Martin Kemp's expertise shines a light onto the true life of one of my heroes, Leonardo da Vinci

 Leonardo – Martin Kemp (2004)

  

            If there is a single human being that exemplifies my definition of an artist it is Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, the greatest of the “Big 3” of Renaissance art.  The other two being Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, otherwise known as Raphael and Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. The omnipresence of Leonardo in our collective human consciousness is unrivalled by any other artist.  From his amazing engineering genius, his deep inquisitiveness about the natural world around us, and his unceasing desire to expand the wisdom of humanity, he drew forth art so timeless as to feel inevitable. His two most famous works, the Last Supper fresco and the small oil painting on poplar universally loved as the Mona Lisa, are the two most recognizable pieces of art the world over, with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco and his massive statue of David coming in a very close second.  I studied Art and Art History and considered myself well-versed on Leonardo, his life, and his achievements, but nothing could have prepared me for the journey taken with this wonderful book by Martin Kemp.

            I should have been prepared, seeing as how Martin Kemp, the Emeritus Professor of Art History at Oxford University, is the world’s most-renowned scholar and expert on Leonardo Da Vinci, his works, and his life story.  As an art lover, I felt Mr. Kemp’s awe and admiration for the old master on every page.  I share this with him.  Mr. Kemp’s prose is detailed, informative, and full of original ideas.  While there exist many biographies of Leonardo, this concise volume focuses on how we, modern human beings, can truly understand him, and the world he adored, analyzed, and portrayed in his writing and art.  A superlative individual such as Leonardo suffers from the cult of personality that arises around such august personages.  Stories turn into myths and myths turn into legends.  The world accepts the legend as truth, until everyone forgets the true facts.  Martin Kemp has created a magnificent resource for anyone seeking to learn the actual details of Leonardo’s life, patronages, and art-making processes. 

            One of the intriguing details in the story of Leonardo’s life is the tale of his death, and what became of the art he left behind in his studio.  Leonardo, like all great artists and craftsmen of the time, ran a studio of painters and sculptors who helped him prepare materials, prime surfaces, and finish “unimportant” details of paintings so the master could focus on the main subjects portrayed within.  One of these men, a rascally character named Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno who painted under the name “Andrea Salai,” apprenticed under Leonardo and held an unsavory reputation, even though he was one of the main apprentices given the responsibility of running Leonardo’s workshop.  Upon the master’s death, Salai took it upon himself to swipe a good number of completed paintings from the studio, keeping them hidden in his home until his untimely death by bow and arrow.  It was in the accounting of Salai’s belongings that a list of the purloined Leonardo’s was found.  This included the famous Giaconda painting currently hanging in the Louvre.  King Francis I of France purchased the lot soon after, which is why the Mona Lisa is a treasured piece of art in France and not Italy.  If it wasn’t for a shady apprentice, the world may never have heard of the Mona Lisa! 

This book is full of details that flesh out the true life of Leonardo, while also explaining exactly why the grandiose and superlative legends arose about the great man.  Martin Kemp includes dozens of color plates showing beautiful reproductions of the master’s art, along with many black and white drawings exploring the ways in which Leonardo used the act of drawing itself as a form of thinking about, and inquiry into, the natural world around us.  He prized sight above all other senses, and the act of focused looking as the main source of inspiration for any visual artist.  In this he influenced everyone that followed, even if only in rebelling against this idea.  In Leonardo’s assessment, visual art is more valuable than any poem, song, or theatrical art.  These types of art require time to pass for the audience to fully grasp the intent and beauty within.  Visual art, such as sculpture, paintings, and drawings, slams the viewer with everything all at once.  It takes very little time for communication to happen through the eye.  The horror of war illustrated in Picasso’s Guernica, or the viciousness of the old gods as portrayed by Goya in his Saturn Devouring His Son slam into us without any need for exposition.  Truth, beauty, and wisdom are transmitted without the need for sloppy words.  Perhaps it is this quality that touches us centuries later as we admire and explore Leonardo’s art.  I know that he touched my life in unimaginable ways.  I hope many people read Martin Kemp’s book and grow in their love and admiration for the great master.

