Art History Today

Origins and Spread of Romanesque & Gothic Style in France, Germany & Northern Europe. 1

Prelude: Romanesque into Gothic.

“When people at the end of the thirteenth- century looked around them as they stood in the nave of Amiens cathedral they were neither seeking to label architectural components, nor deciphering symbols. They were the enraptured witnesses of a new way of seeing.” Michael Camille.¹

In order to understand the Gothic style it is necessary to know something about its predecessor out of which the Gothic movement grew- the Romanesque. This style is thought to date from the 7^th century and is architecturally characterised by the round arch, simplified schemes of plan and elevation including ambulatories and radiating chapels. The early Romanesque lacked the skill to span vaults until about the eleventh-century; then various architectural systems appeared such as the tunnel vaults (Spain and France), groin vaults (Germany), and rib vaults (Durham and churches in Italy). What really marks out the Gothic from the Romanesque is the addition of diagonal ribs to the groin vault; a rib is defined by Peter Frankl as “any kind of arch [lying] within the surfaces of a vault.”² The first man to write about the Gothic style was the remarkable Abbot Suger (c. 1080-1151), who was responsible for constructing St Denis in 1144; he called the rib arcus, though the 13^th century artist Villard de Honnecourt (above) was the first to use the word ogive to mean the pointed arch, and ogive has remained the French term for a Gothic rib right down to present times.³ As Kenneth Clark pointed out, Suger’s writings on art and architecture had a philosophical cast: he was the first to “give a theoretical justification of his love of beauty.” This view of the effect of art on the senses helps to distinguish the Gothic from the Romanesque which had a flat formality about it; it did not seek to ascend to both the spiritual and aesthetic heights of Suger’s St Denis which with its rayonnant windows, precious objects, made St Denis in its heyday a large theological jewel box until the time of the French Revolution when a lot of it was destroyed.

1Gothic Architecture: Visions and Revelations of the Medieval World ( Everyman Art Library, 1996), 12.

2Gothic Architecture (orig pub 1962, Yale University Press, New Haven, Pelican History of Art), revised edition by Paul Crossley (Yale, 2000), 41.

3Ibid.

The Dawn of European Art: From Prehistoric to Medieval Art in Europe. Slides

Slides

1. Albrecht Durer, Europa and the Bull, engraving, 1495.

2. Sebastian Munster, "Queen Europa," Cosmographia, Basel, 1588.

3. Great Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux Caves.

4. Map of cave art in Europe during Paleolithic.

5. Chart with periods of the Paleolithic.

6. Bulls, Deer, Horses, Bear and Other animals, Hall of Bulls, Lascaux Caves.

7. Black headed horse between two bulls, Great Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux Caves.

8. Bulls with hidden bear, Great Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux Caves.

9. Reindeer and salmon and diamond shaped marks showing "returned head" pose, engraving on reindeer antler, Lorthet, Hautes, Pyrénées, from cast of original cylindrical piece, 14 cm.

10. Megaloceros, dot technique, Lascaux Caves.

11. Reconstruction of Megaloceros or "Irish Elk" or "Great Elk."

12. Cave painting of a dun horse, "The Chinese Horse, " 1.47 m, Lascaux, Dordogne.

13. Two Bull bison, in black with red patch on back of that facing left, 2.40 m, Main Gallery, Lascaux Caves.

14. A Man with a Bird Head and a Bison, "Shaft of the Dead Man," black outline painting, Lascaux Caves, Dordogne.

15. Bison, Main Gallery, Lascaux Caves.

16. Bison painted in red dots with black horns and patches on face and shoulder, Marsoulas, Haute-Garonne, S. W. France.

17. Three abstract paintings (Altamira, Castillo, La Mouthe), mainly red and black colours, not thought to represent traps and huts as previously suggested.

18. Deer in black outline, 81 cm, Chimeneas, Santander, Spain.

19. Deer, engraved outline, painteds in black, body filled with shades of pale brown to red, Ceiling of Altamira Cave.

20. Three shot showing three deer with three types of technique.

21. Auroch, or wild ox, engraving on sandstone block, Trou de Chaleux, Belgium.

22. Aurochs and mammoths, example of "twisted perspective, "Pech Merle, Catalan, Southern France.

23. Reindeer, Pech Merle, Catalan, southern France.

24. Löwenmensch, a lion-headed figurine found in Germany, dating to the Upper Paleolithic of about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, 31.1 cm (12.2 in) tall, 5.6 cm (2.2 in), Ulm Museum, Germany.

25. Löwenmensch, different view.

26. "Venus of Hohlefels," mammoth ivory, 35-40,000 years ago, 6 cms, 2.4 inches, Prehistoric Museum of Blaubeuren, near Ulm.

27. "Venus of Hohlefels," different view.

28. "Venus of Brassempouy" (French: la Dame de Brassempouy, meaning "Lady of Brassempouy", or Dame à la Capuche, "Lady with the Hood"), found in cave at Brassempouy, S. W. France 1892, ivory, 25,000 years BP,

29. "Venus of Laussel," limestone bas-relief, 46.0 cm (18.11 inches) high, Museum of Aquitaine, Bordeaux.

30. Detail of Laussel figure, cornucopia.

31. Detail of Laussel figure, head.

32. Stylized Female figurine from Senorbi (Sardinia), marble, 42 cm, National Museum, Cagliari.

33. Female figurine from Amorgos, Cycladic type, marble statue, 1.48 metres, National Museum, Athens.

34. Bison licking insect bite, carved antler, Upper Paleolithic, 20,- 12, 000 BP, found in Dordogne, National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil, Dordogne.

35. The Swimming Reindeer, tip of a mammoth tusk carved as two reindeer depicted one behind the other, Late Magdalenian, 11,000 B.C., mammoth ivory.

36. Fish (salmon or trout), engraving, La Grotte du Poisson, 1 metre, Gorge d'enfer, Dordogne.

37. Head of Apollo Belvedere, marble, copy of bronze original of c. 350-325 B.C., Vatican Palace, Rome.

38. Sutton Hoo helmet, from Sutton Hoo burial ground, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 6-7^th centuries A.D.

39. Purse Lid from Sutton Hoo burial ground, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 6-7^th centuries A.D., gold, garnet and millefiori purse-lid, length, 19 cm, British Museum, London.

40. Page from the Book of Kells, folio 292r, c 800 A.D., text that opens the Gospel of St John, Trinity College Library, Dublin.

41. Page from the Book of Kells, folio 32v, c 800 A.D., Christ Enthroned.

42. Page from Lindisfarne Gospels, folio 27 r, incipit from the Gospel of Matthew, insular or medieval script, 700 A.D.

43. Chi Rho from the Lindisfarne Gospels, 700 A.D., British Library, London.

44. Imago Hominis The Man, symbol of St Matthew, from Echternacht Gospels, c. 698 A.D., Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

45. Eagle (symbol of St John), Echternacht Gospels.

46. Prow of Gokstad Ship, Viking Ship, 9^th century A.D., Museum, Oslo, 78.1 ft long.

47. Side view of the Gokstad ship.

48. Detail of carving on Gokstad ship.

49. Photo of Kenneth Clark before the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris.

50. Unknown artist, Roettgen Pietà, 1360 A.D., Rhine School, wood, coloured, 89 cm high, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn.

51. Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498-99, marble, 174 cm × 195 cm (68.5 in × 76.8 in), Vatican, Rome.

52. Expulsion, Bernward Doors, c. 1015 A.D., Church of St Michal, Hildesheim, Germany.

53. Bernward Doors.

54. Reliquary in the form of the head of Charlemagne, 1350, Mosan goldwork, Aachen Cathedral Treasury.

55. St Gregory and Scribes, book cover, ivory, 10^th century, Kunthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

The Dawn of European Art: From Prehistoric to Medieval Art in Europe. 9

An Art of Sorrow & Suffering: Towards the Gothic.

"What does it matter?" he said. "We should not ask- for in the time it was made they never did. It was not created by some wonderful and well-advertised genius. It is an anonymous product, anonymous and communal.Moreover, is is very advanced Middle-Ages- Gothic- signum mortificationis. No more of the palliating and beautifying that the Roman epoch thought proper to a depiction of the Crucifixion.."Naptha in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.¹

