art history - basic

8/11/2019 Art History - Basic

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History has no natural divisions. A woman living in Florence in the 15th century did not think of

herself as a woman of the Renaissance. Historians divide history into large and small units in

order to make characteristics and changes clear to themselves and to students. Its important to

remember that any historical period is a construction and a simplification. Below are some

important basics to get you started.

As you read the timeline below, please keep in mind that equally momentous developments have

occurred in Africa, Asia, the Americas and in the Pacific.

Prehistoric (before c. 3000 B.C.E.)

The term prehistoric refers to the time before written history. In the West, writing was

invented in ancient Mesopotamia just before 3000 B.C.E., so this period includes visual culture

(paintings, sculpture, and architecture) made before that date. The oldest decorative forms we

can recognize as art come from Africa and may date back to 100,000 B.C.E. In contrast, the

oldest cave paintings known are about 40,800 years old, and although we used to think that only

our species, Homo Sapiens, made artanthropologists now speculate that Neanderthals may

have made at least some of these very early images.

The Neolithic revolution, one of the most profound developments in all of human history, occurs

during the Prehistoric Era. This is when our ancestors learned to farm and domesticate animals,

allowing them to give up their nomadic ways, and settle down to build cities and civilizations.


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Ancient (c. 3000 B.C.E. to c. 400 C.E.)

This period includes the great early civilizations of the ancient Near East (think Babylonia),

ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, the Etruscans, and the Romanseverything that comes after the

invention of writing and before the fall of the Roman Empire. Keep in mind the disintegration of

the Roman Empire took centuries, but to simplify, c. 400 will do.

It was during this period that the ancient Greeks first applied human reason to their observations

of the natural world and created some of the earliest naturalistic images of human beings. This

period is often credited with the birth of Western philosophy, mathematics, theater, science, and

democracy. The Romans in turn created an empire that extended across most of Europe, and all

the lands that surround the Mediterranean Sea. They were expert administrators and engineers

and they saw themselves as the inheritors of the great civilizations that came before them,

particularly, Greece and Egypt (which they conquered).

Its important to remember that althoughhistory is often presented as a series of discrete stories,

in reality narratives often overlap making history both more complex and more interesting. Forexample, it was also during the Roman Empire that the historical figure we now call Jesus Christ

lived. Jesus and his apostles were Jewish men living in what is today Israel, but which was then

part of the Roman Empire.

Middle Ages (c. 400 C.E. to c. 1400 C.E.)

The first half of this thousand-year period witnessed terrible political and economic upheaval in

Western Europe, as waves of invasions by migrating peoples destabilized the Roman Empire.

The Roman emperor Constantine established Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) as a new


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capital in the East in 330 C.E. and the Western Roman Empire broke apart soon after. In the

Eastern Mediterranean, the Byzantine Empire (with Constantinople as its capital), flourished.

Christianity spread across what had been the Roman Empire; even among migrating invaders

(Vandals, Visigoths, etc.). The Christian Church, headed by the Pope, emerged as the most

powerful institution in Western Europe, the Orthodox Church dominated in the East.

It was during this period that Islam, one of the three great monotheistic religions, was born.

Within little more than a century of the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 C.E., Islam had

become an empire that stretched from Spain across North Africa, the Middle and Near East, to

India. Medieval Islam was a leader in science and technology and established some of worlds

great centers of learning (i.e. Cordoba). Islamic culture played an important role in preserving

and translating ancient Greek texts at a time when much of the knowledge created during the

ancient world was lost.

Petrarch (a writer who lived in the 1300s) described the early Medieval period as the "Dark

Ages" because to him it seemed to be a period of declining human achievement, especially whenhe compared it to the Ancient Greeks and Romans. The Middle Ages got its name because

Renaissance scholars saw it as a long barbaric period that separated them from the great

civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome that they both celebrated and emulated.

Medieval society was organized into clearly defined strata. At the top was the king. Below were

lesser nobles. These lords in turn, ruled over peasants and serfs (the vast majority of the

population). Serfs were laborers who were permanently bound to work the land owned by their

lord. The basic unit of this system, known as Feudalism, was the lord/vassal relationship. The

vassal would provide labor (in the fields or in battle) to the lord in exchange for land and

protection. Mobility between strata was very rare.


