Caves to Cathedrals

Gardner’s next turns to Western Europe, the primary focus of its section on paleolithic art.  It begins with carved, mostly portable works and then turns to cave paintings. 

In this first class, before the examination of one particular object or monument and as part of the training of the students in their use of the survey text, I would have the students reorder the works presented in the text according to their actual chronology.  Gardner’s seldom presents the works in their actual chronological order, and this misleads the inattentive reader.  We must therefore develop the students’ awareness of the chronology of works of art, for Gardner’s fails on this account. The previous edition presented an abbreviated timeline at the end of each chapter, but the newest edition lacks such a gesture. 

The carved works, by chance, appear in chronological order.  The cave paintings have no such luck.  Special sections isolate the oldest cave paintings toward the end, and the main text begins with the cave first to be discovered, but the last to be painted. 

First, I would project on the screen the cave paintings in the order in which they appear in the book and ask the students put them in chronological order.  This activity should encourage some fresh discussions about style and assumptions about its development.  I would then reveal that the cave paintings, in chronological order, begin with the ChauvetCave, follow with Peche-Merle, and end with Lascaux and Altamira.  The implications of their dating according to scientific evidence should contrast with their dating according to assumptions about stylistic development.

Then I would reshuffle all the works.  The Lion Man and the Paintings at the Chauvet Cave together form the beginning of paleolithic art in Western Europe, dating to 30,000-28,000.  The Venus of Willendorf, the relief carvings from Laussel, and the cave paintings from Peche-Merle date to the later 30th millennium BCE.  Finally, the paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, the bison spear thrower, and the relief carvings of Le Tuc d’Audoubert belong to the second half of the 20th millennium.  The second awareness that I explicitly cultivate in my students is that of scale.  The new Gardner’s includes a scale with each figure.  But even this takes some training to understand.  Rather, I would require the students to purchase a sewing tape measure, such as the Spring Fiberglass Tape Measure-60″, and would then model its constant use in class.  The captions in Gardner’s are extremely helpful in this regard, as they now indicate the length of particular figures in the cave painting. 

So in this first class, rather than explaining the importance of scale, I would ask the students to arrange the three carved portable objects – the Lion Man, the Venus of Willendorf, and the Bison Spearthrower – according to their height.  This can lead to a discussion of how certain features give an object a monumental or miniature appearance.  But then, out come the tape measures and discussion turns to the deceptiveness of cropped photos in textbooks!

Finally, the final awareness to develop in the students is that of period.  So I would also include among preliminary tasks a discussion of what defines the paleolithic (and would return to it at the end of class).  The textbooks do generally deliver in this regard, but students often skim through these passages (if they read them at all).  A good perpetual reading assignment would be for the students to identify the features of the period(s) under consideration. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 9.01 and is filed under Paleolithic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.