Ancient Art Lecture 2_ Paleolithic Art

Welcome back. I hope that you enjoyed our first lecture on what is art and what art can do for you and how we're going to study art in this class. Before we get started on our lecture today, I just wanna be clear on some nomenclature. So you're gonna see things with slides that have a capital C with a period or a CA with a period, and that means circa or around, so we're not exactly sure of the date, but it was around this time. I don't use BC or AD. I use BCE, which means Before Common Era, and CE, which means Common Era. It aligns exactly with the Judeo-Christian calendar. It's just a more academic, secular way of talking about time. At the beginning of each lecture, you will see the following two kinds of timelines. You will have one that gives an overview of the class. It will show you everything that we will study over the course of this class, Egypt, Neolithic, Paleolithic, Early Christianity, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Mesopotamia, et cetera, and then it will have a circle around the period that we're studying, and then the second timeline will be what's inside that circle or oval. Today, we will discuss the Paleolithic, which has about a 30,000-year span, and these are the names of all or most of the works of art that we will look at. Lohenmensch, Peshmeral, The Caves of Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira. You can see how on the timeline, how they fit, and then later on, when you see new timelines, often I will put something from an older timeline on the new one so you can see what we studied and how it fits into what we are studying. I will also attempt to provide maps so that you'll have an idea of what part of the world we're looking at, so we'll have chronology and geography. This is a map, basically, of human migration during the Paleolithic era. Modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens is what they're called, emerged somewhere between 120,000 to 100,000 years ago and most likely spread out from Africa through Asia into Europe and later into Australia via boats, and the Americas via the Bering Land Bridge. We separate prehistory into two main periods, the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. The way we separate the two is with the development of herding or agriculture versus a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. So in the Paleolithic, it was hunter-gatherer, and then they moved to herding and agriculture during the Neolithic period. Hominids have been making tools for a really long time, perhaps around two million years, and image-making, which is what we'll talk about today, develops around 50,000 years ago, and some of the earliest discovered works are small carvings, either full, round, or relief, which means you can hold them and see them at all sides, or relief, which means they stick out of a wall. It's difficult to know exactly what these were for. That's what we're gonna talk about today. From this map, you can see that the sites we'll be focusing on today are Willendorf in Austria, Chauvet-Lascaux in Peshmeral in France, and Altamira in Spain. When it comes to studying prehistoric art, what we think we know is different from what we know for sure. These are the only two things that we can be reasonably sure of. Some art moved, and some art stayed put. That's about it. So this lecture will discuss the difference between art that was traded amongst groups of people and art that could only be seen by visiting specific places. These types of art have names. The kind of art that can move around is known as mobiliary art, and there are a number of hypotheses of the purpose of these works. It could have been for ritual, it could have been for trade, or it could have been for identification. In other words, I'm from this tribe of people, here is a sculpture that shows that. Most of what we have are self-contained three-dimensional figures of people and animals. These are called sculptures in the round. They don't have a clear original significance. They were carved free of background or block and made of bone, ivory, stone, or clay. For the next couple of sculptures, what I'm gonna do is tell you what we absolutely know about the sculpture and then what we think is the case or the use of it or why it was made. So here is the Löwenmensch, or Löwenmensch in German. It is about a foot tall. It is sculpted from wooly mammoth tusk, or ivory, and it is a lion-human. It is an example of a human figure with a feline head, which was created not by copying directly by nature, but by combining a unique half-human, half-beast, hence the first example of surrealism in which fantastical things were made often in that movement in the 20th century. The lions, with which its makers shared their habitat, were European cave lions. These were maimless, and they were considerably larger than modern lions. 40,000 years ago, lions were more populous and widely distributed throughout the world than modern humans. Lions were plentiful in Europe and were extremely dangerous predators. Possibly every living human would have feared a local pride. Two scientists conducted an experimental replication of the Löwenmensch with the kinds of stone tools available at the time. Removing the base of a wooly mammoth tusk took 10 hours. The body was carved with a steep fronted scraper. Several different tools were needed to separate the torso from the inside of the arms while shaping the head and shoulders, which involved difficult cutting across the grain of the ivory. This often required two hands on the tool. The basic shaping for this experiment took around 200 hours, and in total, the recreation took more than 370 hours. That is more than two weeks if you worked 24 hours a day. That's what we know for sure. Here are things that art historians, archeologists, sociologists have guessed about. So analysis of the ivory fragments that make up the lion man indicate that the figurine was handled a lot over its lifetime. And this lends weight to the idea that it might have been used as a talking stick. The way a talking stick works is that the lion man would resonate the tribe's entire wisdom, affording it oracular powers that could be tuned into prayerful, contemplative, or shamanic trance