The very first drawings of primitive people. The story of one discovery
Primitive (or, in other words, primitive) art geographically covers all continents except Antarctica, and in time - the entire era of human existence, preserved by some peoples living in remote corners of the planet to this day.
Most ancient painting found in Europe (from Spain to the Urals).
Well preserved on the walls of the caves - the entrances turned out to be tightly blocked thousands of years ago, the same temperature and humidity were maintained there.
Not only wall paintings have been preserved, but also other evidence of human activity - clear traces of the bare feet of adults and children on the damp floor of some caves.
Causes of origin creative activity and functions of primitive art. Human need for beauty and creativity.
Beliefs of the time. The man portrayed those whom he revered. People of that time believed in magic: they believed that with the help of paintings and other images they could influence nature or the outcome of the hunt. It was believed, for example, that it was necessary to hit a drawn animal with an arrow or spear in order to ensure the success of a real hunt.
Periodization
Now science is changing its opinion about the age of the earth and the time frame is changing, but we will study according to the generally accepted names of periods.1. Stone Age
1.1 Old Stone Age– Paleolithic. ... up to 10 thousand BC
1.2 Middle Stone Age - Mesolithic. 10 – 6 thousand BC
1.3 New Stone Age - Neolithic. From 6th to 2nd thousand BC
2. Bronze Age. 2 thousand BC
3. Age of Iron. 1 thousand BC
Paleolithic
Tools were made of stone; hence the name of the era - the Stone Age.1. Ancient or Lower Paleolithic. up to 150 thousand BC
2. Middle Paleolithic. 150 – 35 thousand BC
3. Upper or Late Paleolithic. 35 – 10 thousand BC
3.1 Aurignac-Solutrean period. 35 – 20 thousand BC
3.2. Madeleine period. 20 – 10 thousand BC The period received this name from the name of the La Madeleine cave, where paintings dating back to this time were found.
The most early works Primitive art dates back to the late Paleolithic. 35 – 10 thousand BC
Scientists are inclined to believe that naturalistic art and the depiction of schematic signs and geometric shapes arose simultaneously.
Pasta drawings. Impressions of a person’s hand and a random interweaving of wavy lines pressed into damp clay by the fingers of the same hand.
The first drawings from the Paleolithic period (ancient Stone Age, 35–10 thousand BC) were discovered at the end of the 19th century. Spanish amateur archaeologist Count Marcelino de Sautuola three kilometers from his family estate, in the Altamira cave.
It happened like this:
“The archaeologist decided to explore a cave in Spain and took his little daughter with him. Suddenly she shouted: “Bulls, bulls!” The father laughed, but when he raised his head, he saw huge painted figures of bison on the ceiling of the cave. Some of the bison were depicted standing still, others rushing at the enemy with inclined horns. At first, scientists did not believe that primitive people could create similar works art. It was only 20 years later that numerous works of primitive art were discovered in other places and the authenticity of cave paintings was recognized.”
Paleolithic painting
Altamira Cave. Spain.Late Paleolithic (Madeleine era 20 - 10 thousand years BC).
On the vault of the Altamira cave chamber there is a whole herd of large bison located close to each other.
Bison panel. Located on the ceiling of the cave. Wonderful polychrome images contain black and all shades of ocher, rich colors, applied somewhere densely and monochromatically, and somewhere with halftones and transitions from one color to another. A thick paint layer up to several cm. In total, 23 figures are depicted on the vault, if you do not take into account those of which only outlines have been preserved.
Fragment. Buffalo. Altamira Cave. Spain. Late Paleolithic. The caves were illuminated with lamps and reproduced from memory. Not primitivism, but the highest degree of stylization. When the cave was opened, it was believed that this was an imitation of hunting - the magical meaning of the image. But today there are versions that the goal was art. The beast was necessary for man, but he was terrible and difficult to catch.
Fragment. Bull. Altamira. Spain. Late Paleolithic.
Beautiful brown shades. Tense stop of the beast. They used the natural relief of the stone and depicted it on the convexity of the wall.
Fragment. Bison. Altamira. Spain. Late Paleolithic.
Transition to polychrome art, darker strokes.
Cave of Font de Gaume. France
Late Paleolithic.Silhouette images, deliberate distortion, and exaggeration of proportions are typical. On walls and vaults small halls The caves of Font-de-Gaume contain at least about 80 drawings, mostly bison, two undisputed figures of mammoths and even a wolf.
Grazing deer. Font de Gaume. France. Late Paleolithic.
Perspective image of horns. Deer at this time (the end of the Madeleine era) replaced other animals.
Fragment. Buffalo. Font de Gaume. France. Late Paleolithic.
The hump and crest on the head are emphasized. The overlap of one image with another is a polypsest. Detailed study. Decorative solution for the tail. Picture of houses.
Wolf. Font de Gaume. France. Late Paleolithic.
Nio's Cave. France
Late Paleolithic.Round hall with drawings. There are no images of mammoths or other animals of glacial fauna in the cave.
Horse. Nio. France. Late Paleolithic.
Depicted already with 4 legs. The silhouette is outlined with black paint, and the inside is retouched with yellow. The character of a pony-type horse.
Stone ram. Nio. France. Late Paleolithic. Partially contoured image, the skin is drawn on top.
Deer. Nio. France. Late Paleolithic.
Buffalo. Nio. Nio. France. Late Paleolithic.
Most of the images include bison. Some of them are shown wounded, with black and red arrows.
Buffalo. Nio. France. Late Paleolithic.
Lascaux Cave
It so happened that it was the children, and quite accidentally, who found the most interesting cave paintings in Europe:“In September 1940, near the town of Montignac, in the southwest of France, four high school students set off on an archaeological expedition they had planned. In place of a tree that had long been uprooted, there was a hole in the ground that aroused their curiosity. There were rumors that this was the entrance to a dungeon leading to a nearby medieval castle.
There was another smaller hole inside. One of the guys threw a stone at it and, judging by the noise of the fall, concluded that it was quite deep. He widened the hole, crawled inside, almost fell, lit a flashlight, gasped and called others. From the walls of the cave in which they found themselves, some huge animals were looking at them, breathing with such confident power, sometimes seeming ready to turn into rage, that they felt terrified. And at the same time, the power of these animal images was so majestic and convincing that they felt as if they were in some kind of magical kingdom.”
Lascaux Cave. France.
Late Paleolithic (Madeleine era, 18 - 15 thousand years BC).
Called the primitive Sistine Chapel. Consists of several large rooms: rotunda; main gallery; passage; apse.
Colorful images on the calcareous white surface of the cave.
The proportions are greatly exaggerated: large necks and bellies.
Contour and silhouette drawings. Clear images without aliasing. A large number of male and female signs (rectangle and many dots).
Hunting scene. Lasko. France. Late Paleolithic.
Genre image. A bull killed by a spear gored a man with a bird's head. There’s a bird on a stick nearby—maybe his soul.
Buffalo. Lasko. France. Late Paleolithic.
Horse. Lasko. France. Late Paleolithic.
Mammoths and horses. Kapova cave. Ural.
Late Paleolithic.
KAPOVA CAVE- to the South. m Ural, on the river. White. Formed in limestones and dolomites. The corridors and grottoes are located on two floors. The total length is over 2 km. On the walls - Late Paleolithic scenic images mammoths, rhinoceroses
Paleolithic sculpture
Art of small forms or mobile art (small plastic art)An integral part of the art of the Paleolithic era consists of objects that are commonly called “small plastic”.
These are three types of objects:
1. Figurines and other three-dimensional products carved from soft stone or other materials (horn, mammoth tusk).
2. Flattened objects with engravings and paintings.
3. Reliefs in caves, grottoes and under natural canopies.
The relief was embossed with a deep outline or the background around the image was cramped.
Relief
One of the first finds, called small plastic, was a bone plate from the Chaffo grotto with images of two fallow deer:
Deer crossing the river. Fragment. Bone carving. France. Late Paleolithic (Magdalenian period).
Everyone knows a wonderful one French writer Prosper Merimee, author of the fascinating novel "Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX", "Carmen" and other romantic stories, but few people know that he served as a security inspector historical monuments. It was he who handed over this record in 1833 to the historical museum of Cluny, which was just being organized in the center of Paris. It is now kept in the Museum of National Antiquities (Saint-Germain en Lay).
Later, a cultural layer of the Upper Paleolithic era was discovered in the Chaffo Grotto. But then, just as it was with the painting of the Altamira cave, and with other visual monuments of the Paleolithic era, no one could believe that this art was older than ancient Egyptian. Therefore, such engravings were considered examples of Celtic art (V-IV centuries BC). Only in late XIX c., again, like cave paintings, they were recognized as the most ancient after they were found in the Paleolithic cultural layer.
The figurines of women are very interesting. Most of these figurines are small in size: from 4 to 17 cm. They were made from stone or mammoth tusks. Their most notable hallmark is an exaggerated “plumpiness”; they depict women with overweight figures.
"Venus with a Cup" Bas-relief. France. Upper (Late) Paleolithic.
Goddess of the Ice Age. The canon of the image is that the figure is inscribed in a rhombus, and the stomach and chest are in a circle.
Sculpture- mobile art.
Almost everyone who has studied Paleolithic female figurines, with varying degrees of detail, explains them as cult objects, amulets, idols, etc., reflecting the idea of motherhood and fertility.
"Venus of Willendorf". Limestone. Willendorf, Lower Austria. Late Paleolithic.
Compact composition, no facial features.
"The Hooded Lady from Brassempouy." France. Late Paleolithic. Mammoth bone.
Facial features and hairstyle have been worked out.
In Siberia, in the Baikal region, a whole series of original figurines of a completely different stylistic appearance was found. Along with the same overweight figures of naked women as in Europe, there are figurines of slender, elongated proportions and, unlike European ones, they are depicted dressed in thick, most likely fur clothes, similar to “overalls”.
These are finds from the Buret sites on the Angara and Malta rivers.
Conclusions
Rock painting. Peculiarities pictorial art Paleolithic – realism, expression, plasticity, rhythm.
Small plastic.
The depiction of animals has the same features as in painting (realism, expression, plasticity, rhythm).
Paleolithic female figurines are cult objects, amulets, idols, etc., they reflect the idea of motherhood and fertility.
Mesolithic
(Middle Stone Age) 10 - 6 thousand BCAfter the glaciers melted, the familiar fauna disappeared. Nature becomes more pliable to humans. People become nomads.
With a change in lifestyle, a person’s view of the world becomes broader. He is not interested in an individual animal or a random discovery of cereals, but active work people, thanks to which they find whole herds of animals, and fields or forests rich in fruits.
This is how the art of multi-figure composition arose in the Mesolithic, in which it was no longer the beast, but man, who played the dominant role.
Changes in the field of art:
The main characters of the image are not an individual animal, but people in some kind of action.
The task is not in a believable, accurate depiction of individual figures, but in conveying action and movement.
Multi-figure hunts are often depicted, scenes of honey collection, and cult dances appear.
The character of the image changes - instead of realistic and polychrome, it becomes schematic and silhouetted. Local colors are used - red or black.
A honey collector from a hive, surrounded by a swarm of bees. Spain. Mesolithic.
Almost everywhere where planar or volumetric images Upper Paleolithic era, in artistic activity people of the subsequent Mesolithic era seemed to be experiencing a pause. Perhaps this period is still poorly studied, perhaps the images made not in caves, but in the open air, were washed away by rain and snow over time. Perhaps among the petroglyphs that are very difficult to accurately date, there are some that date back to this time, but we do not yet know how to recognize them. It is significant that small plastic objects are extremely rare during excavations of Mesolithic settlements.
Of the Mesolithic monuments, literally a few can be named: Stone Tomb in Ukraine, Kobystan in Azerbaijan, Zaraut-Sai in Uzbekistan, Shakhty in Tajikistan and Bhimpetka in India.
In addition to rock paintings, petroglyphs appeared in the Mesolithic era.
Petroglyphs are carved, carved or scratched rock images.
When carving a design, ancient artists used a sharp tool to knock off the upper, darker part rock, and therefore the images stand out noticeably against the background of the rock.
In the south of Ukraine, in the steppe there is a rocky hill made of sandstone rocks. As a result of severe weathering, several grottoes and canopies were formed on its slopes. In these grottoes and on other planes of the hill, numerous carved and scratched images have been known for a long time. In most cases they are difficult to read. Sometimes images of animals are guessed - bulls, goats. Scientists attribute these images of bulls to the Mesolithic era.
Stone grave. South of Ukraine. General view and petroglyphs. Mesolithic.
South of Baku, between the southeastern slope of the Greater Caucasus Range and the shores of the Caspian Sea, there is a small Gobustan plain (country of ravines) with hills in the form of table mountains composed of limestone and other sedimentary rocks. On the rocks of these mountains there are many petroglyphs of different times. Most of them were discovered in 1939. Large (more than 1 m) images of female and male figures made with deep carved lines received the greatest interest and fame.
There are many images of animals: bulls, predators and even reptiles and insects.
Kobystan (Gobustan). Azerbaijan (territory of the former USSR). Mesolithic.
Grotto Zaraut-Qamar
In the mountains of Uzbekistan, at an altitude of about 2000 m above sea level, there is a monument widely known not only among archaeological specialists - the Zaraut-Kamar grotto. The painted images were discovered in 1939 by local hunter I.F. Lamaev.
The painting in the grotto is made with ocher of different shades (from red-brown to lilac) and consists of four groups of images, which include anthropomorphic figures and bulls. 
Here is the group in which most researchers see bull hunting. Among the anthropomorphic figures surrounding the bull, i.e. There are two types of “hunters”: figures in clothes that flare out at the bottom, without bows, and “tailed” figures with raised and drawn bows. This scene can be interpreted as a real hunt by disguised hunters, and as a kind of myth.
The painting in the Shakhty grotto is probably the oldest in Central Asia.
“I don’t know what the word Shakhty means,” writes V.A. Ranov. “Perhaps it comes from the Pamir word “shakht,” which means rock.”
In the northern part of Central India, huge cliffs with many caves, grottoes and canopies stretch along river valleys. In these natural shelters a lot has been preserved rock paintings. Among them, the location of Bhimbetka (Bhimpetka) stands out. Apparently these picturesque images date back to the Mesolithic. True, we should not forget about the unevenness in the development of cultures in different regions. The Mesolithic of India may be 2-3 millennia older than in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Some scenes of driven hunts with archers in the paintings of the Spanish and African cycles are, as it were, the embodiment of the movement itself, taken to the limit, concentrated in a stormy whirlwind.
Neolithic
(New Stone Age) from 6 to 2 thousand BC.Neolithic- New Stone Age, the last stage of the Stone Age.
Periodization. The entry into the Neolithic coincides with the transition of culture from an appropriating (hunters and gatherers) to a producing (farming and/or cattle breeding) type of economy. This transition is called the Neolithic Revolution. The end of the Neolithic dates back to the time of the appearance of metal tools and weapons, that is, the beginning of the Copper, Bronze or Iron Age.
Different cultures entered this period of development at different times. In the Middle East, the Neolithic began around 9.5 thousand years ago. BC e. In Denmark, the Neolithic dates back to the 18th century. BC, and among the indigenous population of New Zealand - the Maori - the Neolithic existed back in the 18th century. AD: Before the arrival of Europeans, Maori used polished stone axes. Some peoples of America and Oceania have still not completely transitioned from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.
Neolithic, like other periods primitive era, is not defined chronological period in the history of mankind as a whole, but characterizes only cultural characteristics of certain peoples.
Achievements and activities
1.
New features of people's social life:
- The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy.
- At the end of the era, in some places (Foreign Asia, Egypt, India), a new formation of class society emerged, that is, social stratification began, the transition from a tribal-communal system to a class society.
- At this time, cities begin to be built. Jericho is considered one of the most ancient cities.
- Some cities were well fortified, which indicates the existence of organized wars at that time.
- Armies and professional warriors began to appear.
- We can quite say that the beginning of the formation of ancient civilizations is associated with the Neolithic era.
2.
The division of labor and the formation of technologies began:
- The main thing is that simple gathering and hunting as the main sources of food are gradually being replaced by agriculture and cattle breeding.
The Neolithic is called the “age of polished stone.” In this era, stone tools were not just chipped, but already sawed, ground, drilled, and sharpened.
- Among the most important tools in the Neolithic is the ax, previously unknown.
spinning and weaving developed.
Images of animals begin to appear in the design of household utensils.
Ax in the shape of a moose head. Polished stone. Neolithic. Historical Museum. Stockholm.
A wooden ladle from the Gorbunovsky peat bog near Nizhny Tagil. Neolithic. State Historical Museum.
For the Neolithic forest zone, fishing became one of the leading types of economy. Active fishing contributed to the creation of certain reserves, which, combined with hunting animals, made it possible to live in one place all year round.
The transition to a sedentary lifestyle led to the appearance of ceramics.
The appearance of ceramics is one of the main signs of the Neolithic era.
The village of Catal Huyuk (Eastern Turkey) is one of the places where the most ancient examples of ceramics were found.
Cup from Ledce (Czech Republic). Clay. Bell Beaker culture. Chalcolithic (Copper-Stone Age).
Monuments of Neolithic painting and petroglyphs are extremely numerous and scattered over vast territories.
Clusters of them are found almost everywhere in Africa, eastern Spain, in the territory former USSR- in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, on Lake Onega, near the White Sea and in Siberia.
Neolithic rock art is similar to Mesolithic, but the subject matter becomes more varied.
"Hunters". Rock painting. Neolithic (?). Southern Rhodesia.
For approximately three hundred years, the attention of scientists has been captivated by a rock known as the Tomsk Pisanitsa.
“Pisanitsa” are images painted with mineral paint or carved on the smooth surface of walls in Siberia.
Back in 1675, one of the brave Russian travelers, whose name, unfortunately, remained unknown, wrote down:
“Before reaching the fortress (Verkhnetomsk fortress), on the edges of the Tom River there lies a large and high stone, and on it are written animals, and cattle, and birds, and all sorts of similar things...”
Real scientific interest in this monument arose already in the 18th century, when, by order of Peter I, an expedition was sent to Siberia to study its history and geography. The result of the expedition was the first images of Tomsk writing published in Europe by the Swedish captain Stralenberg, who participated in the trip. These images were not an exact copy Tomsk pisanitsa, and conveyed only the most general outlines of the rocks and the placement of drawings on it, but their value lies in the fact that on them you can see drawings that have not survived to this day.
Images of Tomsk writing made by the Swedish boy K. Shulman, who traveled with Stralenberg across Siberia.
