Art History For Dummies - Jesse Bryant Wilder

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      Prehistoric artists hid their paintings deep within the bowels of caves as if they were meant to be kept secret. The paintings are so well hidden, in fact, that the first discovery of a cave painting didn’t occur until 1879 in Altamira, Spain (see Figure 4-1). The second discovery took place in 1940 when two boys in Lascaux in Dordogne, France, followed their lost dog into a hole that opened into the ancient cave.

Photo depicts the superbly rendered cave paintings of prehistoric animals in Altamira, Spain, were the first to be discovered.

      Courtesy of Spanish National Tourist Office

      FIGURE 4-1: The superbly rendered cave paintings of prehistoric animals in Altamira, Spain, were the first to be discovered.

      Hunting on a wall

      Initially researchers believed cave art was connected to hunting. Hunting was primitive man’s main job, and the paintings are mostly of animals — with the exception of a few human stick figures, handprints, and geometric patterns in some caves.

      

Did primitive humans believe that capturing an animal’s likeness on a wall with paint made it easier to kill the animal in the wild? If so, then primitive painting was probably a type of sympathetic magic, kind of like voodoo. The idea is that if you paint a picture of a creature, then you have power over it. In some cave paintings, spears and arrows seem to pierce the animals (like needles sticking in a voodoo doll).

      If you wanted to kill lots of bulls, you painted lots of bulls on the walls of your cave! In the Lascaux cave, the roughly 65-foot-long cave gallery known today as the Great Hall of the Bulls could be an example of a large-scale, prehistoric magic ritual. But today researchers suspect that cave art was more than just hunting magic.

      Psychedelic shamans with paintbrushes

      Later researchers discovered that the animals that appeared on Old Stone Age dinner menus showed up least in cave art. Many paintings depict predators like panthers, lions, and hyenas — not typical dinner fare and not easy to hunt with primitive weapons. These researchers offered a new theory based on the fact that hunter-gatherer societies from Africa to Siberia and North America practiced shaman magic. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers may have done the same thing.

      Hollywood portrays shamans as witch doctors, but tribal shamans are more than spell-casting, dancing doctors in Halloween costumes — they are visionaries and sometimes artists. Here are some interesting thoughts about the role and methods of shamans:

       Primitive peoples believed that the shaman could “beam up” into the spirit world to talk to the souls of beasts. They even thought a shaman could learn from animal spirits how to fix imbalances in nature.

       Some shamans appear to have used natural hallucinogens to give them a boost into the sixth dimension. Primitive peoples throughout the world have often depicted shaman journeys with hallucinogenic images of humans and animals entwining and even merging. Cave art might depict these journeys, too.

       Trainee shamans had to undergo ceremonial, fake deaths, as well as food and sleep deprivation. Perhaps a prone figure that appears in a cave painting is a trainee shaman, faking death after a long fast and a couple of all-nighters.

       In 19th-century Siberia, shamans used a so-called “world pole” topped by a bird to launch their voyages into the underworld.

      

Are cave paintings the world’s first psychedelic art? The half-human, half-animal cave paintings, such as the Bird-Headed Man with Bison and Rhinoceros on the wall at Lascaux suggest they are. At first glance, Bird-Headed Man with Bison looks like a typical hunting scene. A hunter spears a bison in the belly. The beast’s entrails spill out of him. But why does the prone man beside the animal have a bird’s head? And why is a bird perched on a nearby pole like a totem? The Lascaux bird-headed man and bird-topped pole may have been meant to give a prehistoric shaman a successful send-off into the spirit world.

      Sculpture grew up alongside painting as a sister art. Most prehistoric sculptures were either small statues called statuettes or reliefs. In a relief, the sculptor outlines an image in stone or wood, and then carves out the background so that the image projects above it. The most famous early statuette is the Woman of Willendorf, also known as Venus of Willendorf.

      

All nude female figures found by German archaeologists in the 19th century (including Woman of Willendorf) were named Venus.

      Woman of Willendorf is a pudgy 4½-inch-high figure carved out of limestone. She doesn’t look very sexy to modern eyes, but she may have been a fertility symbol 25,000 years ago. Because concentric braids of hair wrapped around her head like a stocking cap conceal Woman of Willendorf’s face, we can surmise that her looks didn’t matter. But these other characteristics and purposes do matter:

       She wasn’t an individual, but a type. Cave people didn’t necessarily think of Woman of Willendorf as hot stuff, the Marilyn Monroe of the cave era, so to speak. What mattered were her sexual characteristics: huge breasts, a bulging belly (as if she were permanently pregnant), watermelon-sized buttocks, and prominent genitals. Her other features weren’t given much attention by the artist. Her pudgy arms and cut-off legs seem to be an afterthought. The same female type is found in many prehistoric cultures around the world.

       Her purpose was to promote fertility and abundance. Was the appeal of Woman of Willendorf meant to turn people on? Probably not. Rather than seeking a libido boost, a woman might have held the statuette in her hand before having sex so that the statuette’s fertility could be magically transferred to her.

       Her ample proportions may have been a sign of wealth. Why is Woman of Willendorf so fat? Living off nuts, berries, and wild game means primitive peoples didn’t need to sign up for weight watchers. Many of them probably died of malnutrition — and most didn’t reach 30. Only a very privileged woman could afford to be this big.

      Technological progress followed the melting glaciers. As the land warmed up, humans were able to farm it, domesticate animals, improve their stone tools, and build permanent settlements. People were no longer dependent on hunting and gathering for survival. Historians call this period the Neolithic Age or New Stone Age. It began in the warm southern climes and migrated northward in the wake of the retreating glaciers.

      

With improved technology, cave life and cave art became a thing of the past. Artistically, humankind fell into a creative slump that lasted about 6,000 years. People still made art, but it doesn’t compare to the Old Stone Age cave paintings and carvings. However, during the New Stone Age, humans improved as architects and built structures to last.

      In this section, we check out New Stone

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