states. In other words, if you held it while you were talking, then the thing would absorb the thing that you were saying, and then that could be used in other rituals. Also, because it took those scientists so long to recreate it, one Paleolithic curator suggests that unless the sculpture was created slowly at odd moments over several months, someone as skilled as an artist may have been excused from other subsistence tasks to work specifically on this piece. And we will see more of this idea of specialization when we get to the Neolithic period. Next up is probably the most famous of all Paleolithic mobiliary art pieces. This is known as the Woman of Willendorf. It is hand-sized. It was discovered in 1908. It has traces of red ochre in the carved surface, which means it might have been covered in this kind of red paint. It's highly schematic. It's abstract. It possibly stresses fertility. The figure has no visible face. The head is covered with circular horizontal bands of what might have been rows of plaited hair, or perhaps a type of headdress. The purpose of the carving is the subject of much speculation. Like other small sculptures, it probably never had feet, and it would not have been able to stand on its own, although it might have been able to be pegged into soft ground. So here are the leading theories about the Woman of Willendorf. Figures like these are thought to have been subtle forms of nonverbal communication among isolated groups of Paleolithic people. This could signify friendliness and the willingness to interact and alive. It could have been a symbol of fertility. This is a female figure with enlarged stomach and breasts. Its pubic area is prominent, perhaps emphasizing pro-creativity. And the red ochre pigment covering it has been thought to symbolize or serve as menstrual blood, seen as a life-giving agent. A third possibility could have been it served as a good luck charm. Its small size led archaeologists to assume that it may have been carried by men during their hunting missions, in which it served not only as a reminder of their mate back at home, but also as a charm to bring them success in their hunting. The facelessness of the figurine might suggest that it may have been of more importance as an object rather than as a person. So it stood in for, there's somebody waiting for me. And finally, another possibility was that it served as a mother goddess or an earth mother or a female deity. This comes from the suggestion that the statue was a woman whose specialness was indicated in her obesity, since women in a hunter-gatherer society would probably not have had the opportunity to get as obese. I wanna add two more things. This used to be called the Venus of Willendorf, and that had to do with biases of the men who kind of ran the departments of art history, archaeology, et cetera. And they just assumed that this was a goddess of love kind of a figure, and that's why it's no longer called the Venus of Willendorf. And of the many benefits of diversifying academia is that assumptions get overturned and many new insights are offered. The second thing I wanted to talk about is her belly button, which is my favorite part because it has been shown that her belly button is naturally occurring, that that was an imperfection in the stone and that it was kind of carved around. And when we get to art that stayed put, we will talk about this more, but it has to do with kind of site generating sculpture. Next, we have the woman of Dolny Vestonica. It was crafted from a single piece of clay. It is the oldest ceramic work found. And there are four holes in the top of her head. And this is possibly fixture points for herbs, feathers, or flowers. In 2004, there was a scan of the figurine surface and it revealed the fingerprint of a child aged seven to 15 years. The woman of Dolny Vestonica was found at a site where humans mixed water and soil and placed wet figures in a hot kiln to bake and then allowed them to explode before a successful figure was produced. So how do we know this? There were more than 700 figurines, nearly all depicting ice age animals such as lions, rhinos, and mammoths that were fired in an oval earthen kiln. At nearby sites of a similar age to Dolny Vestonica, thousands more terracotta figurines and clay pellets had been excavated. Almost all of the Vestonica figurines exhibit breaks and cracks from the shattering shock of the flames that baked them. So the question is, were the world's first ceramic artists also the world's worst craftsmen? Or were these figures props for a pyrotechnic sacrificial ritual? Maybe the only reason that we have this woman of Dolny Vestonica is because it accidentally survived. This last piece of mobiliary art is the woman from Brassenspoor. It was carved from mammoth ivory. The face is triangular, it seems tranquil. While forehead, nose, and brows are carved in relief, which means that things were removed in order to bring out the features, the mouth is absent. On the head is a checkerboard-like pattern formed by two series of shallow incisions at right angles to each other. It has been interpreted as a wig or a hood with geometric decoration or simply just a representation of hair. This type of image is often called a memory image, meaning that the artist would not have carved it based on a model in front of him or her for comparison purposes, but based on a sum of experiences of looking at faces and remembering the most distinctive features. Now, one of my favorite things about art history is that not only can you look back and go, oh, this looks like it's influenced by this, but you can look forward and go, oh, look at the effect this thing had on other artworks. And here's a great example. These are two sculptures from the early 1900s. Modigliani is from 1913 and Brancusi is from 1918. And of course, their goals were probably far different than the prehistoric artists. However, they do emphasize the quest for essential elements and the desire to say a lot by giving a simple depiction of a figure. All right, moving on to the second type of Paleolithic art, and that is parietal art. Basically, it just means art that can't move. And archeologists, sociologists, art historians all have a number of hypotheses about what the purpose of these works