I noticed the same thing with a Roman marble statue! It was so lifelike, it felt like a real person with personality, draped with delicately light cloth about the shoulders and a keen but still vulnerable look in the eyes. It was hard to believe that it was made over a thousand years ago, and made me feel much closer as a human to both the sculptor and the model.

Each of us feels we are the ones living in a modern age, the past so distant and the future so uncertain.