Caves to Cathedrals

I have just discovered Slideshare, a site expressly for the purpose of sharing of slideshows. In the past, I just uploaded Pdf versions of my powerpoints to Blackboard. But students invariably complained about how long these same files took to download. Slideshare is amazing! You can restrict access to your slideshow, and viewers can watch it on Slideshare or download the file. You can even embed the slideshow in a blog!

If you are interested, I invite you to connect to my secret URL, where you can see the slides for my first class on Paleolithic Art and the Chauvet Cave.

The identification of art from the periods of prehistory – paleolithic and neolithic (and mesolithic, as well, if you use Honour and Fleming’s The Visual Arts: A History) – depend not on their place nor their date for their periodization, but on the stage of cultural development.  To underscore the point that every continent has a prehistory, in an ideal survey (global, of course), alongside the neolithic art of the Ancient Near East and Western Europe,  I would present neolithic art from China.

Gardner’s chapter on Chinese Art before 1279 includes a brief section on Yangshao pottery, but unfortunately, it offers little to work with.  A search for “Yangshao” on Via turns up several pieces, some of which are publicly accessible, such as this ca. 4000 BCE bottle from the Harvard University Art Museums.  In fact, one may turn many places on the internet for further material.  Mike Gunther has assembled ceramic and jade from neolithic China on his website, www.art-and-archaeology.com, all linked to the pages of the museums that hold them (but beware- some links are dead).  The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has a useful web resource for Chinese art, the Art of Asia, as does the National Gallery of Art, Teaching the Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology.   And, as for all periods, one may find useful information at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Timeline of Art History.

In my fifty minutes on Neolithic Art, we did not make it to Catal Hoyuk, which was a shame, for those who work on Catal Hoyuk make the material, including the results of the most recent excavations, highly accessible.  The official website provides the most obvious starting point.  Among other places, it leads to the photographs of the archaeologists on Flickr and an Image Collection Database at Stanford.  It also provides an extensive bibliography.

The Open Knowledge and the Public Interest (OKAPI) team at Berkeley has made great efforts to make the archaeological material from Catal Hoyuk more compelling.  You may visit reconstructions in Second Life, although I cannot recommend it, for as I write, I am on Okapi Island in Second Life, stuck outside Catal Hoyuk, unable to climb up the ladder to get into the town.  The Berkeley Archaeologists at Catal Hoyuk Research Archive, and its web exhibition, Remixing Catal Hoyuk, overflow with riches, although this abundance overwhelms and it may prove difficult to find something immediately relevant to the class.

If time permitted, I would aim to contextualize the wall paintings from Catal Hoyuk more fully.  First, I would show the original painting of the landscape.  Gardner’s shows only a watercolor copy of it, but you may find on the web photographs of the actual wall painting.  Second, I would show a plan of Catal Hoyuk and locate the room with the landscape.  Then, I would introduce other material, such as the Mother Goddess figures included in Art Across Time and The Visual Arts: A History. 

But Catal Hoyuk is such a rich site, that it may provide a good opportunity for the students to conduct some guided web-research and to learn more about the site and archaeology more generally. 

The generous on-line publication of material from Ain Ghazal by multiple interested parties makes the monumental figures from Ain Ghazal particularly accessible.  Before teaching the class, I had come across a Jstor-available article by Denise Schmandt-Besserat in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (”Ain Ghazal Monumental Figures” in Number 310, 1998), to which I attribute all that follows.  But today, I find much more on the internet.  You may find Ain Ghazal Excavation Reports by the same author, which include a chapter on the Monumental Statuary, including a lengthy “Stylistic Analysis”, as well as a description and catalogue of a second cache of statues.  Chapter 5 on the “Decorated Skulls” offers great material for the contextualization of the form of the monumental figures, and the Introduction provides background on the town.  A conservation project also provides some information on the University College London website. 

In class, I introduced the human figures from Ain Ghazal by asking the students to place in order from the smallest to the largest the following carved objects: the Venus of Willendorf, the Lion Man, and the figure from Ain Ghazal, and the discussion begun with the paleolithic carved figures in the previous unit may here continue.  The students should appreciate that the figure from Ain Ghazal stands almost 3 1/2 feet high, taller than my almost-five-year-old daughter.

I then asked the class to identify what the Venus of Willendorf, the relief carving of a woman from Laussel, and the figure from Ain Ghazal all have in common.  This question trains their close reading of the survey text. 

Two-headed figures and the figure holding her breasts, both motifs of divine figures in later art of the Near East, suggest the identification of these statues as divinities.  A description of how the statues were made and where and how the archaeologists found them (as two caches, buried in good condition two hundred years apart) can then lead to a discussion of context and use.  Images of the statues from the side also give clues to their possible placement within a space. 

Again, the understanding of context, placement, and use make these figures meaningful.

A comparison of the images in Gardner’swith those in the other survey texts surprises.  For my own field, as we shall see much further down the road, the extent of the overlap disturbed me, but here we actually see differences!  As you can see, Stokstad, especially, but also Adams and Honour & Fleming hold some of the Neolithic material until the next chapter on the Ancient Near East.  The chart, however, does not show how Gardner’s privileges the wall paintings at Catal Hoyuk, while the others privilege the sculpted material.

