Sunday, July 15, 2007

35,000 years ago a magical artist rendered a mammoth in ivory . . .

Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen, says Spiegel, have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. The mammoth and a lion and two more representations are among the oldest examples of figurative art. And they date from the Ice Age.

Doesn't this tiny sculpture of a mammoth remind you of the Venus of Willendorf? The woman was carved some 10,000 years later. She is much more detailed. But the sexual energy, the expression of life force, seems much the same.

Simplicity, suggestion, awareness of the primal: the maker of this talisman established in one carving the classic standards of art.

No comments: