1. Prehistoric Art 35,000 – 2,000 BCE (Before the Common Era)
Stonehenge
2,000 BCE
Chinese Horse
15,000-13,000 BCE
Venus of Willendorf
25,000-20,000 BCE

2. Prehistoric Europe

3. The Birth of Art

4. Prehistoric art The primary focus of this art was survival.
The term “prehistoric” indicates that the culture didn’t have a written language. Instead, they used pictographs or pictures as symbols to communicate.
The first art was made about 30,000 B.C. it took the form of painting on cave walls and small sculptures of humans and animals from bone, stone, clay.
The primary focus of this art was survival.

5. Prehistoric Periods Paleolithic period = old stone
2,500,000 – 10,000 BCE
Mesolithic period = middle stone
10,000 – 4,000 BCE
Neolithic period = new stone
4,000 – 2,000 BCE

6. Subdivisions within the prehistoric periods
are named for the sites at which characteristic artifacts, like tools and weapons, have been found. For example:
Upper Paleolithic period has 5 subdivisions:
Perigoridan
Aurignacian
Gravettian
Solutrean
Magdalenian

7. Forms of art
Early forms of art were either portable sculptures, often of small female "venus figurines", or pictures and symbols that were painted, drawn or carved on the walls and ceilings of caves. Later on, art became more integrated into settlements and daily life.
Reindeer foot-bone
‘HALL OF BULLS’, Cave Painting
Lascaux, France
Venus of Brassempouy

8. Venus of Willendorf 25,000-20,000 BCE
Discovered in 1908 in Austria by archeologist
Joseph Szombathy
Venus of Willendorf was sculpted from
oolitic limestone and colored with red
ocher. Measuring 4” in size, she was made
to be portable.
A subtractive carving method was used to
sculpt the statuette; meaning limestone
was carved away to create the form.
Archeologist have several theories
about the “Venus figurine”
Symbol for fertility
Good luck charm
Mother goddess
(earth mother or female deity)
Paleolithic Period

9. Portable Art made from Mammoth ivory
Horse Head Sculpture
Hohle Fels, Germany
30,000 BCE
Height 5 cm
Venus of Brassempouy, France
23,000 BCE
"The lady in a hood“
Height 3.5 cm
Unlike other venuses she has clear
facial features
“Lion-Man”
Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany
35,000 BCE
Height 30 cm
Statuette from Kostienki, Russia
23,000 BCE
Height 11cm

10. Chauvet Cave, France 30,000 BCE Paleolithic Period
Based on radiocarbon dating, Chauvet contains the oldest known cave paintings

11. Chauvet Cave, southern France
Cave Lions
Bear .
Horses
Rhino

12. A depiction of running animals at Chauvet Cave

13. Rhinos Chauvet Cave

14. Lascaux cave, France
17,000 BCE
Paleolithic Period

15. Chinese Horse (18,000-10,000 BC)
named because its style of elastic strength and fluency resembles Chinese calligraphy or brushwork
Mixing minerals for color, this artist used yellow for the body and charcoal for the
outline, mane, and head and painted with brushes made from animal hairs, leaves,
twigs, or feathers.

16. Hall of Bulls Lascaux Cave 15,000 years old
Their approach was naturalistic representing animals as convincing a pose and action as possible.

17. Bulls

18. Theories about cave painting
The remoteness and difficulty of access of many of these sites and the fact that they appear to have been used for centuries strongly suggest that the prehistoric hunter attributed magical properties to them.
“By confining the animal within the limits of a painting, one subjected it to one’s power in the hunting grounds”

19. Palimpsest effect
Images superimposed on one another – maybe a spatial representation of time (one hunting season taking the place of another – a sort of mark-off calendar)
Groupings of the animals are not entirely haphazard and seem to express an order in terms of the preferences and concerns of the hunter (cattle and horses, for example, regularly appear together.

20. Altamira Cave, Spain
15,000 BCE
Paleolithic Period

21. Bison Altamira Cave 15,000-12,000 BCE

22. Wounded Bison Altamira Cave

23. Ceiling of Altamira Cave 220 yards long by 10 yards wide

24. Mesolithic Period 10,000 – 4,000 BCE
Rock painting styles became more abstract and schematic, more symbolic than picture; it is likely that they recorded a step in the evolution of the symbolic for the pictorial – an evolution that, in the Near East, culminated in the invention of writing.
Rock Paintings
Marching Warriors
Gasulla gorge, Castellon,Spain
8,000-3,000 BCE

25. Pictographs Petroglyphs
Styles of Rock Art
Pictographs Petroglyphs

26. Pictographs are prehistoric symbols drawn or painted on rock walls.
Bhimbetka Cave
Bhimbetka Cave Paintings in India

28. Petroglyphs are prehistoric symbols carved or scratched into rock.
Petroglyphs in Gobustan,
dating back to 10,000 BC

29. The Mesolithic period was the beginnings of both settled communities and farming and includes the invention of the bow and arrow, pottery for food storage and the domestication of animals.

30. Neolithic Period
Man made the giant stride toward the actual concrete control of his environment by settling in fixed abodes and domesticating plants and animals. They changed from hunter to herdsman to farmer.

31. With an ever-increasing, steady supply of grain and meat, we humans now had time to ponder the Big Picture and invent some rather radical technological advances.
Earthen bowl
with pig design
Bone ware
Flint sickles, flat grinding stone, stone ax with wooden handle
Cultivation tool

32. The "new" arts to emerge from this era were weaving, architecture, the construction of megaliths and increasingly stylized pictographs that were well on their way to becoming writing.
Stonehenge is a megalithic monument. Megaliths, literally meaning large stone slabs, had become the most conspicuous forms of expression within the European landscape for the people of this time.
Stonehenge stands in open grassland on the Salisbury Plain in southern Britain

33. Symbols to Writing