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Of course, the thousand years of the Middle Ages saw the creation of many great works of art

and literature, but they were different from what Petrarch valued. The works of art created in the

Middle Ages were largely focused on the teachings of the Church.

It is important to remember that during the Middle Ages it was rare that anyone except members

of the clergy (monks, priests, etc.) could read and write. Despite expectations that the world

would end in the year 1,000, Western Europe became increasingly stable, and this period is

sometimes referred to as the Late (or High) Middle Ages. This period saw the renewal of large

scale building and the re-establishment of sizable towns. Monasteries, such as Cluny, became

wealthy and important centers of learning.

Within the Middle Ages, there are subdivisions in art history, including Early Christian,

Byzantine, Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque and Gothic. When we look closely at much of

the art and politics of the 1,000 years of the Middle Ages, we find a complex and ongoing

relationship with the memory and legacy of the ancient Roman empire and this is the foundation

for the Renaissance.

Renaissance (c. 1400 to 1600)

In part, the Renaissance was a rebirth of interest in ancient Greek and Roman culture. It was also

a period of economic prosperity in Europeparticularly in Italy and in Northern Europe. In art

history, we study both the Italian Renaissance and the Northern Renaissance. We talk about a

way of looking at the world called Humanism, whichat its most basicplaced renewed value

on human knowledge, and the experience of this world (as opposed to focusing largely on the

heavenly realm), using ancient Greek and Roman literature and art as a model.


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There are only a handful of moments in history that we can point to that changed everything. The

invention and adoption of the printing press was certainly one. As a result of the wider

availability of books, literacy rates in Europe dramatically increased. Readers were empowered

and in many ways we can trace the origin of our own information revolution to 15th-century

Germany and Gutenbergs first printing press.

In 1517 a German theologian and monk, Martin Luther, challenged the authority of the Pope and

sparked the Protestant Reformation. His ideas spread quickly, thanks in part to the printing press.

By challenging the power of the Church, and asserting the authority of individual conscience (it

was increasingly possible for people to read the bible in the language that they spoke), the

Reformation laid the foundation for the value that modern culture places on the individual.

It is also during this period that the Scientific Revolution began and observation replaced

religious doctrine as the source of our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Copernicus up-ended the ancient Greek model of the heavens by suggesting that the sun was at

the center of the solar system and that the planets orbited in circles around it. However, there

were still problems with getting this theory to match observation. At the beginning of the 17thcentury, Kepler theorized (correctly!) that the planets moved in elliptical orbits (not circular

ones) and that the speed of the orbits varied according to the planets distance from the sun. So

much for the ideal geometries of the Greeks!

Early Modern (c. 1600 - 1800)

It might seem strange to date the beginning of the "modern era" to so long ago, but in many ways

it was the scientific, political and economic revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries that have

most shaped our own society.


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Art historians study the Baroque style of the 17th century. This was a time of extended and often

violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants made all the more complex because of the

growing power of the Europes great monarchies. It was a time when nations grew in size,

wealth and autonomy and when national boundaries were hardened, prefiguring the countries we

know today (France, Spain and England for example). This was also a period of colonization,

when European powers divided and exploited the worlds people and natural resources for their

own benefit.

The 1700s is often called the Enlightenment. In many ways, it furthers the interest in the

individual seen in the Italian Renaissance and more widely during the Protestant Reformation.

Thinkers such as Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot asserted our ability to reason for ourselves

instead of relying on the teachings of established institutions, such as the Church. In art history

we study the Rococo and Neoclassical styles.

The American and French Revolutions date to this period. The emerging middle classes (and

later the working-classes) began a centuries-long campaign to gain political power, challenging

the control of the aristocracy and monarchy. Successive reform movements (in this period andthe 19th century) and revolutions gradually extended the franchise (the right to vote). Previously

suffrage had been limited to males who owned land or who paid a certain amount in taxes. It was

only in the second half of the 19th and the 20th centuries that universal suffrage became the

norm in Europe and North America.

