Last week I gave the first in a series of three Zoom talks for St Albans Cathedral on The Origins of Western Art. I started with the amazing cave paintings of our Palaeolithic ancestors at Altamira in northern Spain. Around 34,000 - 15,000 years ago, wild deer, horses and cattle were painted on the cave walls in vivid earth colours, capturing the vitality and raw impression of wild animals. The subjects are jumbled without composition, even in some cases painted on top of each other, and hidden away in the depths of the cave complex, where there is no light and difficult access. I gave the accepted interpretation by archaeologists and palaeontologists that these painting related to the need of these early homo sapiens for survival rather than aesthetics. The paintings were a form of sympathetic magic which would symbolically aid these stone-age hunters in their quest for food. Most of my talk, as I traversed the millennia and centuries from the cave paintings of the Holocene to the schematic representations of the Late Antique period (4th century CE), focussed on the cultural and social motivation behind the subjects and the styles of mainly figurative art.
I realised by the end of my presentation, I had not really talked about the pleasure and joy visual art can give human beings. If, however, we were to ask people today what art meant to them, most would put pleasure and aesthetics first. We are such visual creatures - it is estimated that at least 50% of the brain is connected to optical activity - images permeate most aspects of our lives from the environment to our smartphones. We are, consequently, constantly making aesthetic judgements about people, objects and nature as to whether they are beautiful and pleasing.
As an anthropologist, I need to ask the question where does the aesthetic ability to detect and appreciate beauty come from? There are many cultural and personal differences in the way all societies and individuals assess beauty but there also seem to be some commonalities, relating to the enjoyment of form, proportion and line. Ideas about some objective aesthetic qualities have long informed human inquiry. However, tastes do change and there are those artists whose work was unrecognised in their lifetime and who only become famous after their death: Vincent van Gogh is often cited as an example, since, apparently, he only sold one of his paintings during his life and now his works are so sought after they fetch millions.
There are also some artistic canons that establish an aesthetic standard that is celebrated through their fame and exposure which then demand general recognition regardless of individual taste: for example in my talk, I showed a slide of the ancient Greek sculpture, known as the Venus de Milo, which is in the Louvre Museum and was hailed in 19th century as the epitome of female beauty. The marble sculpture set a fashion for the perception of feminine pulchritude and became the 'celebrity' model of the time, in reality as much for political reasons as aesthetics: France had just been forced to return the loot acquired by Napoleonic conquests, including the Greek sculpture, the Venus de Medici, so that the discovery of the 'Venus' sculpture in 1820 on the island of Milos compensated for a loss felt by the French public and when she was brought to Paris she became a sensation, a piece of government propaganda.
I think it is unlikely that we will ever totally discard the Platonic concept of objective beauty, while at the same time we can recognise that at one level the idea of what is beautiful resides not in the object but within us ourselves, influenced by the flow of time and tide.
My next talk on The Origin of Western Art will leave behind the classical idealism of the human form and examine the artistic heritage of the Mediaeval period (6th-15th centuries) when aesthetics are dominated by the iconographic style of the Christian Church. As the learning of the ancient world is revived in Europe so the artists of Renaissance rediscover the subject matter and more naturalistic styles of the ancient Greeks and Romans, leading European art to the modern era.
If you would like to sign up for The Origins Of Western Art: part II go to:
My fee for the talk will go to Conservation 50 which is linked to the charity, St Albans Civic Society.
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