For hunters, the main source of subsistence was deer and elk. Gradually, these animals began to acquire mythical features - the elk was the “master of the taiga” along with the bear.
The image of a moose belongs to the Tomsk Pisanitsa main role: Shapes are repeated many times.
The proportions and shapes of the animal’s body are absolutely faithfully conveyed: its long massive body, a hump on the back, a heavy large head, a characteristic protrusion on the forehead, a swollen upper lip, bulging nostrils, thin legs with cloven hooves.
Some drawings show transverse stripes on the neck and body of moose.
On the border between the Sahara and Fezzan, on the territory of Algeria, in a mountainous area called Tassili-Ajjer, bare rocks rise in rows. Now this region is dried up by the desert wind, scorched by the sun and almost nothing grows in it. However, the Sahara used to have green meadows...
- Sharpness and precision of drawing, grace and elegance.
- Harmonic combination of shapes and tones, the beauty of people and animals depicted with a good knowledge of anatomy.
- Swiftness of gestures and movements.
The small plastic arts of the Neolithic, like painting, acquire new subjects.
"The Man Playing the Lute." Marble (from Keros, Cyclades, Greece). Neolithic. National archaeological museum. Athens.
The schematism inherent in Neolithic painting, which replaced Paleolithic realism, also penetrated into small plastic art.
Schematic image of a woman. Cave relief. Neolithic. Croisard. Department of the Marne. France.
Relief with a symbolic image from Castelluccio (Sicily). Limestone. OK. 1800-1400 BC National Archaeological Museum. Syracuse.
Conclusions
Mesolithic and Neolithic rock paintingsIt is not always possible to draw a precise line between them.
But this art is very different from typically Paleolithic:
- Realism, accurately capturing the image of the beast as a target, as a cherished goal, is replaced by a broader view of the world, the image of multi-figure compositions.
- There appears a desire for harmonious generalization, stylization and, most importantly, for the transmission of movement, for dynamism.
- In the Paleolithic there was monumentality and inviolability of the image. Here there is liveliness, free imagination.
- In human images, a desire for grace appears (for example, if you compare the Paleolithic “Venuses” and the Mesolithic image of a woman collecting honey, or Neolithic Bushman dancers).
Small plastic:
- New stories appear.
- Greater mastery of execution and mastery of craft and material.
Achievements
Paleolithic- Lower Paleolithic
> > taming fire, stone tools
- Middle Paleolithic
>> exit from Africa
- Upper Paleolithic
> > sling
Mesolithic
- microliths, bow, canoe
Neolithic
- Early Neolithic
> > agriculture, cattle breeding
- Late Neolithic
>> ceramics
Chalcolithic (Copper Age)
- metallurgy, horse, wheel
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is characterized by the leading role of bronze products, which was associated with improved processing of metals such as copper and tin obtained from ore deposits, and the subsequent production of bronze from them.The Bronze Age replaced the Copper Age and preceded the Iron Age. In general, the chronological framework of the Bronze Age: 35/33 - 13/11 centuries. BC e., but different cultures they are different.
Art is becoming more diverse and spreading geographically.
Bronze was much easier to process than stone; it could be cast into molds and polished. Therefore in Bronze Age They made all kinds of household items, richly decorated with ornaments and of high artistic value. Ornamental decorations consisted mostly from circles, spirals, wavy lines and similar motifs. Special attention paid attention to jewelry - they were large in size and immediately caught the eye.
Megalithic architecture
In 3 - 2 thousand BC. unique, huge structures made of stone blocks appeared. This ancient architecture called megalithic.The term "megalith" comes from Greek words“megas” – “big”; and "lithos" - "stone".
Megalithic architecture owes its appearance to primitive beliefs. Megalithic architecture is usually divided into several types:
1.
A menhir is a single vertical stone, more than two meters high.
On the Brittany Peninsula in France, the so-called fields stretch for kilometers. menhirov. In the language of the Celts, the later inhabitants of the peninsula, the name of these stone pillars several meters high means “long stone”.
2.
Trilith is a structure consisting of two vertically placed stones and covered with a third.
3.
A dolmen is a structure whose walls are made of huge stone slabs and covered with a roof made of the same monolithic stone block.
Initially, dolmens served for burials.
Trilith can be called the simplest dolmen.
Numerous menhirs, trilithons and dolmens were located in places that were considered sacred.
4.
Cromlech is a group of menhirs and trilithes.
Stone grave. South of Ukraine. Anthropomorphic menhirs. Bronze Age.
Stonehenge. Cromlech. England. Bronze Age. 3 – 2 thousand BC Its diameter is 90 m, it consists of stone blocks, each of which weighs approx. 25 tons. It is curious that the mountains from where these stones were delivered are located 280 km from Stonehenge.
It consists of trilithons arranged in a circle, inside a horseshoe of trilithons, in the middle there are blue stones, and in the very center there is a heel stone (on the day of the summer solstice the luminary is exactly above it). It is assumed that Stonehenge was a temple dedicated to the sun.
Age of Iron (Iron Age)
1 thousand BCIn the steppes Eastern Europe and Asia, pastoral tribes created the so-called animal style at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age.
"Deer" plaque. 6th century BC Gold. Hermitage. 35.1x22.5 cm. From the mound in the Kuban region. The relief plate was found attached to a round iron shield in the chief's burial. An example of zoomorphic art ("animal style"). The deer's hooves are made in the form of a "big-beaked bird."
There is nothing accidental or superfluous - a complete, thoughtful composition. Everything in the figure is conditional and extremely truthful and realistic.
The feeling of monumentality is achieved not by size, but by the generality of the form.
Panther. Badge, decoration of a shield. From a mound near the village of Kelermesskaya. Gold. Hermitage.
Age of Iron.
Served as a decoration for the shield. The tail and paws are decorated with figures of curled up predators.
Iron Age
Age of Iron. The balance between realism and stylization is broken in favor of stylization.
Cultural ties with Ancient Greece, the countries of the ancient East and China contributed to the emergence of new subjects, images and visual means in the artistic culture of the tribes of southern Eurasia.
Scenes of a battle between barbarians and Greeks are depicted. Found in the Chertomlyk mound, near Nikopol.
Zaporozhye region Hermitage.