Modern (after c. 1800)

Capitalism became the dominant economic system during this period (though it had its roots in

the Renaissance). Individuals risked capital to produce goods in a currency-based market which

depended on inexpensive, waged labor. Labor eventually organized into unions (latter-day


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guilds) and in this way, asserted considerable influence. More broadly shared political power

was bolstered by overall increases in the standard of living and the first experiments in public

education.

Steam-powered machines and unskilled laborers in factories began to replace skilled artisans.

London, Paris, and New York led the unprecedented population growth of cities during this

period, as people moved from the countryside or emigrated to find a higher standard of living.

The 20th Century was the most violent in history. It included two world wars, the Cold War, the

dismantling of colonialism and the invention of the Totalitarian state. Dictators (Mussolini,

Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, the successive leaders of North Korea, etc.) imposed extreme

political systems that caused mass starvation, mass dislocations and genocide. At the same time,

the 20th Century was marked by the struggle for human rights and the rise of global capitalism.

Where artists had previously worked under the instructions of wealthy patrons associated with

the church or state, in this period, art became part of the market economy, and art itself came to

be seen as personal self-expression. The high value placed on the individual, which emerged inancient Greece and Rome and then again in the Renaissance, became the primary value of

Western culture. Where artistic styles (for example, Baroque) had once covered numerous artists

working over broad regions and periods of time, in the late Nineteenth and through the 20th

Century, successive styles of art change with increasing speed and fracture into a kaleidoscope of

individual artistic practices.

Where do we fit in?

We are immersed in our own time and it can be difficult to see the world around us objectively.

One of the modern definitions of an artist, in fact, is someone who is particularly insightful about


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their own cultural moment. Thanks to global capitalism, social media and the internet, we are

more interconnected and interdependent than at any other time in history. Some see this as a

utopian moment. With internet access, we can all contribute to and benefit from what is being

called the Information Revolution. For others, the prevalence of technology in our lives threatens

our individuality and privacy, and reduces us to a data point that can be monetized by

corporations like Facebook, Google, and Apple. One thing is certain, throughout the time periods

sketched above, art has meant different things, and it is likely to be differently defined in the

future.

The history of humanity is recorded in our visual culture. Like the fate of previous civilizations,

time will eventually destroy much of the visual culture that we are familiar with today. Future art

historians will seek to reconstruct the world we now live in, to better understand the nuanced

meanings that are so familiar to us. Perhaps someday an art historian will puzzle over an internet

meme, a Torqued Ellipse by Richard Serra, or school-yard graffiti.

Common questions about dates


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How long has our calendar been around?

We are writing this on 12/26/12 or Wednesday, December 26, 2012. Traditionally understood as

two-thousand and twelve years (give or take a few) after Jesus Christ is believed to have been

born. But if Jesus used a calendar, it would not have been the one we use.

Our calendar is called the Gregorian calendar and was instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.

There are many other calendars. Quite a few societies have used calendars linked to the years

their kings ruled. And there are numerous calendars, beyond the Gregorian calendar, that are still

in use today. For example, 2012 equates to 1434/35 in the Islamic calendar and 5772-73 in the

Jewish calendar (both are lunar, based on the cycles of the moon).

B.C. or B.C.E.?

Many people use the abbreviations B.C. and A.D. with a year (for example, A.D. 2012). B.C.

refers to "Before Christ," and the initials, A.D., stand forAnno Domini, which is Latin for "In theyear of our Lord." This system was devised by a monk in the year 525.

A more recent system uses B.C.E. which stands for "Before the Common Era" and C.E. for

"Common Era." This newer system is now widely used as a way of expressing the same periods

as B.C. and A.D., but without the Christian reference. According to these systems, we count time

backwards Before the Common Era (B.C.E.) and forwards in the Common Era (C.E.).

Circa?


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Often dates will be preceded with a "c." or a "ca." These are abbreviations of the Latin word

"circa" which means around, or approximately. We use this before a date to indicate that we do

not know exactly when something happened, so c. 400 B.C.E. means approximately 400 years

Before the Common Era.

Why 2012 is in the 21st Century

We live in the 21st Century, that is, the 2000s. Similarly when we say "20th Century," we are

referring to the 1900s. All this because, according to the calendar we use, the 1st Century

included the years 1-99 (there was no year zero), and the 2nd Century, the years 100-199.