Click on chart to enlarge.

As I develop this site, I notice that while I find plenty of medieval blogs (my field of specialization), I find almost no art history blogs. 

Let me, then, draw attention to one written by the Director of the Walters Art Museum – Gary Vikan – called the Director’s Blog.  Dr. Vikan posts infrequently, but well.  I would appreciate to learn of any others!

After describing the lesson plan for each period, I will compile a list of the works and figures that would structure my ideal survey text on that particular period.  In most cases, I do not specialize in the field and offer my choices humbly.  Please feel free to comment!

Gardner’s chapter on prehistoric art has 12 images and 1 map in the paleolithic section.  I will adhere to this quantity of material.  Since prehistoric art  is not my speciality, I will be rather generic for material with which I have insufficient familiarity.

World Map of Sites with Prehistoric Rock Painting

Figure 1      Plan of the Chauvet Cave (30th-28th C. BCE)

Figure 2      North Wall of Hillaire Chamber of the Chauvet Cave

Figure 3      Panel of the Horses in the Hillaire Chamber

Figure 4      Reconstruction of the phases of the creation of the Panel of the Horses

Figure 5     The Lion Man (30-28th millennium BCE)

Figure 6     Venus of Willendorf (28-25th millennium BCE) from front, back, side (such as in Art Across Time)

Figure 7     Rhinoceros, Wounded Man, and Disemboweled Bison from the Cave at Lascaux (15-13th mil. BCE)

Figure 8     Contextualizing view of image in Figure 7

Figure 9     An example of Saharan Rock Art (5-4th millennium BCE)

Figure 10    Rock art from Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria (6-4th millennium BCE)

Figure 11    An example of the earliest Australian Rock Art

Figure 12    An example of prehistoric rock art in the Americas

From my teaching philosophy, you may surmise that I take a strongly object- and monument-centered approach.  In each class, I focused on one or two works for close examination.  For the class on Paleolithic Art, I chose the Chauvet Cave (simply because I happened across Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times, with its stunning photos). 

The Chauvet Cave has a fantastic website, in English.  When you click on “Visit the Cave” in the bottom right, the site takes you to a highly comprehensible plan of the cave with informative click-able views. 

Following my standard procedure, I began with the photograph in Gardner’s- the Panel of the Horses in Figure 1-12 (Here is the image on the official website of the same painting).  First I showed a detail of the confronted rhinoceroses and asked for a student to describe what s/he saw.  We noticed their slight overlapping and the differentiation in the rendering of the legs closer to the viewer from those farther, and here began our semester-long discussion of the representation of space.  We then shifted our gaze upward and looked at the horses, and then to the bulls/aurochs.   At this point, I just elicited a simple description.

Then I projected onto the screen a plan of the cave and led them on this plan to the location of the painting reproduced in Gardner’s - the Hillaire Chamber.  I oriented the students within this chamber toward the north wall, flanked by the entrances to the Skull Chamber and the Megaceros Chamber.  Then I showed a view of the north wall, but showing only the area between these two entrances.  This view amazes me.  The alcove at the center gives this wall the appearance of an intentionally highlighted location.  (Please note that the alcove does not appear clearly in the image to which I link.) 

So then we looked at the other painted animals to the right of the alcove, the Panel of the Cervids, and then in the alcove itself, although the images therein do not photograph easily. 

At this point, I introduced the notion of program.  It is audacious to speak of program and cave paintings in the same class, but this wall, to me, is clearly an intentional assemblage of images, which is the loosest definition of program. 

But to qualify this, I returned to the Panel of the Horses.  I showed the students a photograph of some animal figures incised above the aurochs.  Here then enters the material/archaeological evidence.  I showed a series of images from the above-mentioned book that recreate the phases in which the Panel of the Horses was painted.  The first two images show a bear scratching the wall and then the incised animal figures, and the sequence continues through nine phases.  The question then arises whether in each new phase, the painter responded to the pre-existing imagery. This makes for a compelling discussion.

N.B.  The Bradshaw Foundation also publishes much useful on the Chauvet Cave as well as on other prehistoric sites. 

In my teaching, I privilege the close examination of material original to the period of study.  I advocate an openness to all sources, whether visual, textual, or material, and I cultivate in my students the intellectual tools - from the disciplines of art history, history and archaeology - that one needs to examine these primary sources.  The meaningful contextualization of works of art then results from the interrelating of visual, textual, and material evidence.

The historical study of art also develops skills particular to the discipline.  These include: 

• the precise description of the content and form of a work of art (for pedagogical purposes, I label these skills Iconography and Formal Analysis)
• the identification of traditional and innovative elements in a work of art
• the establishment of the historical context of a work of art through the meaningful relating of image to text
• the discernment of a program encompassing the various elements of a single monument.

I have ordered these skills from lower level to higher.  I will elaborate on each in due course.