Conclusions
Scythian art – “animal style”. Amazing sharpness and intensity of images. Generalization, monumentality. Stylization and realism. primitive artAny person endowed with a great gift - feel the beauty the surrounding world, feel harmony lines, admire the variety of shades of colors.
Painting- this is the artist’s perception of the world captured on canvas. If your perception of the world around you is reflected in the artist’s paintings, then you feel a kinship with the works of this master.
The paintings attract attention, fascinate, excite imagination and dreams, evoke memories of pleasant moments, favorite places and landscapes.
When did they appear first images created by man?
Appeal primitive people to a new type of activity for them - art - one of the greatest events in human history. Primitive art reflected man’s first ideas about the world around him, thanks to it knowledge and skills were preserved and passed on, and people communicated with each other. In spiritual culture primitive world art began to play the same universal role that a sharpened stone played in work.
What gave a person the idea to depict certain objects? Who knows whether body painting was the first step towards creating images, or whether a person guessed the familiar silhouette of an animal in a random outline of a stone and, by cutting it, gave it a greater resemblance? Or maybe the shadow of an animal or a person served as the basis for the drawing, and the imprint of a hand or a step precedes the sculpture? There is no definite answer to these questions. Ancient people could come up with the idea of depicting objects not in one, but in many ways.
For example, to the number the most ancient images on the walls of Paleolithic caves include human hand prints, and a random interweaving of wavy lines pressed into the damp clay by the fingers of the same hand.
Works of art from the Early Stone Age, or Paleolithic, are characterized by simplicity of shapes and colors. Rock paintings are usually the outlines of animal figures, made with bright paint - red or yellow, and occasionally - filled with round spots or completely painted over. Such ""paintings"" were clearly visible in the twilight of the caves, illuminated only by torches or the fire of a smoky fire.
In the initial stage of development primitive art didn't know laws of space and perspective, as well as composition, those. intentional distribution of individual figures on a plane, between which there is necessarily a semantic connection.
In living and expressive images stands before us life story primitive man the Stone Age era, told by himself in rock paintings.
Dance. Lleid painting. Spain. With a variety of movements and gestures, a person conveyed his impressions of the world around him, reflecting in them own feelings, mood and state of mind. Crazy jumping, imitation of animal habits, stamping feet, expressive hand gesturescreated the preconditions for the emergence of dance. There were also war dances associated with magical rituals, with faith in victory over the enemy.
<<Каменная газета>> Arizona
Composition in the Lascaux cave. France. On the walls of the caves you can see mammoths, wild horses, rhinoceroses, and bison. For primitive man, drawing was the same “witchcraft” as spells and ritual dances. By “conjuring” the spirit of a drawn animal by singing and dancing, and then “killing” it, a person seemed to master the power of the animal and “defeat” it before hunting.
<<Сражающиеся лучники>> Spain
And these are petroglyphs. Hawaii
Murals on the Tassili-Ajer mountain plateau. Algeria.
Primitive people practiced sympathetic magic - in the form of dancing, singing or painting animals on the walls of caves - to attract herds of animals and ensure the continuation of the race and the safety of livestock. Hunters acted out scenes of a successful hunt to attract energy into the real world. They turned to the Mistress of the Herds, and later to the Horned God, who was depicted with the antlers of goats or deer to emphasize his primacy over the herds. The bones of animals were supposed to be buried in the ground so that animals, like people, were reborn from the womb of Mother Earth.
This cave drawing in the Lascaux region of France from the Paleolithic era
Large animals were the preferred food. And Paleolithic people, skilled hunters, destroyed most of them. And not just large herbivores. During the Paleolithic, cave bears completely disappeared as a species.
There is another type of rock paintings, which has a mystical, mysterious character.
Rock paintings from Australia. Either people, or animals, or maybe both...
Drawings from West Arnhem, Australia.
Huge figures and small people next to them. And in the lower left corner there is something incomprehensible.
Here is a masterpiece from Lascaux, France.
North Africa, Sahara. Tassili. 6 thousand years BC Flying saucers and someone in a spacesuit. Or maybe it's not a spacesuit.
Rock art from Australia...
Val Camonica, Italy.
and the next photo is from Azerbaijan, Gobustan region
Gobustan is included in the UNESCO heritage list
Who were those “artists” who were able to convey the message of their time to distant eras? What prompted them to do this? What were the hidden springs and driving motives that guided them?.. Thousands of questions and very few answers... Many of our contemporaries love it when they are asked to look at history through a magnifying glass.
But is everything really so small in it?
After all, there were images of gods
In the north of Upper Egypt is ancient city temples of Abydos. Its origin dates back to prehistoric times. It is known that already in the era Old Kingdom(about 2500 BC) in Abydos, the universal deity Osiris was widely worshiped. Osiris was considered a divine teacher who gave the people of the Stone Age a variety of knowledge and crafts, and, quite possibly, knowledge about the secrets of the sky. By the way, it was in Abydos that it was found ancient calendar, dating back to the 4th millennium BC. e.
Ancient Greece And Ancient Rome also left a lot of rock evidence reminding us of their existence. They already had a developed written language - their drawings are much more interesting, from the point of view of studying everyday life, than ancient graffiti.
Why is humanity trying to find out what happened millions of years ago, what knowledge did ancient civilizations have? We look for the source because we think that by revealing it, we will find out why we exist. Humanity wants to find where the starting point is, from which it all began, because it thinks that there, apparently, there is an answer, “what is all this for,” and what will happen in the end...
After all, the world is so vast, and the human brain is narrow and limited. The most complex crossword puzzle of history must be solved gradually, cell by cell...
Human civilization has come a long way and achieved impressive results. Contemporary art is one of them. But everything has its beginning. How did painting arise and who were they - the first artists of the world?
The beginning of prehistoric art - types and forms
In the Paleolithic, primitive art first appeared. It had different shapes. These were rituals, music, dances and songs, as well as drawing images on various surfaces - rock paintings of primitive people. The creation of the first man-made structures - megaliths, dolmens and menhirs, the purpose of which is still unknown, dates back to this period. The most famous of them is Stonehenge in Salisbury, consisting of cromlechs (vertical stones).
Household items, such as jewelry, children's toys, also belong to the art of primitive people.
Periodization
Scientists have no doubts about the time of the birth of primitive art. It began to form in the middle of the Paleolithic era, during the period of the late Neanderthals. The culture of that time is called Mousterian.
