Why are the ancient portraits in textbooks so fat now? Are they really like that?

Nowadays, the portraits of ancient people in textbooks are very fat, but they were not like this at that time. Many portraits in history books are drawn by combining the background of the times, the status of the characters and people's imagination.

From junior high school to senior high school, the portraits of ancient people in history textbooks are very fat and not very beautiful. If you look closely, you will find that they are very similar, but the people in the portrait are not like the people in the book at that time. The portraits of ancient characters in textbooks use traditional imagery. This kind of painting is not based on real and objective things. At that time, the emphasis was on the integration of ink painting, and painting was mainly based on images. The ancient portraits in textbooks are all fat, because people think that a fat body will have a solemn and powerful momentum. Most of the portraits in textbooks are generals or princes and nobles. If the painting is thin, it will look very ugly. Even if they were really thin at that time, painting poems would make them fat. The portraits we see in books now are all drawn by painters according to their own meaning and the background of the times at that time, not to say that the ancient Chinese characters at that time grew like that.

Many portraits of ancient people were manually drawn according to the background of the times at that time. For example, in the Tang Dynasty, fatness was beauty, and many studios combined the background of that era to make ancient figure paintings fatter to cater to everyone's aesthetics. In addition, at that time, not everyone was qualified for painters to draw portraits, so many people's portraits were formed by reference. As long as one person's portrait is fat, there is a chance that other people's portraits are fat, so we can always see that ancient portraits are all fat and very similar.

We don't even know what the ancients looked like. Everything can only be drawn by our own imagination and understanding, so we can't determine whether they really look like that through the portraits in the textbooks.