To lift the curtain on the Gothic age, it is helpful to consider the above quotation from the German writer Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain. The above is spoken by Herr Naptha, a Jesuit intellectual who has a fondness for the Middle-Ages, and who displays a wooden pietà sculpture in his home. Mann scholars believe that Naptha's religious sculpture may have resembled something like the Röttgen Pietà, a wooden group of the Virgin holding the Man of Sorrows- Christ, her son- on her knees, and dating from the early fourteenth-century, the "advanced Middle Ages" to use Naptha's words. As the Jesuit says, his pietà is the product of an era that was "anonymous and communal" by which he means the age of craftsmanship when artists strived towards the greater glory of God rather than for individual recognition. The Röttgen Pietà is deliberately harrowing and ugly because as Naptha had previously said- in his Jesuitical way- "all works of art whose function is to express the soul and the emotions..are always so ugly as to be beautiful, and so beautiful as to be ugly."² To Naptha- and the artist in a deeply devout age- art had to move the spectator by appealing to their emotions by showing the wounds of Christ whilist hinting at the divine which could only be found within. As Naptha says, "physical beauty is an abstraction" and one feels if he placed his Pietà next to Michelangelo's much more celebrated version in the Vatican, he would turn away in disgust as it would symbolise that abstract view of the human body that he despises; ironically, Michelangelo's group despite its Roman style was influenced- iconographically- by German pietàs. In sum, we could consider Michelangelo's and the unknown artist of the Röttgen Pieta standing for two opposing ideological positions which we could term medieval mysticism and renaissance humanism. As we shall see throughout this course, the story of European art hinges on the conflict between a more conservative, ascetic notion of art and one which is more culturally optimistic, believes in progress and sees art as a symbol of that ascent towards the high point of European civilisation.

1Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain,(trans H. T. Lowe-Porter, first pub 1924, Penguin, 1960), 393.

2Ibid.

The Dawn of European Art: From Prehistoric to Medieval Art in Europe. 8

Between European Prehistoric & the Gothic: Towards the "First Great Age" of European Civilisation.

"Man is no longer Imago Hominis, the image of man, but a human being, with humanity's impulses and fears; also, humanity's moral sense and belief in the authority of a higher power. By the year 1000, the year in which many timid people had feared that the world would come to an end, the long dominance of the barbarian wanderers was over, and Western Europe was prepared for the first great age of civilisation."¹ Kenneth Clark.

The story of European art now turns to Ireland and Hibernia, whose inhabitants first arrived on its shores between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic ages, what is known as the Mesolithic- the central period of prehistoric Europe. By this time the glaciers had retreated though the world remained cold, harsh and uninviting. From 2,500 up to 500 BC, the peoples who would be known as Celts began arriving in Ireland led by their Druid priests. And by the time of the sixth century A.D, the Early Church was reaching these barren outposts; for example, scholars were arriving in Cork, representatives of Western Christianity clinging on to wild places in Ireland and subsequently Iona, an island in the Inner Hebrides. To this epoch of precarious civilisation we owe such wonders as the Book of Kells, perhaps the last great artifact of Iona founded by St Columba in 563 A.D. However, the Ionians were increasingly threatened by the coming of the Norsemen in their longships (above) and so they fled to Ireland. Despite the efforts of mythographers to promote the importance of Celtic mythology, it could not compete with Viking legend which has permeated views of the north helped occasionally by Ossian and Wagner:² the Nordic theme which will be encountered many times on this course. In a memorable evocation of the powerful symbolism of the Viking longship, in his TV series Civilisation Kenneth Clark stood on the banks of the Seine with one of the greatest edifices of the Gothic period- Notre-Dame- at his back whilist speculating on what the prow of a Viking ship might have signified to a Parisian mother and her family seeking to settle peacefully in their little hut in early medieval times.³ The Vikings were not "civilised" in Clark's sense, but they were not without an eye for decoration and beauty. Looking at the carvings of these magnificent vessels- now safely moored in European museums- one can see similarities between this style and Romanesque architecture which comes of age during the reign of Charlemagne who epitomises the spirit of the High Middle Ages, the subject of the second week.

1Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, (BCA, London, 1969) 31

2On Celtic Mythology, Joseph Campbell: The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (Penguin, 1964), 31f.

3Clark, Civilisation, 1-2.

The Dawn of European Art: From Prehistoric to Medieval Art in Europe. 7

Animal Sculpture in Stone & Wood in European Prehistoric Art.

