Prehistoric

Introduction to Prehistoric Art

Types
Archeologists have identified 4 basic types of Stone Age art, as follows: petroglyphs (cupules, rock carvings and engravings); pictographs (pictorial imagery, ideomorphs, ideograms or symbols), a category that includes cave painting and drawing; and prehistoric sculpture (including small totemic statuettes known as Venus Figurines, various forms of zoomorphic and therianthropic ivory carving, and relief sculptures); and megalithic art (petroforms or any other works associated with arrangements of stones). Artworks that are applied to an immoveable rock surface are classified as parietal art; works that are portable are classified as mobiliary art.


Characteristics

The earliest forms of prehistoric art are extremely primitive. The cupule, for instance - a mysterious type of Paleolithic cultural marking - amounts to no more than a hemispherical or cup-like scouring of the rock surface. The early sculptures known as the Venuses of Tan-Tan and Berekhat Ram, are such crude representations of humanoid shapes that some experts doubt whether they are works of art at all. It is not until the Upper Paleolithic (from roughly 40,000 BCE onwards) that anatomically modern man produces recognizable carvings and pictures. Aurignacian culture, in particular, witnesses an explosion of rock art, including the El Castillo cave paintings, the monochrome cave murals at Chauvet, the Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, the Venus of Hohle Fels, the animal carvings of the Swabian Jura, Aboriginal rock art from Australia, and much more. The later Gravettian and Magdalenian cultures gave birth to even more sophisticated versions of prehistoric art, notably the polychrome Dappled Horses of Pech-Merle and the sensational cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira.

Venus of Willendorf (25,000 BCE)

One of the famous Venus Figurines

of the Upper Paleolithic.

Stone Age lions watching prey.

Chauvet Cave (c.30,000 BCE)

Franco-Cantabrian cave art from

the Late Aurignacian.