Animals in Art and Thought

To the End of the Middle Ages

Francis Klingender, Evelyn Antal, John P Harthan, Evelyn Antal, John P Harthan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367206369
• eBook ISBN: 9780429557750
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Originally published in 1971, Animals in Art and Thought discusses the ways in which animals have been used by man in art and literature. The book looks at how they have been used to symbolise religious, social and political beliefs, as well as their pragmatic use by hunters, sportsmen, and farmers. The book discusses these various attitudes in a survey which ranges from prehistoric cave art to the later Middle Ages. The book is especially concerned with uncovering the latent, as well as the manifest meanings of animal art, and presents a detailed examination of the literary and archaeological monuments of the periods covered in the book. The book discusses the themes of Creation myths of the pagan and Christian religion, the contribution of the animal art of the ancient contribution of the animal art of the ancient Orient to the development of the Romanesque and gothic styles in Europe, the use of beast fables in social or political satire, and the heroic associations of animals in medieval chivalry.

Part 1 The Ancient World

Chapter 1 The hunter’s art and mythology

The rock paintings and engravings

A history of animal art must begin with the beginning of all art, for animals were the first subject to challenge the artistic faculties of men. But these first artists were already, biologically considered, modern men, of the same stock as our own and the ancestors of the present races of mankind.¹ They arrived in northern latitudes, probably from different centres in Asia and Africa, shortly after the last glaciation had passed its peak. Following the migrations of their game as the ice retreated, they occupied all the ice-free country from Siberia to the Bay of Biscay, as well as North Africa and Spain, and gradually replaced the older inhabitants of the Neanderthal type, who were the last more ape-like predecessors of modern man. Works of art produced by these newcomers have been excavated all along the line of their encampments from Siberia to Spain, but it is in the sheltered limestone valleys and gorges of south-western Europe that we find the best preserved specimens of their art. There they embellished the walls of deep caves with life-like paintings and engravings of animals and produced the first works of sculpture on a large scale, arts which flourished in this region until the end of the glaciation and the spread of the forests.²

From the standpoint of the present the age and duration of this first, astonishing phase in the history of art, appear overwhelming. In his survey of the subject published in 1952 the Abb é Breuil spoke of four hundred centuries of cave art, but even on the more conservative estimate which places the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic culture at c. 25,000 and its end at c. 10,000 years ago,³ this first phase lasted about three times as long as the whole period of written history. Yet in the wider setting of human development as a whole, the origin of art among Upper Palaeolithic peoples is seen to be a late and advanced achievement. Poor as the material equipment of people who lacked even pottery and textiles must seem to us, it was far superior to the Mousterian technology of the Neanderthal men; this enhanced command over the material conditions of life, due to greater technical efficiency and to the increased size of the co-operating social group,⁴ made art possible. The concentration of the richest finds at a few centres, despite the vast areas occupied by the Upper Palaeolithic hunters, is directly related to this fact: the cave art of south-western Europe expressed the spiritual iife of the most advanced prehistoric hunting culture as it developed over an immense period under most favourable conditions.

The foremost centres of this cave art are to be found in the departments of the Dordogne and Lot, in the northern foothills of the Pyrenees in France and in the Cantabrian mountains of northern Spain. Another cluster occurs in the Rhone valley, and there are southern outposts near Malaga and Cadiz, in the heel of Italy and on the island of Lavanzo off Sicily. Quite distinct from these cave-sites are the painted rock-shelters of eastern Spain.

The development of Franco-Cantabrian cave art parsed through three main phases, Aurignacian, Solutrean and Magdalenian, each with subdivisions and local variations. Apart from the true Aurignacians, several peoples, distinct in origin and in the details of their technology, contributed to the first of these phases, especially the Gravettians, who preyed on the mammoth in Siberia and eastern Europe as well as in the west. They also carved the figurines of obese women, the ‘Venuses’, found on various sites⁵ in all these areas, sometimes in association with small round drawings. In the Upper Aurignacian art of France (also called Perigordian) this Gravettian tradition of sculpture is combined with the pictorial art of the caves which the true Aurignacians are believed to have initiated.