Similarly, when we say 2nd Century B.C.E. we are referring to the years 100-199 B.C.E.

Within our calendar, we also have a tendency to find portentous meaning in the millennial years,

that is, in the years 1000 and more recently, 2000.

What maps tell us

When we think of maps we often assume they are scientifically objective tools that help us get

from here to there, that they are telling us truths about the world in which we live. However,

maps are subjective, and like any form of art and design they have stories to tell and reveal a lot

about the times in which they were produced. The most successful maps are selective, leaving in

information that is important to the agenda of the cartographer and excluding the chaos of other

details that are irrelevant to the narrative. There is a beautiful economy of design to a good map,

and many maps can help us decode the belief systems of its audience.


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Political Map of the World, August 2013, CIA Sourcebook

Is North Always Up?

In the 21st century, particularly if one lives in the Northern Hemisphere, we assume maps to be

oriented north up. But this is a recent convention that is not consistent with maps produced up

through the sixteenth century when Europe became the center of map production and a global

power during the age of exploration and put itself at the top of the world.

The most important part of a map for the intended user tends to be at the top, and in the Middle

Ages, this often reflected religious rather than political points of view.


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Some Alternatives

Consider this medieval T-O map based on the 7th century writings of Isidore of Seville, the

Archibishop of Seville, Spain. According to the Bible, after the great flood had destroyed all life

not preserved on the Ark, the three sons of Noah (Shem, Japeth, and Ham), were sent off to the

known continents to repopulate and rule the earth. Shem went to Asia, Ham to Africa, and Japeth

to Europe. On the map below, the T is made of the known important bodies of water that

separate the continents: Europe and Africa are divided by the vertical line of the Mediterranean;

and the horizontal line represents the Don, the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Nile. The

entire world is surrounded by the O of the great ocean.

Isidore of Seville,Etymologiae,

printed by Gnther Zainer, Augsburg, 1472


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In this type of map, such as in theEbstorf Mapillustrated below, Jerusalem is typically placed at

the center of the world as the birthplace of Christianity and the East (also called the Orient) is at

the top, as this was the location of the Garden of Eden and the origin of man. We still use the

word orientation when weare trying to find our way based on this early European cartographic

tradition.

Gervase of Ebstorf,Ebstorf

Map, manuscript map on goat skin, 3.6m x 3.6m, 13th century. Originally in the Ebstorf convent, but destroyed in

1943 during WWII

A wonderful example of a medieval map of the world, or mappa mundi, is the Ebstorf Map made

in the 13th century (above). In this map, the T-O model is used but here the world has actually

become the body of Christ. If you look carefully, you can see his hands extending out to the

sides, his feet at the bottom, and his head at the top in the East, next to a small image of the

Garden of Eden. Jerusalem is represented as the belly button of the world and in the center of


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Christ, and the picture is filled with images of stories from the Bible and their relationship to the

known world. This map not only reveals the geo-spiritual belief systems of the medieval world

but is also a visual encyclopedia of Christian narratives.

While medieval Christians were placing east at the top, early Islamic cartographers spun the

world to a south orientation. Five times a day a faithful Muslim is required to pray facing Mecca.

Intricate and beautiful instruments called astrolabes were adapted from the Persians and modified

by Muslims to help determine not only the time of prayer, but also the direction of Mecca from

ones current location.

In a map by the influential Arabic cartographer Al-Idrisi, the world again reflects a circle in a T-

O model, but the world is represented with south at the top, and Mecca, (in what is now Saudi

Arabia), is at the center of the world. The world is represented as a circle surrounded by ocean.

The peninsulas of Spain and Italy are in the lower right, and in Africa the Mountains of the

Moon are shown as the source of the Nile. The Arabian Sea is in the upper left and the Caspian

and Black Seas are also included. The map is decorated with mountain ranges and rivers, and

includes the great wall containing the legendary Gog and Magog in the lower left, a mischievousand dangerous people fenced off from the rest of the world until the end of the world according

to Islamic, Christian, and Jewish tradition.