Fortunately, in addition to cave and rock painting, and figurative sculpture we have excellent examples of animal carving surviving from this early European period. By no means is this art confined to the Aurignacian sites, but is also found in parts of Northern Europe like Scandinavia. For example, the Elk's Head of Huittinen, a mesolithic moose's head of soapstone of 8-9,000 years old found in 1903, is the oldest archaeological artifact found in Finland. The elk was the "principal great animal in the food economy" ( Powell) and stone would be shaped into the heads of these animals for both hunting and ritualistic purposes.¹ Some of these people like the Maglemose Culture inhabited the regions around the Baltic and the North seas, and in addition to stone and wood carving they produced images of animals like brown bears and elks in amber which give us some idea of how the natural world impinged on their daily existence. From the Magdalenian culture of the Upper Paleolithic in Western Europe we have carvings of reindeer like the so-called "swimming reindeer" in the British Museum, a 13,000 year old carving by an unknown artist who created it from a mammoth tusk; this vital image with its corkscrew motion (above) epitomises the L'âge du renne (the Age of the Reindeer). Staying in the water, but with a species more natural to it we have a rare example of fish- possibly salmon or trout- engraved on the roof of a small cave, La Grotte du Poisson (Gorge d'Enfer in the Dordogne). Mention should also be made of the previously shown bison licking an insect's bite which was created between 20,000- 12,000 years ago. It is a product of Magdalenian culture and it is a carved and engraved fragment of a spear-thrower made of reindeer antler.

1Powell, Prehistoric Art, 70.

The Dawn of European Art: From Prehistoric to Medieval Art in Europe. 6

Evolution of Figurative Sculpture in Prehistoric Times.

Figurative, or to use Powell's term, "figurine art" consists of mainly images of animals and women.There are not many fugurines of men unless one counts strange artefacts like the Löwenmensch ("Lion Man") found in a German cave in 1939; this is thought to be a lion and a human fused together. There are about sixty surviving representations of women distributed "in Gravettian deposits from the Ukraine to Moravia, Austria, Germany, Belgium and France, and on into Italy."¹ Recalling Powell's previous point about the coexistence of abstraction and naturalism, some of these figurines like the so-called "Savignano Venus" are both abstract and natural.² Another conspicuous trait is the lack of a face which seems to suggest it was irrelevant to processes such as propagation. However, some fecundity figurines like the ivory head of a woman, the "Venus of Brassempouy" are more naturalistic with clear facial features; such may have been intended for charms or amulets.³ This Gravettian achievement waned and it was replaced by carvings on blocks of limestone showing human figures and animals. One of the most famous continuing the "Venus" sequence is the figure at Laussel, an 18.11 inch high nude female figure carved in limestone rock, found in the Dordogne region of France. This Laussel figure (above) has an obvious lineage with the other Venus types, but there is more monumentality here. There are also attributes: the figure holds a bison horn, or possibly a cornucopia, in one hand, which has thirteen notches. According to some researchers, this may symbolize the number of moons or the number of menstrual cycles in one year.

1Powell, Prehistoric Art, 12. The Gravettian is the name of the archeological culture that succeeded the Aurignacian c. 33,000 B.P.

2The name "Venus" is obviously anachronistic, but it is useful in tracing the stylistic development of a female deity in art beginning with the "Venus of Hohle Fels" of about 35-40, 000 years ago.

3Powell, Prehistoric Art, 19.

The Dawn of European Art: From Prehistoric to Medieval Art in Europe. 5

Painting Technique at Lascaux and Altamira.

So much for magic and style, but what about the actual technique used in painting these marvels on the walls of caves? What kind of painting was this? What was the technique? The predominant colours used were red, yellow and black; red came from hematite, usually found within red clay; yellow from iron oxyhydroxides; black by way of charcoal or manganese oxides, though none of this compound has been found near Lascaux, so it must have been brought from elsewhere within reasonable distance, like the Pyrenees region. Though the cave painters used brushes, blowing the pigment onto a stencil and directly on the wall, they almost certainly used their hands to trace lines on the walls. They have left us some examples of handprints stencilled in the rock as if to make the link between their art and themselves explicit. Surprisingly, there are quite a variety of styles surviving from the red-dotted style as in the bison at Marsoulas to the more bolder black outline of the deer at Chameneas, Santander in Spain. In the case of the latter, the shape was engraved first, than painted over. One of the best examples of this technique is the deer on the ceiling of the Altamira Caves (above): its outline was originally engraved, then painted over in black, then the body was filled with shades of pale brown to red, It is essential also to note the skill of these artists in showing movement, gesture and animation to these animals; they employed certain techniques like "twisted perspective" and the "returned head pose"- both in painting and engraving to add an extra dimension to these animals that they revered.

