I think I know what you mean, and surface texture effects on light/shadow are certainly lost in most captures. Even when effort is made to capture 3D/depth info

I think I know what you mean, and surface texture effects on light/shadow are certainly lost in most captures. Even when effort is made to capture 3D/depth information it is difficult to show. In fact, I would say that the most likely point of loss is actually your monitor. Even if web formats (like "theartnewspaper.com") have tiny unexpandable images there's no reason not to have barely compressed images at much higher resolutions and high bit depth. PC monitors are usually lower resolution than you can see, while their color accuracy and contrast range are notoriously poor. 8-bit sRGB is simply not able to carry visible color gamut and contrast without loss. I'd recommend only using TVs or very high end monitors for viewing something like art. The captured data is likely much higher resolution (e.g. >1000ppi) and scanned in Raw with 36bit (12bit RGB) color. It's possible to screw up, but there's not a lot of reason to. The new 10 bit HDR standards (Rec2020 etc) are much better and can come close to human visible range without gamma compression. If you stand at the right distance from a 4k OLED or better a 6k XDR Pro Display rotated to the correct aspect ratio, you can approach what the eye is capable of... if view tracking and light source modeling were used you might even start to emulate some depth.