(This wonderful book can be purchased from Oxford University Press here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/leonardo-9780199583355?cc=us&lang=en& )

Michael Benson Shares The Awesome Beauty We Create When Art and Science Meet

 

Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time – Michael Benson (2014)

            Rarely do I come across a book such as this, one that brings together two of my greatest loves and creates something fabulous.  Author Michael Benson shows us how the worlds of Art and Astronomy are, and have always been, connected and complimentary, and the way he does so is so beautiful, informative, and clever that I am left in awe.  I love this book!

            The objects in our sky, the gorgeous night with its twinkling stars, shiny planets, comets, and meteors, and the beaming sky of day with the Sun and sometimes the Moon visible, have been our companions throughout the whole existence of life on our planet.  Ancient man not only saw, but understood, that the view afforded from Earth allows us to see the passage of time, and the cycles described by the motions of the heavens.  Using just plain, careful, repeated observation, and before the invention of written language, humanity catalogued stars and constellations, predicted eclipses, and calculated the Moon’s cycles.  We also created art to help us describe what we saw, from cave paintings to petroglyphs to carved or molded sculptures.  This is how we know that ancient man understood the cosmos in a deep and meaningful way, something which has been sadly lost to much of our modern human population.

            Cosmigraphics collects some of the most amazing images and artwork created by us to describe the heavens above and our Earth below.  This book captures the artistic legacy of the visual explorations of our cosmos, and provides wonderfully descriptive and informative text with each image.  This book is divided into sections exploring the idea of Creation, our Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the structure of the Universe, etc.  Each chapter is so gorgeous and so indicative of the immense genius required to not only grasp infinitely complex ideas but to also portray them in a visual manner, that they allow for the dissemination of information and the spread of wisdom.  These images tell a million stories.  They are beautiful in their own right, and worthy of the appreciation we rightfully lay upon masterpieces by the likes of Michelangelo or Picasso.

            We marvel at the heavens, and have always done so.  As our scientific knowledge grew, our ideas of the universe grew.  Whereas ancient man had deduced that the Earth is spherical, it was accepted doctrine that the Earth was the center of all creation (Bible bias, always), and that, according to early Greek philosophers, what we see in the sky corresponds to sequential “shells” with each carrying different denizens of the sky.  It was accepted belief that the Moon rotated around the Earth in its own sphere, then the Sun, then each known planet.  At the time, this was Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Beyond the planetary “spheres” was a celestial sphere containing the stars in heaven, all fixed and immovable.  It took centuries of human observation, and the perfection of lenses and the telescope, for us to understand that there are no “shells”, that the heavens do move, that our Sun is the center of our solar system, that the planets all rotate around the Sun and not Earth, and that the stars themselves are ridiculously far away from our personal solar system.  Even so, it was assumed that the whole of existence fit within our galaxy, a self-contained universe we refer to as the Milky Way.

            Astronomers and other scientists improved on the initial telescopes, and with the new-found clarity of vision, were able to discern that many of the objects in our night sky were not nebulas internal to the Milky Way, but actually their own island universes, located an inconceivable distance from our own galaxy.  Each new discovery shrunk the old world dictated by religious dogma and human make-em-up, and increased the scope of vision allowed to a human being.  As our knowledge of the universe, its galaxies, and the overall structure of it grew, the idea that humanity was the single reason for everything to exist also dissipated, much to the chagrin of every deluded, brain-dead, dogmatically religious idiot whose entire world-view is based in blind belief and obedience to thousand-year old make-believe. 

            With every new discovery, with every new tool we create to explore our universe, we find more wonder and weirdness than we could ever have imagined. There used to be just one Sun.  Now we know that our galaxy, the cloudy band of light in our night sky called the Milky Way, is composed of billions of individual stars.  We know that outside of our galaxy lie countless trillions of other galaxies, each with their infinity of suns and planets. Hell we even know that everything we can see in the sky above is just a small part of the entire universe.  Estimates now posit our Universe is on the order of 13-15 billion years old, and nearly unimaginably vast, but we can only observe about 36 billion light years distance in any direction.  In its early stages, spacetime itself expanded faster than light, causing much of the Universe to remain occulted from our vantage point.  Any observer on a planet over 36 billion light years away from us would not be able to see Earth either.  It is these type of realities that, while factually and verifiably true, crash against our ideas of “common sense.”  Common sense stated that, if the Earth were actually rotating, all plants, animals, and water would be flung off the planet! (They did not know about gravitation, just as humans in the 1800’s did not know about radiation.  Who knows what all-encompassing truths of the Universe we remain ignorant of today in 2026!)

