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IMHO, the large number of subjects, their posing, the oddly disjointed direction of their gazes, the stiffly frozen action of the subjects, the props & set dressing, their makeup, and the unusual lighting contributes enormously to the appearance of a painting with little basis in reality. 

When have you last seen a photo where the basic content looked like this.  Contrast this to the huge number of classic paintings with these attributes, e.g., http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/thumbnail/99386/1/The-Marriage-Of-The-Virgin-1513.jpg

IMHO, these are much more important factors contributing to the painterly look than mechanistic aspects like contrast, colorizing / degrees of saturation, etc.

T