Neanderthals knew how to process stone, creating tools. On some objects, scientists found indentations and notches in the form of crosses, forming a primitive ornament. In that era they could not yet paint, but ocher was already in use. Pieces of it were found ground down, like a pencil that had been used.
Primitive rock art - definition
This is one of the types. It is an image painted on the surface of a cave wall by an ancient man. Most of such objects were found in Europe, but drawings of ancient people are also found in Asia. The main area of distribution of rock art is the territory of modern Spain and France.
Doubts of scientists
For a long time, modern science was not aware that the art of primitive man had reached such a level. high level. Drawings were not found in caves until the 19th century. Therefore, when they were first discovered, they were mistaken for fraud.
The story of one discovery
The ancient cave painting was discovered by an amateur archaeologist, Spanish lawyer Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola.
This discovery is associated with dramatic events. In the Spanish province of Cantabria in 1868, a hunter discovered a cave. The entrance to it was littered with fragments of crumbled rock. In 1875 she was examined by de Sautuola. That time he found only tools. The find was the most ordinary. Four years later, the amateur archaeologist again visited the Altamira cave. He was accompanied on the trip by his 9-year-old daughter, who discovered the drawings. Together with his friend, archaeologist Juan Vilanova y Piera, de Sautuola began excavating the cave. Not long before, at an exhibition of Stone Age objects, he had seen images of bison, surprisingly reminiscent of the cave painting of an ancient man that his daughter Maria had seen. Sautuola suggested that the animal images found in the Altamira cave belong to the Paleolithic. Vilanov-i-Pierre supported him in this.
Scientists have published the shocking results of their excavations. And they were immediately accused by the scientific world of falsification. Leading experts in the field of archeology categorically rejected the possibility of finding paintings from Paleolithic times. Marcelino de Sautuola was accused of the fact that the drawings of ancient people, allegedly found by him, were drawn by a friend of the archaeologist, who was visiting him in those days.
Only 15 years later, after the death of the man who had revealed to the world beautiful examples of painting by ancient people, his opponents admitted that Marcelino de Sautuola was right. By that time, similar drawings in the caves of ancient people had been found in Font-de-Gaume, Trois-Freres, Combarel and Rouffignac in France, Tuc d'Auduber in the Pyrenees and other regions. All of them were attributed to the Paleolithic era. Thus, the honest name of the Spanish scientist, who made one of the notable discoveries in archeology, was restored.
The skill of ancient artists
The rock art, photos of which are presented below, consists of many images of different animals. Among them, bison figurines predominate. Those who saw the drawings of ancient people for the first time, found in the city, are amazed at how professionally they were made. This magnificent skill of ancient artists made scientists at one time doubt their authenticity.
Ancient people did not immediately learn to create accurate images of animals. Drawings have been found in which the outlines are barely outlined, so it is almost impossible to find out who the artist wanted to depict. Gradually, the drawing skill became better, and it was already possible to quite accurately convey the appearance of the animal.
The first drawings of ancient people can also include handprints found in many caves.
The hand smeared with paint was applied to the wall, the resulting print was outlined in a different color and enclosed in a circle. According to researchers, this action had important ritual significance for ancient people.
Themes of painting by the first artists
The rock painting of an ancient man reflected the reality that surrounded him. It reflected what worried him most. In the Paleolithic, the main occupation and method of obtaining food was hunting. Therefore, animals are the main motif of the drawings of that period. As already mentioned, numerous images of bison, deer, horses, goats, and bears were discovered in Europe. They are conveyed not statically, but in motion. Animals run, jump, frolic and die, pierced by a hunter's spear.
Located in France, there is the largest ancient image of a bull. Its size is more than five meters. In other countries, ancient artists also painted those animals that lived next to them. In Somalia, images of giraffes were found, in India - tigers and crocodiles, in the caves of the Sahara there are drawings of ostriches and elephants. In addition to animals, the first artists painted scenes of hunting and people, but extremely rarely.
Purpose of rock paintings
It is not known exactly why ancient man depicted animals and people on the walls of caves and other objects. Since by that time a religion had already begun to take shape, they most likely had deep ritual significance. The “Hunting” drawing of ancient people, according to some researchers, symbolized the successful outcome of the fight against the beast. Others believe that they were created by the shamans of the tribe, who went into a trance and tried to receive through the image special power. Ancient artists lived a very long time ago, and therefore the motives for creating their drawings are unknown to modern scientists.
Paints and tools
To create drawings, primitive artists used a special technique. First, they scratched an image of an animal on the surface of a rock or stone with a chisel, and then applied paint to it. It was made from natural materials- ocher different colors and black pigment, which was extracted from charcoal. Animal organic matter (blood, fat, brain matter) and water were used to fix the paint. Ancient artists had few colors at their disposal: yellow, red, black, brown.
The drawings of ancient people had several features. Sometimes they overlapped each other. Artists often depicted large number animals. In this case, the figures in the foreground were depicted carefully, and the rest - schematically. Primitive people did not create compositions; the vast majority of their drawings were a chaotic jumble of images. To date, only a few “paintings” have been found that have a single composition.
During the Paleolithic period, the first painting tools were already created. These were sticks and primitive brushes made from animal fur. Ancient artists also took care of lighting their “canvases.” Lamps were discovered that were made in the form of stone bowls. Fat was poured into them and a wick was placed.
Chauvet Cave
She was found in 1994 in France, and her collection of paintings is recognized as the oldest. Laboratory research helped determine the age of the drawings - the very first of them were made 36 thousand years ago. Here were found images of animals that lived in ice age. These are the woolly rhinoceros, bison, panther, tarpan (ancestor of the modern horse). The drawings are perfectly preserved due to the fact that thousands of years ago the entrance to the cave was blocked.
It is now closed to the public. The microclimate in which the images are located may disturb human presence. Only its researchers can spend several hours in it. It was decided to open a replica of the cave nearby for visiting spectators.
Lascaux Cave
This is another famous place where drawings of ancient people were found. The cave was discovered by four teenagers in 1940. Now her collection of paintings by ancient Paleolithic artists includes 1,900 images.