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Al-Idrisi,Mappa Mundi, Oxford

Pococke Manuscript, Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS. Pococke 375, fols. 3c-4r)

Maps tell stories, not facts

Maps are narratives that tell a story of the time and people of their origin, even the modern

Google Earth is a product of subjective choices of visual signs and symbols of our time. These

seemingly objective maps, like any other, involve selections of information, human editing, and

a visual language legible to the current end user.

Next time you are looking at the standard map of the world oriented to the north, consider the

20th century Upside-Down Map of the World published in New Zealand. Tired of being put on


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maps "down under," New Zealand and Australia are at the top and the effect is jarring; our sense

of orientation all depends on your point of view.

By Dr. Christina Connett

What is Cultural Heritage?

Leonardo da Vinci,Mona Lisa, c. 1503-05, oil on panel 30-

1/4 x 21 inches (Muse du Louvre)

We often hear about the importance of cultural heritage. But what is cultural heritage? And

whose heritage is it? Whose national heritage, for example, does theMona Lisaby Leonardo da

Vinci belong to? Is it French or Italian?


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First of all, lets have a look at the meaning of the words. Heritage is a property, something

that is inherited, passed down from previous generations. In the case of cultural heritage, the

heritage doesnt consist of money or property, but of culture, values and traditions. Cultural

heritage implies a shared bond, our belonging to a community. It represents our history and our

identity; our bond to the past, to our present, and the future.

Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage

Cultural heritage often brings to mind artifacts (paintings, drawings, prints, mosaics, sculptures),

historical monuments and buildings, as well as archaeological sites. But the concept of cultural

heritage is even wider than that, and has gradually grown to include all evidence of human

creativity and expression: photographs, documents, books and manuscripts, and instruments, etc.

either as individual objects or as collections. Today, towns, underwater heritage, and the natural

environment are also considered part of cultural heritage since communities identify themselves

with the natural landscape.

Moreover, cultural heritage is not only limited to material objects that we can see and touch. It

also consists of immaterial elements: traditions, oral history, performing arts, social practices,

traditional craftsmanship, representations, rituals, knowledge and skills transmitted from

generation to generation within a community.

Intangible heritage therefore includes a dizzying array of traditions, music and dances such as

tango and flamenco, holy processions, carnivals, falconry, Viennese coffee house culture, the

Azerbaijani carpet and its weaving traditions, Chinese shadow puppetry, the Mediterranean diet,

Vedic Chanting, Kabuki theatre, the polyphonic singing of the Aka of Central Africa (to name a

few examples).


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The Importance of Protecting Cultural Heritage

But cultural heritage is not just a set of cultural objects or traditions from the past. It is also the

result of a selection process: a process of memory and oblivion that characterizes every human

society constantly engaged in choosingfor both cultural and political reasonswhat is worthy

of being preserved for future generations and what is not.

All peoples make their contribution to the culture of the world. Thats why its important to

respect and safeguard all cultural heritage, through national laws and international treaties. Illicit

trafficking of artifacts and cultural objects, pillaging of archaeological sites, and destruction of

historical buildings and monuments cause irreparable damage to the cultural heritage of a

country. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), founded

in 1954, has adopted international conventions on the protection of cultural heritage, to foster

intercultural understanding while stressing the importance of international cooperation.

The protection of cultural property is an old problem. One of the most frequently recurring issues

in protecting cultural heritage is the difficult relationship between the interests of the individualand the community, the balance between private and public rights.

Ancient Romans established that a work of art could be considered part of the patrimony of the

whole community, even if privately owned. For example, sculptures decorating the faade of a

private building were recognized as having a common value and couldnt be removed, since they

stood in a public site, where they could be seen by all citizens.


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Lysippos of Sikyon,Apoxyomenos (Scraper), Hellenistic or Roman copy after 4th

c. Greek original, c. 390-306 B.C.E. (Museo Pio-Clementino, Vaticana)

In hisNaturalis Historiathe Roman author Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.) reported that the

statesman and general Agrippa placed theApoxyomenos, a masterpiece by the very famous

Greek sculptor Lysippos, in front of his thermal baths. The statue represented an athlete scraping

dust, sweat and oil from his body with a particular instrument called strigil. Emperor Tiberius

deeply admired the sculpture and ordered it be removed from public view and placed in his

private palace. The Roman people rose up and obliged him to return theApoxyomenosto its

previous location, where everyone could admire it.