were for. Some thought veneration, which means to kind of worship the spirits of the animals. Sympathetic magic, which has this kind of reciprocity where I paint the buffalo, but then the buffalo helps me because of the veneration. A teaching device, which could be used for the young people to say, this is how you hunt. Or shamanistic rituals, which is communing with the spirits of these animals. Cave paintings were discovered in 1879 when a girl out exploring with her father in Altamira, Spain, crawled through a small opening in the ground and found herself inside an amazing painted chamber. These paintings were often denounced as modern forgeries and were accepted as authentic only in 1902 after a host of similar discoveries. In addition to paintings in these caves, there were discoveries of footprints and musical instruments that indicated ritual functions. Interestingly, cave paintings were probably quicker to make than we anticipate because of the spray method that was used. Here's an example of Michel Lorblanchet demonstrating the airbrush spitting technique. Early artists would chew a piece of charcoal to dilute it, and then use their hand as a stencil to blow out the mixture onto the cave wall. In Peshmeral, many handprints are recorded and it might have served as a ritual function or it could have been a record of the number of people in a band or tribe. Okay, I'm gonna go way off track here, but I promise I will bring us back to this parietal art. So this is a work of art that was never made by one of my favorite contemporary artists, Robert Irwin. And what happened was Ohio State University proposed a project for their central plaza and they commissioned Robert Irwin to make a sculpture project. He observed the area in which they asked him to make a sculpture and he noticed that students had carved out these paths after years of walking to and from all of the surrounding buildings to get from class to class. So what he proposed was a series of elevated shapes emphasizing these paths. Then students could continue unimpeded to their classes, but also they could dangle their feet up the edges or picnic on the polygons without fear of being trampled. The school saw this and they were like, where's the sculpture? Now, this is pertinent because as we are about to see, prehistoric artists seem to have a similar inclination to work with preexisting structures and incorporate images into them or onto them. It's as if they were staring at the walls and thought, hmm, that curve up there looks like the back of a bull. This is a great example of this site generated idea. If you look to the right of this, you'll see that the head of the horse actually seems like the edge of the rock formation. Even the form of the spine of the horse kind of follows along with the ridge of the rock. Here's another cave in Spain, in Altamira, and it's dated to about 12,000 BCE. An artist created these sculptural effects by painting over and around natural irregularities in the walls. Some caves were adorned with relief sculpture, either heightened from existing rock forms or modeled from clay on the cave's floor. The bison on the cave floor in Le Touc d'Adubert are well-preserved and surrounded by numerous footprints suggesting the important rites that took place around this structure. This is a major work of cave art at Lascaux, and it became one of the most popular tourist attractions in France, but the visitors to the caves were changing the cave atmosphere in destructive ways. Too much warmth, humidity, and carbon dioxide emitted by all the people. So the paintings began to deteriorate and the government closed the site to the public, and they opened up a facsimile replication of the caves and the art nearby. We'll talk about this more in a second. Lascaux has around 600 paintings and 1,500 engravings. Some of the figures are rendered in what's called twisted perspective, with parts in profile and then others seen from the front. So it's like the body is from the side, but the head is looking at you. The caves show animals, human figures, and abstract science. There's no representations of vegetation or landscape, perhaps indicating that the scenes were not meant to be reality, in quotes, or representations of actual events. And if you look at other images of this, it almost looks like a parade in this kind of dome structure. And this is another example of site-generated work. All right, this last work of art that we'll look at is actually the subject of one of your questions this week. So I'm gonna give you some information, but basically I want you to do most of the work. So here's what I will tell you. This is actually at the bottom of a 16-foot shaft or grave, as perhaps the vision of a shaman. A shaman is a person who's thought to have special powers, like the ability to see visions of the future and past, or to contact animals in spirit form. And it's unusual in that it seems to tell a story or have a narrative, because a lot of the cave paintings we look at don't seem to do that. There's something specific about the birds, and the birds are interesting because birds are known to occupy two realms. They can be on the surface of the earth, or they can be in the air. So they have this duality to them. And you can see there's other examples of birds, or a bird-like thing, in this. And then there are other questions like, are the man and the bison occupying the same space? Is this depicting a myth, an omen, a vision for a good hunt? What's that other animal to the left of them? What's the deal with those six dots? Why does this shaman seem to have an erection? Those are all questions that I want you to consider when you answer this question in this week's module. Finally, often I will include videos to accompany a lecture. And this video that I want you to watch is about the Chauvet Caves in France. And in a nutshell, they found this cave. They were worried that it would get destroyed like Lascaux, so the French government built like a replica of it. And the question that I want you to consider is, is this a good idea? And think about the idea that, what if the Vatican built a replica of the Sistine Chapel and then they made copies of the frescoes by Michelangelo? Is it like that, or is it different? Why or why not?