The place has become very popular with visitors. The huge influx of tourists led to damage to the drawings. This happened due to an excess of carbon dioxide exhaled by people. In 1963, it was decided to close the cave to visitors. But problems with the preservation of ancient images still exist today. The microclimate of Lascaux has been irreversibly disrupted, and the drawings are now under constant control.
Conclusion
The drawings of ancient people delight us with their realism and skillful execution. Artists of that time were able to convey not only the authentic appearance of the animal, but also its movement and habits. In addition to aesthetic and artistic value, the paintings of primitive artists are important material for studying the animal world of that period. Thanks to the drawings found in the Chauvet Grotto, scientists made an astonishing discovery: it turned out that lions and rhinoceroses, the original inhabitants of hot southern countries, lived in Europe during the Stone Age.
Cro-Magnons, who lived on earth 30 thousand years ago, used simple drawings to express their feelings and emotions. But the cave paintings of primitive people cannot be called primitive, since they were created by people with extraordinary artistic talents. Drawings of primitive people in caves are graphic and three-dimensional images, bas-reliefs on the walls. Many such drawings are known today: in France (southwestern part), Spain (northwestern part), Italy, even in Russia, Serbia and England there are single copies.
Rock paintings and pictures of primitive people are unique and most often resemble a two-dimensional image. At the same time, techniques that help convey volume began to be used only during the Renaissance. Rock art is replete with images of rhinoceroses, bison, mammoths, and deer. Also in the drawings there are scenes of hunting, people with arrows and spears are depicted. Occasionally there are drawings of fish, plants, and insects. The colors used to make the drawings do not fade and fully convey their original brightness. It is difficult to imagine a person who has no idea what rock paintings are (photos will help you understand this).
Where did the first people draw?
Hard-to-reach areas of the caves, located hundreds of meters from the surface, were an excellent place for drawing. This is explained primarily by the cult significance of rock carvings, which require the performance of a certain ritual. Drawing was such a ritual. Melted and still hot fat from wild animals, tufts of moss or wool were poured into the bowls. Then the artist began to work in the light of stone lamps.
What are the rock paintings called?
The rock paintings of the ancients are called petroglyphs (Greek - to carve a stone). There are drawings made in the form of symbols or symbols. The drawings contain a huge amount of valuable information about the life of the representatives ancient population, reveal traditions and historical events that influenced ancient man.
Later drawings were made in the form of symbols or symbols. Man initially sought to express thoughts through signs and writing. Painting brought this moment closer, becoming transition period between graphic drawings and writing. The images are called pictograms. For example, on the territory of Armenia, archaeologists discovered designs reminiscent of all known ancient alphabets. The oldest images found here were created more than 9,000 years ago. Prehistoric cave paintings are pictures created by the first people.
Technique and materials
What motivated people to draw? Just the desire to create beauty or the need to perform and capture a special ritual? Making a rock engraving was not so easy, especially if the paint was applied into deep slits, which the ancient painter carved with a rough cutting tool. It could have been a large stone chisel. Such a tool was discovered at the site of the ancient people of Le Roc de Serre. During the Middle and Late Paleolithic period, the technique of performing rock paintings of primitive people was more subtle. The outlines of the engravings were carved several times with shallow lines. Even then, shading and combined painting were used. There are similar images on the tusks and bones of animals that belong to the same period.
Rock paintings, photo in Altamira Cave
The paint of primitive man was all shades of ocher, which were used as a red dye, charcoal and manganese ore. Chalk and guano were also used bats. The future paint was ground using bone or stone. The resulting powder was mixed with animal fat. Ancient people even had prototypes of modern tubes. They stored paints in hollow parts of animal bones, both sides of which were sealed with a hardened lump of the same animal fat. There were no other colors, such as green or blue.
Primitive artists used bones or sharp sticks as brushes, the ends of which were split. They also used pieces of wool that were tied to bones. First they drew the outline and then painted it in. But there are other images as well. For example, a handprint that has been splattered with paint through a reed.
Ancient people had no idea about the composition or proportions of the body. They painted large predators and, against their background, tiny mountain goats. But this did not stop them from creating masterpieces comparable to modern representation about painting. The accuracy of the representation of objects and animals is amazing, and the drawings of ancient people in caves captured in stone ancient animals that had long since become extinct. Visual effect was enhanced by the fact that the image was applied to a rock ledge.
What did primitive people draw?
Rock paintings of ancient people are a manifestation of emotional and vivid imaginative thinking. Not everyone could create such masterpieces, but only those in whose subconscious visual images arose. Those who were overwhelmed with vivid images transferred them to the plane of the rocks.
There is an assumption that with the help of cave paintings visions were transmitted, a person expressed himself and passed on the life experience he received. But most scientists adhere to the version about cult significance drawings: they were probably created before the hunt. Thus, the person tried to influence the result, to attract the preferred animal during the hunt.
The disappearance of some animals and climate change have led to a serious change in human activity. Now he spent more time raising animals and cultivating the land. There was less time left for hunting. This was also reflected in rock art. The drawings were no longer done deep in the cave, but outside. Images of humans were now becoming more common. Animals that were domesticated were also depicted in cave engravings (fox hunting scenes). Schematic drawings became widespread: triangles, straight or winding lines, a jumble of colored spots.
If earlier hunting scenes were most often depicted, now they were also ritual dances, battles, grazing. There are many such drawings in Spain.
Where can you see rock art?
In France, in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet, drawings were discovered that date back to approximately the 18th-15th millennia BC. e. They depict horses, cows, bulls, and bears. In Spain, in the Altamira cave, hunting scenes were depicted by ancient artists so skillfully that if you look at them with a blazing fire, you get the impression of objects moving. In Africa there is a whole complex of caves with rock paintings. These are Laas Gaal in Somaliland and Tassilien Adjer in Algeria. Rock paintings have also been discovered in Egypt (Swimmers Cave), Bulgaria, Bashkiria, Argentina (Cueva de las Manos Cave) and many others.
Objects of art or primitive reflection of reality?
It is impossible to put an equal sign between primitive “art” and modern one. But when considering ancient images, modern art historians rely on familiar formulations, going far beyond the specifics of primitive art. Today in the art world there is the author of the work, and there is the consumer. Ancient artists created their creations only because they had the ability to draw and felt the need to depict the reality around them or significant events. They had no ideas about art or were blurry, but the images that filled their consciousness found a way out into the world through their creator, who, most likely, was considered by their fellow tribesmen to be endowed with supernatural power.