Our right to enjoy the arts, and to participate in the cultural life of the community is included in

the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.


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Whose Cultural Heritage?

The term cultural heritage typically conjures up the idea of a single society and the

communication between its members. But cultural boundaries are not necessarily well-defined.

Artists, writers, scientists, craftsmen and musicians learn from each other, even if they belong to

different cultures, far removed in space or time. Just think about the influence of Japanese prints

on Paul Gauguins paintings; or of African masks on Pablo Picassos works. Or you could also

think of western architecture in Liberian homes in Africa. When the freed African-American

slaves went back to their homeland, they built homes inspired by the neoclassical style of

mansions on American plantations. American neoclassical style was in turn influenced by the

Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, who had been influenced by Roman and Greek

architecture.

Lets take another example, that of theMona Lisapainted in the early sixteenth century byLeonardo da Vinci, and displayed at the Muse du Louvre in Paris. From a modern point of

view, whose national heritage does theMona Lisabelong to?


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People taking photos of the Mona Lisa, photo:Heather Anne Campbell(CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Leonardo was a very famous Italian painter, thats why theMona Lisais obviously part of the

Italian cultural heritage. When Leonardo went to France, to work at King Francis Is court, he

probably brought theMona Lisawith him. It seems that in 1518 King Francis I acquired the

Mona Lisa, which therefore ended up in the royal collections: thats why it is obviously part of

the French national heritage, too. This painting has been defined as the best known, the most

visited, the most written about and the most parodied work of art in the world: as such, it belongs

to the cultural heritage of all mankind.

Cultural heritage passed down to us from our parents must be preserved for the benefit of all. In

an era of globalization, cultural heritage helps us to remember our cultural diversity, and its

understanding develops mutual respect and renewed dialogue amongst different cultures.

By Elena Franchi
https://www.flickr.com/photos/call-to-adventure/8159509811https://www.flickr.com/photos/call-to-adventure/8159509811https://www.flickr.com/photos/call-to-adventure/8159509811https://www.flickr.com/photos/call-to-adventure/8159509811


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Paleolithic art, an introduction

Replica of the painting from the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in southern France (Anthropos museum, Brno)

The oldest art: ornamentation

Humans make art. We do this for many reasons and with whatever technologies are available to

us. Extremely old, non-representational ornamentation has been found across Africa. The oldestfirmly-dated example is a collection of 82,000 year old Nassarius snail shells found in Morocco

that are pierced and covered with red ochre. Wear patterns suggest that they may have been

strung beads. Nassarius shell beads found in Israel may be more than 100,000 years old and in


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the Blombos cave in South Africa, pierced shells and small pieces of ochre (red Haematite)

etched with simple geometric patterns have been found in a 75,000-year-old layer of sediment.

The oldest representational art

The oldest known representational imagery comes from the Aurignacian culture of the Upper

Paleolithic period (Paleolithic means old stone age). Archeological discoveries across a broad

swath of Europe (especially Southern France, Northern Spain, and Swabia, in Germany) include

over two hundred caves with spectacular Aurignacian paintings, drawings and sculpture that are

among the earliest undisputed examples of representational image-making. The oldest of these is

a 2.4-inch tall female figure carved out of mammoth ivory that was found in six fragments in the

Hohle Fels cave near Schelklingen in southern Germany. It dates to 35,000 B.C.E.

The caves

The caves at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, Lascaux, Pech Merle, and Altamira contain the best known

examples of pre-historic painting and drawing. Here are remarkably evocative renderings of

animals and some humans that employ a complex mix of naturalism and abstraction.

Archeologists that study Paleolithic (comes from Greek and means old stone age) era humans,

believe that the paintings discovered in 1994, in the cave at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in the Ardche

valley in France, are more than 30,000 years old. The images found at Lascaux and Altamira are

more recent, dating to approximately 15,000 B.C.E. The paintings at Pech Merle date to both

25,000 and 15,000 B.C.E.


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Questions

What can we really know about the creators of these paintings and what the images originally

meant? These are questions that are difficult enough when we study art made only 500 years ago.

