Nuh-uh, people have been painting realistic pictures for wayy longer than that. Image Here’s a Roman painting circa 40 BC. Image This is from about 600-something AD. Image 12th or 13th century AD.

Also I think that possibly photograph-like realism may just not have been something artists aimed for, so they just created other styles that the next generation of artists learned to copy, and repeated that until someone came up with a new style.