The Dawn of European Art: From Prehistoric to Medieval Art in Europe. 4

Primitivism & Naturalism in the Caves.

"It is a process which shows a growing understanding of how to give the final optical impression an increasingly pictorial, instantaneous and apparently spontaneous form. The accuracy of the drawing [in cave painting] rises to a level of virtuosity which takes it upon itself to master increasingly difficult attitudes and aspects,increasingly fleeting movements and gestures, increasingly bold foreshortenings and intersections. This naturalism is by no means a fixed, stationary formula, but a mobile and living form, which tackles the rendering of reality with the most varied means of expression and performs its task sometimes with lesser sometimes with greater skill." Arnold Hauser

In the first volume of his Social History of Art, the German Marxist art historian Arnold Hauser placed the problem of style at the centre of a discussion of prehistoric art. According to Hauser, there are two prevailing styles in the prehistoric period: "primitive naturalism" and the "geometrical style." Geometric style is dependent on form, patterns and shapes; it is schematic, that is to say resembling a diagram as in the case of representing the body by one straight vertical line and two semi circles for the arms and the legs. This geometric stylization was even extended to animals that the huntsmen tracked; an array of painted dots in a cave at Marsoulas (Haute-Garonne, France, above) forms a bison, primitive pointillism, if you will, that invites connections between this art to the era of impressionism and later movements, a strategy that Hauser used.¹ Another example would be the enigmatic group known as "The Shaft of the Dead Man" (Lascaux) which shows a schematically drawn caveman and a bird on a pole in front of a bison, which presumably has killed the huntsman.² The geometric style would supersede the naturalistic style which is abundant in the Palaeolithic period with the many depictions of animals, naturalistic because we can identify with these artists as their work is more human, empirical, something that we recognise as part of our world, however distant in time.³ What Paleo lithic art should not be regarded as is something decorative, expressive or ornamental. For one thing, these painted images were hidden deep in dark caves, so they would have been completely useless as decorations; they were also painted one over another thus destroying any kind of aesthetic effect, though to conclude that they lacked any sense of composition is to sell their art short. The safest explanation is that the purpose of this art must have been ritualistic, even "magical," and though they were created during a low cultural stage when there was no religion as we would recognise it, this cave art may have something in common with the aims of later epochs when religious art served as a form of consolation to the artist.⁴

1Hauser, From Prehistoric Times, 2: "The peculiar thing about the naturalistic drawings of the Old Stone Age is, on the other hand, that they give the visual impression in such a direct, unmixed form, free from all intellectual trimmings or restrictions, that we have to wait until modern impressionism to find any parallels in later art. We discover motion studies which already remind us of modern instantaneous photographs, the like of which we do not find again until we come to the pictures of a Degas or a Toulouse-Lautrec, so that for the eye unschooled by impressionism there must appear to be some-thing badly drawn and unintelligible about these pictures."

2According to T. G. E. Powell this puzzling ensemble provokes two hypotheses. Firstly that the scene "commemorates the killing of a man by a bison after it had received a deadly wound." Secondly, that this is "a ritual enactment, approaching the shamanism of circumpolar peoples of more recent times, to bring about the death of a bison." Powell, Prehistoric Art (Thames and Hudson, 1966), 63.

3Yet perhaps this "pointillist" bison underlines Powell's point that the geometrical style might have been equally important in the Upper Palaeolithic Period, Powell, Prehistoric Art, 13: "..it raises the question..as to whether abstractions and schematic portrayal did not play as important a part, if not a prior one, in the origins of art as did naturalism."

4Hauser, From Prehistoric Times,

The Dawn of European Art: From Prehistoric to Medieval Art in Europe. 3

Magic, Art & Ritual in Early European Art.

