(Not related to the sculpture, just a bit of pedantry.) I appreciate the attempt to render the name of the locality in the present-day local alphabet (Czech), but the diacritic above the 'e' in "Vĕstonice" is wrong: the letter is "letter e with breve", but should be "letter e with caron", giving "Věstonice".
Here's those two characters together for comparison. It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about because the two render so closely in smaller text.
At least in Firefox the search pane has a ‘Match Diacritics’ option. Turning it on causes it to match only the precise characters in the textbox. (It’s slightly misnamed, since it doesn’t just handle diacritics, but also cases like ⟨e⟩ vs ⟨ɛ⟩.)
The lack of faces in most prehistoric art has always been fascinating to me, especially given the attention to detail paid to animals in cave paintings. Did people not give as much thought to individual identity before a certain milestone in our development as a species? Was it taboo or superstition to render someone's likeness? Were caves just not the place for portraiture? Why was this seemingly prevalent across cultures and geography? Etc etc; people with more to say than me have written about it at length I assume. This bust is from 24000BC, and the person depicted was 1) presumably already dead and 2) might have had a developmental deformity. Maybe that provides some clues about when, how, and why portraiture developed as an art form.
That they have a skelatal reconstruction of a persons face with similarities to the sculptue from the same site, it then could pehaps also be the first evidence for a comisioned work, and any evidence for industry and common curency would support that.....the first sale
The article doesn’t mention how old the found skeleton is, or I missed it. Would be a huge coincidence imo given the large timespan, and perhaps more so an artifact of humans looking for similarities.
Your observation, is of course, valid. Also valid is the fact that those people like STUFF!!!, lots of stuff,stuff that WE like, and that in many ways we can look.at there stuff, and know exaxtly how it was used, and we dont just give good stuff away, so it is reasonable to expect and look for the mechanisms by which they created, expressed,and honored, value.
Given that "currency" is a mental construct , the known fact of things with immence value, now, litteraly bieng childs toys, to be lost in the dirt, and aluminum bieng the most valuable element, but now totaly dismissed as a possible currency, points to a need to see that distant time from the subtlest of clues.
And yes its not pure science, but pure science can no longer be considered pure, and as long as we are not out on some wild truely impossible thoeretical precipice, then , hey, its a very cool possibility.
The possible subject WAS wearing a fox tooth neclace, and 12000 years after this internment, they were honoring foxes and dressing in there pelts,.....as shown in statuary.... in the first know megalithic settlments not so far away,in Turkey, catyl hylueac or something its called.
I find it wonderful that a human from around 1000 generations ago created art on a now extinct animals tusk. In a way they're able to communicate with us in such a distant future. Makes me wonder what we're leaving behind.
Hah I was just in dolní věstonice a short while ago - there's a really nice walking route past an old castle and through the vineyards that ends up in Mikulov.
edit: also this thing is on display somewhere in Antropos!? I had no idea there was something interesting inside there, it's always been just the "nearly there" point from my walk from Kamenolom to Duck bar.
I am wondering if the artist was a genius ahead of his times. Like an Einstein thinking about the nature of time. - Creating a sculpture of a human being when contemporary artists just depict animals at best, in a very abstract way. And even those artists were not common among their peers.
The OED and Cambridge dictionaries disagree. All the examples in both are of two dimensional representations or even one dimensional (written).
Of course if enough people decide to agree with the Wikipedia article then the dictionaries will have to be updated but just now i suspect that if you were to ask people to describe what the word meant that very few would mention sculpure.
But I don't think that sculpture really captures it either, it's more like a cameo.
To me the word “portrait” makes me think “painting” as well.. I never would have guessed it refers just to what is being depicted rather than “how”. Thanks for sharing.
Most good art colleges have portrait classes in every concentration. I went to the film school at my art college but I sat for a portrait in most other concentrations because we all modeled for each other.
I think the beauty of women changed humanity. Inspired by these beings that were so beautiful they were almost gods, men strived to be more than club-wielding cavemen. To be kind and loving and worth a damn.
> I think the beauty of women changed humanity. Inspired by these beings that were so beautiful they were almost gods, men strived to be more than club-wielding cavemen.
Men did strive to be more than club-wielding cavement. We became spear, axe, arrow, gun, cannon, etc wielding cavemen.
> To be kind and loving and worth a damn.
Or armed to the teeth? Armed to a level that the most brutish caveman could only dream.
History along with the lack of diversity in the Y-chromosome paint a far different picture than the one you are describing.
