Talk:Art History/Prehistoric Art

Third para
Begins "tada examples of Paleolithic (Old Stone Age)" I assume that's meant to be "Today examples..." but I'm not confident enough to correct it. Anyone know? --Bodnotbod 11:38, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Tada makes no sense. I changed the word back to "famous". Also I recreated the subheadings under Paleolithic Art.

Picture is huge
How did the picture get so big? I looked at it and it seems to have been done correctly.

For the love of god, fix it.

Plagiarism
The following paragraphs were removed because they are claimed to be plagiarism. See for the claim.

Paleolithic painters drew their images using chunks of red and yellow ocher. For painting, they ground these same ochers into powders they mixed with water before applying. Large flat stones served as palettes. The painters made brushes from reeds, bristles, or twigs, and may have used a blowpipe of reeds or hollow bones to spray pigments on out-of-reach surfaces. To illuminate their work, the painters used stone lamps filled with marrow or fat, perhaps with a wick of moss.

Perhaps the best-known Paleolithic cave is that at Lascaux, near Montignac, France. Many of the animals were created by outline alone, but others are represented using colored silhouettes. On the walls of the Lascaux cave one sees, side by side, the two basic approaches to drawing and painting found repreatedly in the history of art. Although most of the animals share a common ground line, some seem to float above the viewer's head. The painting has no setting, no background, no indication of place. The Paleolithic painter was concerned solely with representing the animals, not with locating them in a specific place.

Another feature of the Lascaux paintings deserves attention. The bulls there show a convention of representing horns that has been called twisted perspective, because the viewer sees the heads in profile but the horns from the front. Thus, the painter's approach is not strictly or consistently optical. Rather, the approach is descriptive of the fact that cattle have two horns. Two horns are part of the concept "bull." In strict optical-perspective profile, only one horn would be visible, but to paint the animal in that way would, as it were, amount to an incomplete definition of it.

liblamb 21:15, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Venus vs Woman
Venus denotes the Roman goddess. This term makes the Woman figure that has appeared in so many other cultures appear roman centric. I recommend having it changed.