"When the Palaeolithic artist painted an animal on the rock, he produced a real animal. For him the world of fiction and pictures, the sphere of art and mere imitation, was not yet a special province of its own, different and separate from empirical reality; he did not as yet confront the two different spheres, but saw in one the direct, undifferentiated continuation of the other. He will have had the same attitude to art as Lévy-Bruhl’s Sioux Red Indian, who said of a research worker whom he saw preparing sketches: ‘I know that this man has put many of our bisons into his book. I was there when he did it, and since then we have had no bisons.’¹ Arnold Hauser

A story of European art must begin in the dawn of the continent's existence, which on the grand time scales of human history starts in the first stage of the Old Stone Age- the lower Palaeolithic. But we must be careful when we use the word "art" to describe the wondrous paintings on the walls of caves at locations like Lascaux and Altamira. To provide a context for the phenomenon of these cave paintings we have to not only turn to art historians like Arnold Hauser and Ernst Gombrich but anthropologists and specialists on the culture of the prehistoric period. As the extract from Hauser's Social History of Art makes clear, prehistoric man had no grasp of the concept of imitation; in other words to him an animal was real, not something reproduced in the sphere of art which could have held no meaning for him. Just as the Sioux Indian believed that the artist had eliminated the bison from the world by putting them in his sketch book, so prehistoric man believed the bison he painted was the real thing in the world. Such an attitude might be explained not in terms of art history categories, but by turning to magic. By painting a bison, deer or horse on the wall prehistoric man hoped to will the capture and killing of these animals, a mental condition that approaches what is called in the parlance of modern psychology, wish-fulfilment. In fact Sigmund Freud in his book on anthropology and ancient culture, Totem and Taboo said that "sorcery" and "magic" were " a body of instructions upon how to obtain mastery over men, beasts and things."² Freud claimed that of the two magic was the oldest and dealt primarily with "subjecting natural phenomena to the will of man."³ Within art history Ernst Gombrich was one of the first to introduce magic and art into the debate in his Art and Illusion in which he suggested that the skill of representing these prehistoric animals grew out of the magic ritual used to capture these animals; Gombrich also disavowed the idea that the cave painters were primitive, putting their achievements on a par with art of our own epoch.⁴ This is indeed how archaeologists reacted to the discovery of these caves refusing to believe that the art of their own time, not the stone age. But to it might be right to class these cave painters as among the first professionals alongside the ordinary magician and medicine men of the prehistoric period.⁵

1Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Vol 1, From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, with an introduction by Jonathan Harris, (Routledge, 1999, first pub in two volumes 1951), 1.

2Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (RKP 1960, orig pub 1950), 78. Freud was heavily influenced by the anthropologist Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough which makes a distinction between varities of magic.

3Hauser, From Prehistoric Times, 1.

4Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study of the Pyschology of Pictorial Representation (Phaidon, 1960), 92.

5"People speak with justice of the 'magic of art' and compare artists to magicians...There can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art's sake. It worked originally in the service of impulses which are for the most part extinct today. And among them we may suspect the presence of many magical purposes." Freud, Totem and Taboo, 90.

The Dawn of European Art: From Prehistoric to Medieval Art in Europe. 2

A Note on European Prehistoric Art & Art History.

By the term "prehistoric art" we are referring to those periods before human history when writing or other methods of record-keeping had not yet been developed. We are also alluding to the art of the "Upper Palaeolithic Period" in that phase known as the "Aurignacian" (after Aurignac, Central France) which is thought to have appeared 40, 000 years B.P.¹ Palaeolithic art consisted of rock and cave painting, jewellery, engraving in clay, bone, and antler, all of which have been connected with the definition of the human. But art historians working on this kind of art are less concerned with anthropological, or even philosophical and psychological questions, but more with problems of style and its development. Having said that, the study of European prehistoric art does overlap with archaeology since the existence of this art raises questions about human origins and more specifically the role of the European land mass in the formation of the culture that led to European art. The most renowned branch of prehistoric art are the caves of Lascaux (discovered by 18 year Marcel Ravidat and his friends in 1940) and the paintings at Altamira (found in Cantabria, Spain in the 1880s). Though it was initially part of the field of anthropology, prehistoric art gradually found its way into surveys of world art in the 1950s and 1960s like Hermann Leicht's History of the World's Art and more famously Ernst Gombrich's never-out-of-print The Story of Art, whose title has been borrowed for the name of this course.²

1BP is the archaeological designation "Before Present" whose dating scheme commences in 1950.

2Hermann Leicht, History of the World's Art (Spring Books, London, 1963), "The Art of the Ice Age,"7-22; Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art, (Phaidon, 1950).