Why did no one draw fractals before the early 20th century?
I've heard about art that resembles fractals, but that doesn't count. What I'm talking about is stuff like Sierpinski's triangle. Surely someone must've doodled Sierpinski's triangle centuries ago, right? It seems hard to believe that even simple fractals like Sierpinski's triangle, Von Koch Curve, Peano Curve, Viscek Fractal, or the Jerusalem Cube took so long to be drawn.
Update: By drawing, I mean drawing enough iterations of the fractal on whatever surface you're using so that it is impossible to draw any more due to the thickness of your lines. Here's something I drew a few years ago as an example that's not perfect, but is good enough.
Among other things, depending what you mean by "drawing", it was simply not easy to draw such stuff until the advent of computer-assisted drawing.
I seem to recall that J. Peter Matelski (who started grad school a year or two after I did, at Princeton, c. 1974) was one of the first people to draw (one way or another) a picture of some part of the Mandelbrot set.
EDIT: in the late 1980's, I myself did "hack" my dot-matrix printer so that it could print a part of a Mandelbrot set. Had to set "characters" that were the various dots-or-not in the small print-blocks (or whatever they were called)... and also cause there to be no inter-line spacing... and so on. A fun exercise, but limited resolution.