            Many of my intellectual heroes utilized both Art and Science in their work.  Leonardo da Vinci fused art, science, and engineering in ways we are still coming to grips with today.  Even Richard Feynman, physicist extraordinaire, created a visual and artistic way of describing particle interactions with diagrams named after him still used today to explain quantum processes.  Galileo’s observations of Jupiter and his discovery of its visible moons would not have had the impact they had without his daily drawings of the gas giant and it’s satellites.  These beautiful drawings are included in Cosmigraphics.  An image is truly worth a thousand words and Galileo’s drawings helped to simplify the results from exceedingly complex visual observations, allowing the rest of us to grasp his discoveries. 

            Science, the scientific method specifically, is how we understand the basic truths of our existence.  Art is how we communicate those found truths, whether personal or universal.  In Cosmigraphics, Michael Benson catalogues and examines the confluence of Science and Art, and expands our collective minds in doing so successfully.  This is a masterpiece of artistic and scientific exposition, and I hope someday to find a copy for my own collection.  Almost nothing that we humans do is isolated.  Every field of human endeavor touches every other field, and we are better off for it.  The specialization of humanity’s explorations have led to amazing discoveries, but it is the space between the specialists, the diffuse and vague areas between concrete ideas, where the true synergy of life occurs.  We would all be better off if we recognized this fact and lived our lives accordingly.  If you know of anyone interested in science, art, or the history of humanity’s exploration of our universe, this is the book for them.  It is highly recommended.

(This amazing book can be purchased here: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/cosmigraphics/author/michael-benson/ )

David Hockney Shines a Light on the True Methods of Master Painters

 

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters – David Hockney (2001)

 

            Sometimes it takes an artist to understand another artist.  Oftentimes, it takes an artist with an inquisitive mind to penetrate another artist’s methods and techniques.  As an artist myself, I know how other artists view art.  We look at the work itself but we are also deeply concerned with how the work was created.  This is similar to how normal people can appreciate a beautiful car, but it takes a trained mechanic to understand the beauty inherent in the interior workings of the vehicle, something not evident to the casual fan.  David Hockney, a world-famous artist, and one of the few modern creators still obsessed with drawing, used his artist’s eye to penetrate the obscurities and purposeful deflections of master painters, realizing, after careful study, that the revered classic painters, figures such as Ingres, Vermeer, and Caravaggio, among many others, were not drawing their subjects free-hand.  Instead, it was plain to Hockney’s modern eye that these magnificent draughtsmen utilized mechanical aids such as lenses, mirrors, and the camera obscura, to perfect their paintings and drawings. Once this idea entered Hockney’s mind it would not leave, sending him on a years-long course of research, practice, and study.  The fruition of the idea is this amazing book.

            Hockney understands that an artist lives within the means allowed during the times they happen to live in.  For Hockney, this means that he has color reproductions, printers, and material readily available.  It is this availability that allowed him to compile his amazing “wall,” a collection of images sorted chronologically on a long studio wall, which allowed him to first “see” the enormous influence exerted by the technologies of the looking glass, the mirror, and the camera obscura on the great master painters.  This is critical to understanding how Hockney arrived at his idea, and it leads into the first section of the book, showcasing the visual evidence he gathered over a decade, helping to illuminate his thesis.

            Seemingly overnight, sometime in the 15^th century, the images change.  Gone are the flat, carefully observed, painterly images of the old masters such as Poussin or Reubens. Instead, we have Van Eyck’s incredibly rich and detailed Arnolfini Wedding, or Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes, works so detailed and seemingly exact, as to feel ultra-realistic, as close to an exact reproduction as art could get until the advent of chemical photography.  The only way this could be achieved would be through the use of a camera obscura, originally just a darkened room with a pinhole on one wall, allowing the bright sunlight from outside to enter the room and shine on the opposing wall, showing a reversed and upside-down image of whatever was outside the room. This was as close to magic as humans ever got!  They were able to see the full range of color and light, as well as seeing the motion of the scene in question.  Imagine it, in a world where images were few and far between, where a master artist worked for years to learn to capture likeness, shape and form, to have a simple contraption display a magical light show must have seemed pure fantasy. 

