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Early Art. HSP 3M0. Prehistoric Art . Modern humans were shocked when they first encountered pre-historic cave paintings 30, 000 Before Common Era (BCE) are oldest known cave paintings (2007 data)
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Early Art HSP 3M0
Prehistoric Art • Modern humans were shocked when they first encountered pre-historic cave paintings • 30, 000 Before Common Era (BCE) are oldest known cave paintings (2007 data) • Question for Class: When survival is such a struggle why was energy and time expended on art? What purpose do the visual representations have? What purpose do they serve? What does the art mean? • Modern Humans lived on earth for over 100,000 years but earliest “art” goes back 40,000 years (art emerged as humans move out of Africa into Europe, Asia and Australia where they encountered and displaced homo neanderthalensis)
How did art emerge? • Some argue that is was a neurological mutation related to the structure of the brain that opened up the capacity for abstract thought, and that symbolic language and representations art were a sudden development in human evolution = sudden mutation VS • Objects created were the product of lengthy and lost period of experimentation and techniques in cave paintings and in carvings = gradual and evolutionary • Thoughts???
Palaeolithic Art • Paintings, drawings and sculptures appeared over Eurasia, Africa, and Australasia between 10, 000 to 40,000 years ago (Ice Age) • -use of colour • -animals are the dominant images • -painted from memory • -demonstrates acute power of observation: bison behave in images as the do in the wild
Wounded Bison • Wounded Bison Altamira Cave, Spain 15,000-10,000 BCE • *Note the subtle shading- suggests distance • -effect of light suggests weight or volume • Cave ceiling decorated with various bison • (Example of use of earth colours)
Palaeolithic Art • The greatest variety discovered so far is in south-east France – 427 animal representations and 17 species • -use of outlining in red and black, use of shading and several colours (may have used hands to mask out paintings) • -also found finger engravings
Palaeolithic Carvings relief - a: a mode of sculpture in which forms and figures are distinguished from a surrounding plane surface b: sculpture or a sculptural form executed in this mode c: projecting detail, ornament, or figures
Palaeolithic Carvings • use of rudimentary tools on ivory (tusks, Reindeer antlers, clay) therefore arduous • Pendant, spear thrower, figures to contact spirit world?? • Women frequent subjects in pre-historic sculpture – often seeming to stress fertility (Could they be fertility charms)
Interpreting Prehistoric Painting- Ritual or religious purpose? • Magico-religious motives: • -Possible belief that image was seen as equivalent to the animal it represented, to create and posses the image was to exert power over it • -Improve success of hunt – gouge marks • -stimulate fertility (depict pregnant animals) OR • Shamanism: spirit world can be accessed through alternate states of consciousness • -if bulge in cave that looks like an animals body then the animal’s spirit is especially strong • -could drawings represent a Shamans encounter with an animal spirit? Do they represent a mythical truth? Or is it just a gory telling of a hunt? • OR • The purpose of engraving multiple animals over one another may have been to record animal migration (example of overlapping at Les TroisFreres, France)
Les TroisFreres, France-Could cave depth and location may have altered the meaning or use of the painting -Is there one set answer to explain the use/purpose of art?
Neolithic Art: • New technologies develop that suggest beginnings of specialization • New technology includes pottery (Pottery may have emerged in Mesopotamia sixth millennium BCE – by 3500 BCE pottery making appears in western Europe) • Neolithic people of western and northern Europe defined spaces for tombs and rituals with huge blocks of stone known as megaliths – mounted in a post-and-lintel arrangement (to upright stones supporting a third horizontal stone) • Using post-and-lintel arrangement they constructed tombs for the dead known as dolmen tombs • -Other sites thought to be ritual centers or function as a calendar (gauging suns position at various times of the year)
Summary: • Human beings began to express themselves visually during the prehistoric age. They left behind no written records to explain their intentions, however, and thus prehistoric art raises as many questions as it answers. Even so, by the end of the era, people had established techniques of painting, sculpting, and pottery making, and they had begun to construct monumental works of architecture. They also developed a strong sense of the power of images and spaces. They had recognition of both how to produce impressive spaces, such as those at Altamira and other caves, and how to alter space in a sophisticated way, as seen in the megaliths at Menec and elsewhere.
Palaeolithic Art • During the Stone Age, humans subsisted by hunting animals and gathering available foods. Yet they found the time – and had the need – to make art. Palaeolithic art survives mostly in two forms: paintings on cave walls and smaller objects carved from bone or stone. Its most frequent subject is the animals – most often those animals that people depended on for food. Theses renderings of animal forms are incredibly lively and naturalistic, though their function and meanings are not well understood. In comparison, when human figures are depicted, it is much more abstract.
Neolithic • During the Neolithic period, humans domesticated animals and raised their own plants for food, leading to a more settled way of life. Architecture was made from more permanent materials then in earlier Palaeolithic dwellings. The formation of human communities resulted in increased specialization and new technologies, such as pottery making. Sculptures and painted representations have evidence of developing religious practices and concern for the dead. Other innovations include large-scale stone structures for burial and other monuments, which many scholars see as tools for the marking of the passages of the seasons. • Thoughts??