It is much more perilous to assert meaning for the art of people who shared our anatomy but had

not yet developed the cultures or linguistic structures that shaped who we have become. Do the

tools of art history even apply? Here is evidence of a visual language that collapses the more

than 1,000 generations that separate us, but we must be cautious. This is especially so if we want

understand the people that made this art as a way to understand ourselves. The desire to

speculate based on what we see and the physical evidence of the caves is wildly seductive.

Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc

The cave at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc is over 1,000 feet in length with two large chambers. Carbon

samples date the charcoal used to depict the two head-to-head Rhinoceroses (see the image

above, bottom right) to between 30,340 and 32,410 years before 1995 when the samples weretaken. The cave's drawings depict other large animals including horses, mammoths, musk ox,

ibex, reindeer, aurochs, megaceros deer, panther, and owl (scholars note that these animals were

not then a normal part of people's diet). Photographs show that the drawing shown above is very

carefully rendered but may be misleading. We see a group of horses, rhinos and bison and we see

them as a group, overlapping and skewed in scale. But the photograph distorts the way these

animal figures would have been originally seen. The bright electric lights used by the

photographer create a broad flat scope of vision; how different to see each animal emerge from

the dark under the flickering light cast by a flame.


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A word of caution

In a 2009 presentation at UC San Diego, Dr. Randell White, Professor of Anthropology at NYU,

suggested that the overlapping horses pictured above might represent the same horse over time,

running, eating, sleeping, etc. Perhaps these are far more sophisticated representations than we

have imagined. There is another drawing at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc that cautions us against ready

assumptions. It has been interpreted as depicting the thighs and genitals of a woman but there is

also a drawing of a bison and a lion and the images are nearly intertwined. In addition to the

drawings, the cave is littered with the skulls and bones of cave bear and the track of a wolf.

There is also a foot print thought to have been made by an eight-year-old boy.


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Our earliest technology?

Handaxe, lower paleolithic, about 1.8 million years old, hard

green volcanic lava (phonolite), 23.8 x 10 cm, found at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, Africa The Trustees of the British

MuseumMade nearly two million years ago, stone tools such as this are the first known

technological invention.

This chopping tool and others like it are the oldest objects in the British Museum. It comes from

an early human campsite in the bottom layer of deposits in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Potassium-

argon dating indicates that this bed is between 1.6 and 2.2 million years old from top to bottom.

This and other tools are dated to about 1.8 million years.

Using another hard stone as a hammer, the maker has knocked flakes off both sides of a basalt

(volcanic lava) pebble so that they intersect to form a sharp edge. This could be used to chop

branches from trees, cut meat from large animals or smash bones for marrow fatan essential


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part of the early human diet. The flakes could also have been used as small knives for light duty

tasks.

Deliberate shaping

To some people this artefact might appear crude; how can we even be certain that it is humanly

made and not just bashed in rock falls or by trampling animals? A close look reveals that the

edge is formed by a deliberate sequence of skilfully placed blows of more or less uniform force.

Many objects of the same type, made in the same way, occur in groups called assemblages which

are occasionally associated with early human remains. By contrast, natural forces strike

randomly and with variable force; no pattern, purpose or uniformity can be seen in the

modifications they cause.

Chopping tools and flakes from the earliest African sites were referred to as Oldowanby the

archaeologist Louis Leakey. He found this example on his first expedition to Olduvai in 1931,

when he was sponsored by the British Museum.

Handaxes were still in use there some 500,000 years ago by which time their manufacture and

use had spread throughout Africa, south Asia, the Middle East and Europe where they were still

being made 40,000 years ago. They have even been found as far east as Korea in recent

excavations. No other cultural artefact is known to have been made for such a long time across

such a huge geographical range.

Handaxes are always made from stone and were held in the hand during use. Many have this

characteristic teardrop or pear shape which might have been inspired by the outline of the human

hand.


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The beginnings of an artistic sense?

Although handaxes were used for a variety of everyday tasks including all aspects of skinning

and butchering an animal or working other materials such as wood, this example is much bigger

than the usual useful size of such hand held tools. Despite its symmetry and regular edges it

appears difficult to use easily. As language began to develop along with tool making, was this

handaxe made to suggest ideas? Does the care and craftsmanship with which it was made

indicate the beginnings of the artistic sense unique to humans?

art history - basic

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