Pre-Historic Art

What you need to know from How Art Made the World

Program One--More Human Than Human
One image dominates our contemporary world above all others: the human body. How Art Made the World travels from the modern world of advertising to the temples of classical Greece and the tombs of ancient Egypt to solve the mystery of why humans surround themselves with images of the body that are so unrealistic.

The Venus of Willendorf—25000 b.c.e.

  • Possibly a goddess figure, mother-earth statue, fertility goddess
  • Exaggerated breasts, hips, legs
  • Featureless face, no feet, small arms perched on the breasts

The Theory of Exaggeration

  • Humanity has always preferred to exaggerate the representation of the human figure.
  • Seagull research

The art of Ancient Egypt—3100-500 b.c.e.

  • One of the first great organized civilizations
  • Used a grid systems to how the human figure was represented
  • The figure was not exaggerated

The Art of Ancient Greece

  • Obsessed with the perfect/ideal human figure
  • Initially sculptures were restricted to small figurines
  • Through Egyptian influence the greats learned to sculpt at a large scale
  • Kritios Boy—represented the real human body
  • Once reality was created the Greek sculptures returned to exaggerating the human form.

Program Two--The Day Pictures Were Born
The discovery of prehistoric cave paintings in the last century led to the shocking realization that humans have been creating art for over 30,000 years. Episode two reveals how the very first pictures ever made were created, and how images may have triggered the greatest change in human history.

The Altamira Cave—First cave painting to be discovered

Lascaux Cave—known for the Hall of Bulls

Why Theories (Why where these paintings created?)

  • Hunting Rituals--This theory has been questioned because the animals drawn on the cave walls do not correlate with the animals bone found within the caves.
  • Maturing Rituals
  • Trance and Hallucination—The drawings were created during trance like states

Cave paintings were not representations of what the artists saw in nature, rather they were representations of what they saw in their minds.

Cave painting stopped around 10000 b.c.e.

GibekliTepe-Earliest example of Neolithic religion.

GibekliTepe suggests that imagery brought about the first agrarian societies.