Prehistoric Art 35,000 – 2,000 BCE (Before the Common Era) Stonehenge 2,000 BCE Chinese Horse 15,000-13,000 BCE Venus of Willendorf 25,000-20,000 BCE

Prehistoric Europe

The Birth of Art

Prehistoric art The primary focus of this art was survival. The term “prehistoric” indicates that the culture didn’t have a written language. Instead, they used pictographs or pictures as symbols to communicate. The first art was made about 30,000 B.C. it took the form of painting on cave walls and small sculptures of humans and animals from bone, stone, clay. The primary focus of this art was survival.

Prehistoric Periods Paleolithic period = old stone 2,500,000 – 10,000 BCE Mesolithic period = middle stone 10,000 – 4,000 BCE Neolithic period = new stone 4,000 – 2,000 BCE

Subdivisions within the prehistoric periods are named for the sites at which characteristic artifacts, like tools and weapons, have been found. For example: Upper Paleolithic period has 5 subdivisions: Perigoridan Aurignacian Gravettian Solutrean Magdalenian

Forms of art Early forms of art were either portable sculptures, often of small female "venus figurines", or pictures and symbols that were painted, drawn or carved on the walls and ceilings of caves. Later on, art became more integrated into settlements and daily life. Reindeer foot-bone ‘HALL OF BULLS’, Cave Painting Lascaux, France Venus of Brassempouy

Venus of Willendorf 25,000-20,000 BCE Discovered in 1908 in Austria by archeologist Joseph Szombathy Venus of Willendorf was sculpted from oolitic limestone and colored with red ocher. Measuring 4” in size, she was made to be portable. A subtractive carving method was used to sculpt the statuette; meaning limestone was carved away to create the form. Archeologist have several theories about the “Venus figurine” Symbol for fertility Good luck charm Mother goddess (earth mother or female deity) Paleolithic Period

Portable Art made from Mammoth ivory Horse Head Sculpture Hohle Fels, Germany 30,000 BCE Height 5 cm Venus of Brassempouy, France 23,000 BCE "The lady in a hood“ Height 3.5 cm Unlike other venuses she has clear facial features “Lion-Man” Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany 35,000 BCE Height 30 cm Statuette from Kostienki, Russia 23,000 BCE Height 11cm

Chauvet Cave, France 30,000 BCE Paleolithic Period Based on radiocarbon dating, Chauvet contains the oldest known cave paintings

Chauvet Cave, southern France Cave Lions Bear . Horses Rhino

A depiction of running animals at Chauvet Cave

Rhinos Chauvet Cave

Lascaux cave, France 17,000 BCE Paleolithic Period

Chinese Horse (18,000-10,000 BC) named because its style of elastic strength and fluency resembles Chinese calligraphy or brushwork Mixing minerals for color, this artist used yellow for the body and charcoal for the outline, mane, and head and painted with brushes made from animal hairs, leaves, twigs, or feathers.

Hall of Bulls Lascaux Cave 15,000 years old Their approach was naturalistic representing animals as convincing a pose and action as possible.

Bulls

Theories about cave painting The remoteness and difficulty of access of many of these sites and the fact that they appear to have been used for centuries strongly suggest that the prehistoric hunter attributed magical properties to them. “By confining the animal within the limits of a painting, one subjected it to one’s power in the hunting grounds”

Palimpsest effect Images superimposed on one another – maybe a spatial representation of time (one hunting season taking the place of another – a sort of mark-off calendar) Groupings of the animals are not entirely haphazard and seem to express an order in terms of the preferences and concerns of the hunter (cattle and horses, for example, regularly appear together.

Altamira Cave, Spain 15,000 BCE Paleolithic Period

Bison Altamira Cave 15,000-12,000 BCE

Wounded Bison Altamira Cave

Ceiling of Altamira Cave 220 yards long by 10 yards wide

Mesolithic Period 10,000 – 4,000 BCE Rock painting styles became more abstract and schematic, more symbolic than picture; it is likely that they recorded a step in the evolution of the symbolic for the pictorial – an evolution that, in the Near East, culminated in the invention of writing. Rock Paintings Marching Warriors Gasulla gorge, Castellon,Spain 8,000-3,000 BCE

Pictographs Petroglyphs Styles of Rock Art Pictographs Petroglyphs

Pictographs are prehistoric symbols drawn or painted on rock walls. Bhimbetka Cave Bhimbetka Cave Paintings in India

Petroglyphs are prehistoric symbols carved or scratched into rock. Petroglyphs in Gobustan, dating back to 10,000 BC

The Mesolithic period was the beginnings of both settled communities and farming and includes the invention of the bow and arrow, pottery for food storage and the domestication of animals.

Neolithic Period Man made the giant stride toward the actual concrete control of his environment by settling in fixed abodes and domesticating plants and animals. They changed from hunter to herdsman to farmer.

With an ever-increasing, steady supply of grain and meat, we humans now had time to ponder the Big Picture and invent some rather radical technological advances. Earthen bowl with pig design Bone ware Flint sickles, flat grinding stone, stone ax with wooden handle Cultivation tool

The "new" arts to emerge from this era were weaving, architecture, the construction of megaliths and increasingly stylized pictographs that were well on their way to becoming writing. Stonehenge is a megalithic monument. Megaliths, literally meaning large stone slabs, had become the most conspicuous forms of expression within the European landscape for the people of this time. Stonehenge stands in open grassland on the Salisbury Plain in southern Britain

Symbols to Writing