Caves to Cathedrals

Also published at Early Medieval Art.

Thanks to the Digital Research Tools Wiki, I have discovered two on-line tools for creating timelines. While Simile requires facility with HTML, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University offers a more accessible Timeline Builder.

I usually encourage students to make timelines, in order to manage the periods and works of art, but they seldom do. An on-line program would make this task much more enticing. To promote active learning, the students should really do the work, but I think I will make my own next time as well!

For the class, I defined prehistoric as before writing (rather than before written history). The basic principle of contextualization – that the interrelating of text and image/object/monument permits contextualization of the work of art – means that with the emergence of textual sources in the historical record, the possibilities for interpretation of a work of art dramatically increases. I therefore prioritized the recognition of this moment, when writing emerges, and defined prehistory accordingly. So you may see on my syllabus that in the second class on prehistoric art, which focused primarily on the Neolithic, I also included Bronze Age Cycladic art.

The Cycladic figures compare well with the Ain Ghazal statues. Furthermore, the discernment of paint through scientific analysis relates the Cycladic figures to the paleolithic figures. (On the painting of these figures, see “Painted Early Cycladic Figures: An Exploration of Context and Meaning” by Elizabeth Hendrix.)

Scholars, however, traditionally consider the Myceneans and Minoans, also of the Bronze Age Aegean, as prehistoric, in spite of their scripts – Linear A, B, and C. But the figures of the Cycladic Civilization have so much more in common with the enigmatic objects of the Neolithic than with the expressive Mycenean and Minoan works, that I may still stand behind the decision to include the Bronze Age Cycladic with the Neolithic.

Although Gardner’s includes Stonehenge, I did not cover it during class time. But at the least, I can note recent news items.

National Geographic has just published several items – a news article, a magazine essay, and a slideshow – as part of its coverage of new findings, most notably the dating of some burials so that they predate the stones.

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