At Castillo, Gargas, Pech-Merle and elsewhere, occur hand-tracings formed by daubing (or possibly, as in northern Australia, spitting or blowing pigment around a hand placed against the rock-face⁶) [1], These and the rows of dots sometimes associated with them are believed to be the oldest markings in the caves. Positive hand-prints are said to be somewhat more recent.⁷ At La Baume-Latrone near Nîmes these occur with meandering parallel lines within some of which the first animal-shapes can be recognized.⁸ The pigments used in these earliest, as in the later, paintings are chiefly confined to various shades of red ochre and black manganese. Similar entanglements of parallel lines with or without animal details or with whole animals enclosed in them were produced at the same stage of development by tracing them with fingers or sticks in soft clay, as in the caves at Altamira [2] and Pech-Merle.⁹ In both techniques (of which the second was a rudimentary form of engraving, as the first was of painting) the earliest independent outlines of animals or animal-heads came later. Those traced in clay at La Clotilde in Cantabria and a few in the neighbouring cave of Hornos are still very crude, but at the latter site some specimens show how rapidly the Aurignacians acquired the skill of reproducing the characteristic outlines of their game.¹⁰ Here and at other Aurignacian sites the shape of the animal appears, as it had become fixed in the hunter’s memory: the feet are often omitted, and horns or antlers invariably reveal their characteristic shapes in three-quarter view, while the heads are in profile [3]. A deeply engraved bison in the cave of La Grèze¹¹ near Les Eyzies illustrates both these features, and on a fine elephant outlined in red at Pindal in Asturias even the position of the heart is shown [4] as in the so-called X-ray drawings of Australian aborigines. The twisted perspective of the antlers is generally retained even in the case of the beautiful late Aurignacian animals which abound in the cave of Lascaux; these are no longer mere outlines or silhouettes, but polychrome paintings revealing by skilful shading and even by foreshortening the plastic shape of the animals [5].¹² A wide range of more or less conventional signs and sometimes rather crude pictures of masked men are associated with the animal pictures on most Aurignacian sites, while the Venus images continued to be produced, not only in small figurines, but also in the group of four from Laussel, in relief on a larger scale.¹³

1 Hand silhouette with dots, from the frieze of black Horses. Pech-Merle

2 ‘Macaroni’ tracings with Animal Heads. Altamira

The Aurignacian phase was brought to an end by a new invasion, that of the Solutreans who for a relatively short period occupied a territory stretching from Spain to Hungary; their activity is distinguished by beautifully worked laurel-leaf blades. Except at Parpallo in eastern Spain, these people were not painters, but excelled as sculptors, their finest monument being a stone circle with ibexes fighting head-on, carved in relief at Le Roc de Sers, Charente [6].¹⁴

In the last and longest phase of Franco-Cantabrian art, the Magdalenian, this fine tradition of sculpture was continued, for example, in the frieze of horses at Cap Blanc or in the bison couple modelled in clay deep down in the cave of Tue d–Audoubert in the Pyrenees; and in the later stages of this culture weapons and other portable objects were richly carved with animal shapes.¹⁵ But in the caves the Magdalenian picture-cycle began anew with simple contours, often in black, and developed on different lines from the Aurignacian, by stressing the interior modelling of the rounded animal forms and their surface texture, rather than their silhouettes. Moreover the Magdalenian artists never employed the twisted perspective of the older style when drawing the animal’s horns. The actual presence of the animal, therefore, rather than a memory image, is conjured up in this art, often in a momentary gesture, such as the turn of the head. In the polychrome bisons of Altamira [7] or in the reindeer of the same period of Font-de-Gaume this impressionist art achieved a standard of perfection which was rarely equalled in any later period.¹⁶ Once again, this lifelike animal art is associated, as in the Aurignacian phase, with conventional symbols and, occasionally, with masked men; women however were now chiefly depicted on portable objects, except for the extraordinary group of three life-size torsos discovered in 1949–50 at Angles-sur-I/Anglin.¹⁷

3 Engraved Stag with twisted antlers. Marcenac

4 Elephant with heart showing. Pindal. Asturias

5 The Black Bull. Lascaux

Though grouping is not unknown, as for example at Lascaux or, in a Magdalenian setting, at Montespan, it is exceedingly rare in the Franco-Cantabrian cave art. Nor is this surprising in view of the total absence of daylight at the painted sites. The overwhelming impression created by the massed imagery in the great halls, especially at Lascaux, where the colours stand out vividly from the white rock, is largely the effect of modern lighting. The dim light of a flare or primitive lamp would chiefly reveal some individual animal that appeared to leap from the wall, often in a narrow passage or cramped nook, its shape thrown forward and often, indeed, suggested to the artist by the bulging surface of the water-washed rock-face. Moreover, where the pictures are lightly engraved without colours, they are visible only in a strong side-light; on most sites, including Altamira, even the paintings cannot have been intended for aesthetic contemplation, since it often happens that several works of widely different ages are superimposed in utter disregard of the effect created, and are jumbled together regardless of unity of scale or viewpoint. Yet Magdalenian engravings on bones or small plaques of stone where men and animals are grouped in narrative scenes are by no means rare.¹⁸ Hence the absence of grouping in cave art must have been intentional and related to the function the pictures served.

6 Ibexes fighting; carved stone block. Le Roc de Sers, Charente

7 Bison bellowing. Altamira

The contrast is further underlined by the quite distinct series of paintings discovered in open rock shelters in eastern Spain,¹⁹ where they are visible ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Half Title
• Frontispiece
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Editors’ Foreword and Acknowledgments
• Author’s Preface
• Photographic Acknowledgments
• Part 1 The Ancient World
• Part 2 The early Middle Ages
• Part 3 The later Middle Ages
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• General index
• Index of animals