I feel I have asked the question clumsily, but with artists today capturing photo-realistic images in paint, why do painted and carved images throughout history look so rudimentary?
Were the artists limited by their tools and materials? Or, might there have been a psychological hurdle that early artists had to get over having seen few if any artistic images in their lives?
The way people read and interpret images is culturally learned, and the function of images was not always to create an illusion of deep space.
For example, in a lot of medieval art, things happening higher on the page were interpreted as being further in space although the scale would not change. Figures may be repeated within the same frame to show a passage of time, like a comic strip. Architectural elements would be drawn parallel rather than meeting a vanishing point because that is the truth of how they exist in reality, not how they are perceived by the human eye (similar case for Japanese screen painting or Persian manuscripts). Also, figures may be scaled based on their cultural importance or political power rather (hierarchical scale). Things may "tilt up" and flatten out, which validates the flatness of the surface. Many modern painters in the 20th Century were drawn to pre-Renaissance art because it acknowledge its flatness, which is an essential quality unique to the medium of painting. Check out Paul Klee for example.
So although perspective, which emulates the physiological process of seeing, was "invented" during the Renaissance, it's not necessarily that early Europeans or non-western cultures were incapable of making "photo-realistic" art. They may see their art as more "real" than a photographic image because of how they interpret it and its cultural significance.
Suggested read: [E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation] (https://www.worldcat.org/title/art-and-illusion-a-study-in-the-psychology-of-pictorial-representation/oclc/772510&referer=brief_results)
I have an MFA in painting, so have studied a lot of Art History, but I'm not a scholar.
Edit: link update per sub rules.
I think this questions rests on a misapprehension; that historical art looks "bad". Most history of art books begin with the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira. Even these are highly accomplished depictions of bison and deer and other animals. It's obvious that the people who created them were highly skilled and had a very finely developed aesthetic sense.
All cultures since have had their own aesthetic style, and their own styles of two-dimensional representation. I don't know how you can possibly look at, say, a Maori carving, or a Medieval manuscript, or a page of the Book of Kells, and say that it looks bad or rudimentary. To me it looks almost unbelievably accomplished and complicated, to the point that there isn't anyone alive today who could duplicate it.
People on Reddit seem very impressed with photo-realism, but it's not as difficult as people seem to suppose. It's a kind of painting that depends wholly on the mechanical invention of the camera, and so couldn't have been conceived of before a very recent date.
So, a follow-up question: What is an example of historical art that you think looks bad, or rudimentary? Even African masks, say, have a ritual function which they exist to fulfil, and it might be better if they stay simple, which might not chime with our western aesthetic sense. But the fact that they are simple doesn't make them any less art objects.
And the "photographic" way of seeing the world is only one way of seeing it, no less valid than any other, and a very recent invention. Anyone who has ever painted from life and from a photograph will tell you how different the camera sees things from the eye. Even very good cameras see things differently from the human eye. The photograph corresponds closely with reality, but it actually doesn't correspond exactly with what the eye sees, even very high-definition megapixel cameras.
So what I'm saying is that the "photographic" way of seeing and looking at things is just as much a culturally-determined habit as the way of looking at the world that led to the flat perspective-less drawings in medieval manuscripts. They're both artificial.
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What about architectural drawings? Would architects render buildings in 3-d or would they have used flat design?