When artists in the Middle Ages or Renaissance or the Early Modern Era or even 19th century made drawings, paintings, sculptures, busts, or whatnot of people from centuries before, or even from like in Classical Antiquity, did they usually try to find primary source or firsthand descriptions and writings of the person (or even older representations, if available) to be more accurate? Or was it often completely arbitrary and they just came up with their own idealized depiction of what that person would have looked like, in some fanciful way? It's true in the height of the Greco-Roman world there were many actual busts of people from the era or at least nearby in time, but as the Dark Ages commenced this almost disappeared. Yet there are all these romanticized depictions of barbarian kings like Charlemagne, Clovis, the various Visigothic or Anglo-Saxon kings, Attila, etc.
I also noticed until the last few centuries, especially in the Middle Ages or Renaissance there was a tendency to anachronistically depict ancient people with the dress and armor of the day the artists lived, as if they no longer knew what they actually wore originally.
Ok... was the question not worded clearly/simply enough or what?
I mean like what made people choose a certain look for a depiction of someone in the distant past when they didn't have info on them? I imagine they often idealized them in some kind of romanticized way of viewing the past and its kings and heroes. You don't really see epic sculptures of fat, short, bald, hunchbacked kings and rulers, even if they may have been so in reality.
Some of the early medieval rulers have statues that are totally at odds with descriptions of what they were actually like. Like for various ones for kings of Spain; they just kind of made them generic, fit muscular, bearded, same kinds of armor, etc. And if they were going to make them all so generic looking and inaccurate, what was the point of even making these statues in the 16th-19th centuries... just to indicate these people existed and were human lol?