement of a glove or a book, operated like a contract, broadcasting rank, property rights and moral capital. A crooked smile could signal loss of self‑control; direct eye contact could violate etiquette. Painters were not chasing psychological realism but optimizing legibility under strict constraints, a kind of social low‑entropy system that resisted ambiguity.
Religious and civic works followed similarly tight iconography. A saint had to be recognizable at a glance by attributes as standardized as traffic signs: a specific flower, a wound, a tool. Compositional rules fixed hierarchies in place, from central triangles to mandatory halos. When viewers no longer share the underlying etiquette or theology, those visual algorithms keep running, but their output looks absurdly over‑literal, like a user interface for a software that nobody uses anymore.
Contemporary audiences bring different priors: cinematic acting, candid photography, psychological nuance. The gap between that expectation and the old signaling regime creates an unintended comic effect. What feels like exaggerated costume or meme‑ready pose is simply the residue of a system where painting had to stabilize reputation, enforce decorum and reduce interpretive noise with almost bureaucratic precision.