So what is the difference between rock art and ordinary modern art? The only difference is that the first drawings were made by artists of the Paleolithic era, and rock was used as a canvas. Of course, the phenomenon of creativity is associated with the interaction of all spiritual forces and the release of emotions in a special way. A person could create something new and important for himself, but the awareness of this phenomenon occurred gradually. The Cro-Magnon man lived in a cultural environment in which there was no division into separate spheres of activity. But the ancient people did not have leisure in our understanding, since their life was not divided into strict work and rest. The time when a person was not fighting for existence, he devoted to performing rituals and other actions important for the well-being of the tribe.
The discovery of cave art galleries raised a number of questions for archaeologists: what did the primitive artist paint with, how did he paint, where did he place the drawings, what did he paint and, finally, why did he do it? The study of caves allows us to answer them with varying degrees of certainty.The palette of primitive man was poor: it had four main colors - black, white, red and yellow. To obtain white images, chalk and chalk-like limestones were used; black - charcoal and manganese oxides; red and yellow - minerals hematite (Fe2O3), pyrolusite (MnO2) and natural dyes - ocher, which is a mixture of iron hydroxides (limonite, Fe2O3.H2O), manganese (psilomelane, m.MnO.MnO2.nH2O) and clay particles. Stone slabs on which ocher was ground, as well as pieces of dark red manganese dioxide, were found in caves and grottoes in France. Judging by the painting technique, pieces of paint were ground and mixed with bone marrow, animal fat or blood. Chemical and X-ray structural analysis of paints from the Lascaux cave showed that not only natural dyes were used, mixtures of which give different shades of primary colors, but also quite complex compounds obtained by firing them and adding other components (kaolinite and aluminum oxides).
Serious study of cave dyes is just beginning. And questions immediately arise: why were only inorganic paints used? The primitive man-gatherer distinguished more than 200 different plants, among which were dyeing ones. Why are the drawings in some caves made in different tones of the same color, and in others - in two colors of the same tone? Why does it take so long to enter early painting colors of the green-blue-blue part of the spectrum? In the Paleolithic they are almost absent; in Egypt they appear 3.5 thousand years ago, and in Greece only in the 4th century. BC e. Archaeologist A. Formozov believes that our distant ancestors did not immediately understand the bright plumage of the “magic bird” - the Earth. The most ancient colors, red and black, reflect the harsh flavor of life at that time: the sun's disk on the horizon and the flame of a fire, the darkness of the night full of dangers and the darkness of the caves bringing relative peace. Red and black were associated with the opposites of the ancient world: red - warmth, light, life with hot scarlet blood; black - cold, darkness, death... This symbolism is universal. It was a long journey from the cave artist, who had only 4 colors in his palette, to the Egyptians and Sumerians, who added two more (blue and green) to them. But even further from them is the 20th century cosmonaut who took a set of 120 colored pencils on his first flights around the Earth.
The second group of questions that arise when studying cave painting concerns the technology of drawing. The problem can be formulated as follows: did the animals depicted in the drawings of Paleolithic man “come out” of the wall or “go into” it?
In 1923, N. Casteret discovered a Late Paleolithic clay figure of a bear lying on the ground in the Montespan cave. It was covered with indentations - traces of dart strikes, and numerous prints of bare feet were found on the floor. A thought arose: this is a “model” that incorporates hunting pantomimes around the carcass of a dead bear, established over tens of thousands of years. Then the following series can be traced, confirmed by finds in other caves: a life-size model of a bear, dressed in its skin and decorated with a real skull, is replaced by its clay likeness; the animal gradually “gets to its feet” - it is leaned against the wall for stability (this is already a step towards creating a bas-relief); then the animal gradually “retracts” into it, leaving a drawn and then a pictorial outline... This is how archaeologist A. Solar imagines the emergence of Paleolithic painting.
Another way is no less likely. According to Leonardo da Vinci, the first drawing is the shadow of an object illuminated by a fire. Primitive man begins to draw, mastering the “outlining” technique. The caves have preserved dozens of such examples. On the walls of the Gargas cave (France) 130 “ghost hands” are visible - human handprints on the wall. It is interesting that in some cases they are depicted with a line, in others - by filling in the external or internal contours (positive or negative stencil), then drawings appear, “torn off” from the object, which is no longer depicted in life-size, in profile or frontally. Sometimes objects are drawn as if in different projections (face and legs - profile, chest and shoulders - frontally). Skill gradually increases. The drawing acquires clarity and confidence of the stroke. Using the best drawings, biologists confidently determine not only the genus, but also the species, and sometimes the subspecies of an animal.
The Magdalenian artists take the next step: through painting they convey dynamics and perspective. Color helps a lot with this. The horses of the Grand Ben cave, full of life, seem to be running in front of us, gradually decreasing in size... Later this technique was forgotten, and similar drawings are not found in rock paintings either in the Mesolithic or Neolithic. The last step is the transition from a perspective image to a three-dimensional one. This is how sculptures appear, “emerging” from the walls of the cave.
Which of the above points of view is correct? A comparison of the absolute dating of figurines made of bones and stone indicates that they are approximately the same age: 30-15 thousand years BC. e. Maybe the cave artist took different paths in different places?
Another of the mysteries of cave painting is the lack of background and frame. Figures of horses, bulls, and mammoths are scattered freely along the rock wall. The drawings seem to hang in the air; not even a symbolic line of ground is drawn under them. On the uneven vaults of caves, animals are placed in the most unexpected situations: upside down or sideways. No in drawings of primitive man and a hint of the landscape background. Only in the 17th century. n. e. in Holland the landscape is designed into a special genre.
The study of Paleolithic painting provides specialists with abundant material for searching for the origins various styles and directions to contemporary art. For example, a prehistoric master, 12 thousand years before the advent of pointillist artists, depicted animals on the wall of the Marsoula cave (France) using tiny colored dots. The number of similar examples can be multiplied, but something else is more important: the images on the walls of caves are a fusion of the reality of existence and its reflection in the brain of Paleolithic man. Thus, Paleolithic painting carries information about the level of thinking of a person of that time, about the problems that he lived with and that worried him. Primitive art, discovered more than 100 years ago, remains a real Eldorado for all kinds of hypotheses on this matter.
Dublyansky V.N., popular science book
