77 Paintings That Feel Way Ahead Of Their Time, As Shared By Art Lovers Online

Art might be hundreds of years old, but sometimes it feels surprisingly modern. From paintings that look like movie stills to portraits that could easily pass as memes today, people online have been sharing artworks that seem way ahead of their time. And honestly, some of them might just make you do a double take.

A recent Reddit thread on r/ArtHistory invited people to share old paintings that feel modern or ahead of their time. It didn’t take long for the discussion to go viral, with history and art enthusiasts flooding the comments with mind-blowing examples from different centuries. Some of these pieces really make you feel like you’re looking at something created today.

You might be surprised too, so don’t waste any more time – scroll down to check out some of the most fascinating finds from the thread we picked just for you.

Dürer’s “Hare” has always looked extremly 18-19th century to me, like Rosa Bonheur’s or George Stubbs’ works, for instance, but no, as you can very much see on the painting, it is actually from the Renaissance.

Alex Colville painted this in 1976, but it looks like a low-poly PS1 game render.

Namely for the skull.

This is a painting of a young woman pointing to a smaller painting of a butt and giggling. Apparently we’ve always been juvenile.

I saw this in an exhibition recently and it blew me away. Looks so contemporary but it’s Renaissance. Attributed to Pietro Faccini, The head of a youth, c.1590. Royal Collection Trust.

These are drawings rather than paintings, but they’re from the 13th century by a 7-year-old boy named Onfim and look very similar to the drawings kids make today. I don’t think that’s necessarily surprising, but they’re amazing little artifacts that pierce the veil of time and let us see something that feels really human in just how mundane they are. Kids’ drawings are so disposable, it’s wild to see any preserved. And moreover, to recognize 900-year-old doodles as familiar feels incredible to me. I can imagine this kid being so proud of his drawings, showing his family, friends, and neighbors on some regular afternoon in a world so different from ours.

This was made in 1955! A lot of his work looks like early computer graphics, like this one does.

I’m obsessed with this painting I saw at a gallery in Hull, UK.

Something about her face felt so modern to me that I saved this photo to my phone. How serendipitous to see this post!

Alex Colville is one of my favourites – most of his work has an uncanny photo-realism feel to it, almost like it’s a digital painting or something, even though most of his work was done in the mid-20th century, well before digital images. I’m not experienced with talking about art, so I hope that makes sense. Here is one of his most famous works, ‘Horse and Train’ from 1954. Considered to be one of the most recognizable pieces of Canadian art.

The way Vermeer rendered the buildings in ‘The Little Street’ always made me feel like it’s some real place that exists right now, not 1657. Like one of the many little streets you can still find in European towns today.

She looks like she just came back from the gym.

They were attached to the mummies of the people depicted. EDIT: What I like best is that these weren’t post-death portraits; many of the mummies died in old age, and the portraits are all of younger people. These were likely the family portraits they had when younger, like for marriage / a special ceremony. I like that these were how people chose to remember them and grieve. Maybe these portraits being entombed with their subjects was part of that process.

1655, artist unknown. Two women wearing fun shaped beauty patches, very similar to the pimple patches worn today. The patches were meant to cover blemishes and scars.

“Portrait of Bianca degli Utili Maselli and Her Children” by Lavinia Fontana, circa 1604-5. It looks like a modern-day children’s book cover or illustration to me; kinda Brett Helquist-y

I always think Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations look so 1920s and art deco and they’re about 60 years older than that.

I don’t know much about art history, but this one always struck me as too modern (Parmigianino’s “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”).

This post got me looking into other studies done by Rubens, and several of them look like modern everyday people. For example, this man just looks like some guy trying not to fall asleep while waiting for his number to be called at the DMV.

This painting was made in a time in which we still thought about dinosaurs as slow, dumb animals that dragged their tails on the ground btw.

When I saw this in the LA Museum of Art, I could not stop admiring it. And then I read the description: 1888!

1st century CE. The very first time I saw this fresco from Pompeii in a book when I was a kid, three main things impressed me: 1- there were realistic paintings in the remote time when “Jesus was on earth”, 2- there were still life paintings in that time, and 3- there were glass utensils, and they were represented in art! Plus, the colours and composition looked quite modern to my child eyes. Something similar to Cezanne, but even in his famous paintings combining peaches + pitchers, the pitchers used to be depicted as clay jars (something we used to associate more with Christ period).

“The Torment of Saint Anthony” by Michelangelo in 1487 (when he was 12 years old, apparently!). I saw this a few months ago and thought the monsters looked like they could be from some Dungeons and Dragons quest book from the early ’80s or something.

Johannes Gumpp’s self-portrait from 1646 just seemed like such a meta piece for its time.

‘Ehon mizu ya sora’ (“Picture Book of Water and Sky”), published in 1780 and illustrated by the Osaka artist known as Nichōsai. The book caricatures famous kabuki actors from Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo (Tokyo), depicting them on stage in a minimalist and humorous manner exemplary of the ‘toba-e’ style.

Anything by William Blake. All of it looks like it should be from the 20th century. This is from 1794, somehow.

Yeah, it’s quite insane how modern it feels.

Anguissola’s sibling painting. Late 16th century. Besides their clothes, this looks so contemporary, and I don’t really know why.

He would become the main inspiration for Magritte’s early works

I find that a lot of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s works read like this to me (here ‘The Annunciation’ (1898) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). His religious scenes often depict non-traditional relationships between the human and divine. In ‘The Annunciation,’ Gabriel is a bolt of light rather than a fully formed angel. His ‘Mary’ and ‘La Sainte Marie’ also seem very modern. As a Philadelphian, it always makes me proud to think of Tanner and see his works in collections worldwide. Unfortunately, he left Philly for Paris due to antebellum racism, but became the first black artist to medal at the Salon and was elected Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1923!

Okay, it’s Dürer, but his radical approach to painting his own nude body is what makes him modern. To me, it has a lot of expressionistic vibes.

Hilma Af Klint was way ahead of her time!

This guy from c. 1520 (Marx Reichlich). He looks like David from my high school Spanish class.

Everything by Hilma af Klint. Like this 1908 painting.

“Girl at the Piano: Recording Sound,” 1935, by Theodore Roszak always struck me as futuristic for the ’30s. Something about the line work? What do you think?

The use of colour in this portrait of the Kangxi emperor from 1699 always felt so modern to me somehow.

Modigliani. This is from 1909. Looks like something from the 1980s to me.

77 Paintings That Feel Way Ahead Of Their Time, As Shared By Art Lovers Online

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