Sort of. What it means is that something that is depicted must, necessarily, have been around for a while. Might be a year, might be a decade. Appearance in art can only tell you that the thing existed prior to the date of the art.
Of course, if a person appears all decked out in his finery in a portrait you can reasonably assume that what you see is a reasonably accurate representation of that person and his possessions at that time. But that is a trivial observation. What it tells you is that the technology to create the weave of the cloth that he is wearing must have been developed before that date. It tells you that the form of a weapon was around for some period of time prior to the depiction of it in the piece. It tells you nothing about when those things were first developed, only that they were there then. And it certainly does not provide a definitive date of a form of an object, only that that form was in existence when the art was created. That is why you often see the phrase "Before such and such a date" in museum identification cards.
That is what I mean by terminus ante quem:
"Terminus post quem ("limit after which", often abbreviated to TPQ[1]) and terminus ante quem ("limit before which") specify the known limits of dating for events. A terminus post quem is the earliest time the event may have happened, and a terminus ante quem is the latest. An event may well have both a terminus post quem and a terminus ante quem, in which case the limits of the possible range of dates are known at both ends, but many events have just one or the other. Similarly, terminus ad quem ("limit to which") is the latest possible date of a non-punctual event (period, era, etc.), while terminus a quo ("limit from which") is the earliest."
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