Foreign Art History

Author: Zhu Ming
Editor-in-Chief: Xie Rongdai
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1998-03-01
Features:
Fragment: During the Aurignacian period and the subsequent Solutrean period, painting using color and lines had already emerged; round sculptures or reliefs carved from stone, bone, antler, or ivory; as well as works created by mud modeling. Although many sites often contain artifacts from later cultural periods, the development and improvement of their expressive capabilities show clear lines. It is generally believed that the most representative works are female figurines, reflecting the worship of motherhood in a matriarchal society. Famous artifacts include the "Venus" figurine unearthed from Willendorf in Austria (Figure 1), which prominently features full and rounded breasts and buttocks, praising and praying for superior fertility and reproductive abilities, to the extent that the face and limbs are abnormally simplified. Clearly, in tribal groups, a strong and robust maternal leader is crucial. Works of a similar nature have been discovered in vast areas of Europe. For example, the stone female figurines found in Lespugue and Grimaldi in France tend to be exaggerated into geometric shapes, while the ivory female figurines from Bousset and Gergelim in the Soviet Union are more realistic. Another example is the relief of the "Woman Holding an Horn Cup" unearthed from the Rocsel cave in France, where the body's representation shares similarities with the exaggerated "Venus" of Willendorf. The right hand holds an object shaped like a horn, whether it is a horn or a horn cup is uncertain. As for the representation of animal figures, there is a mud-molded bear in the Montastruc cave in France, and the scattered footprints around it suggest it may have been created for a shamanic ritual related to bear hunting. The wild boar relief in the Charente cave is more vivid. In terms of murals, early works include the mammoth in the Niaux cave (see right figure), the wild ox in the Font-de-Gaume cave, both depicted with crude and naive lines to outline the side profiles of animals. In the Gargas cave, there are horses decorated with dots on their bodies, and primitive human handprints are preserved. By the Magdalenian period, cave murals had reached a relatively mature level, with numerous caves containing murals discovered on both sides of the Pyrenees in France and Spain, archaeologically referred to as the "Franco-Cantabrian Art Circle." Among them, the largest and highest level are the Lascaux in France and the Altamira in Spain.