            Hockney’s suggestion that the old master painters utilized such mechanical aids shook the art and art history worlds.  The art dogma proclaimed loudly that the true genius of artists such as Vermeer lay in their uncanny ability to capture likeness without anything as pedantic and common as a lens, mirror, or other such device.  To imagine their use of a camera obscura would only detract from their esteem.  This is a deeply rooted fallacy, which Hockney points out exists solely because most art historians are not creators of art.  In the intervening quarter-century since David Hockney released this book, his observations have gained much traction, especially among his fellow artists.

As Hockney states several times, the paint does not apply itself.  The marks created by a painter using a camera obscura serve as points of departure, allowing an artist to achieve very close likenesses of a human sitter, for example.  Free-hand drawing, what artists call “eyeballing,” is a process whereby the hand of the artist seeks the proper contours and spatial relations of the scene he is painting.  X-ray photography of such works can show how an artist moved an element of the painting, adjusted a position, or completely removed an aspect of the image.  These markings and underdrawings are not found in the highly detailed images from Vermeer, Ingres, Caravaggio, or any of the other artists using a camera obscura device.  Instead, there are basic scrapings or markings, detailing the main points of a figure, or the relation of the nose to the face in a portrait.  This makes the finished work seem as if it was created whole out of thin air, with little to no preparation!  This was only possible with the use of a mechanical aid.

The first section of this book details the visual evidence discovered by Hockney.  From spatial distortions, only producible by the use of a lens, to issues of relative size between the heads of sitters and their bodies, to the flatness created by such projections, which became a stylized flatness in the works of the major artists, Hockney points out countless examples of each, in vivid color, and invites us to make our own observations.  As an artist myself, once seen, these examples cannot be unseen. 

Hockney describes the progress of the mechanical aids and how, using a lens and mirror, the camera obscura allowed for more complex paintings.  For example, in Hans Holbein’s masterpieces, Hockney shows how each section, exquisitely detailed, was composed individually, using the tolls mentioned above.  This gives the paintings a cohesive, focused nature very pleasing to the eye, but close reading by a trained eye can see the perspective shifts, and the diverted angles which come from such technique.  Another “sign” of the camera obscura is the rise of chiaroscuro, or the treatment of bright light and deep shadow within paintings.  Before the use of the devices, paintings did not use shadow to mold the shape of the subjects, instead using color and line.  In fact, most pre-1400’s European painting matched what we see in Indian or Chinese paintings, a focus on form and color, with no shadows portrayed whatsoever.  It is these shadows that Hockney intuited arose from the bright light (essentially full sunlight) needed for the proper functioning of a camera obscura.  Painters were now obsessed with light and shadow, and capturing near-perfect likenesses of people and nature.  It was not until hundreds of years later, when the chemical photograph managed to capture light and form for posterity, that the painting world retreated from pure representation, moving into wild new fields such as Fauvism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism, attempting to do with paint what could not be done with the camera.

The second part of this book deals with the textual evidence gathered by David Hockney to support his claims.  The older examples can be a bit vague, for each artist and craftsman was deeply suspicious of others and would never share the secrets of their trade with anyone for fear it would be stolen or used erroneously.  Roger Bacon, artist and scientist extraordinaire, wrote in Of Art and Nature that,

“The cause of…concealment among all wise men is the contempt and neglect of the secrets of wisdom [sic] by the vulgar sort that knoweth not how to use these things which are most excellent.” 

This is as true now as it was in the 13^th century when Bacon wrote it.

The third part prints out much of the correspondence between David Hockney and fellow artists, historians, etc., all discussing the ideas found in this book, from conception to publication.  It gives a great timeline, and allows the reader to travel along with Hockney as he gains certainty and wisdom concerning his idea.  It is a great coda to this amazing book.  Hockney also shares an extensive bibliography, perfect for people like me, seeking more reading material.

This may be the single greatest art history book I have ever read.  It reads like a mystery and the images are perfectly chosen to elucidate Hockney’s writing.  Perhaps we need to return to a time when art history was written by actual artists, instead of historians.  The insights found by David Hockney may only be the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  Once our preconceived ideas about how “artistic genius” functions are discarded, we can better see how these magnificently creative artists captured our world in their art.  To demean an artist for using a tool says more about the person laying judgment than it does about the creative individual.  No mechanical aid can teach how to lay down paint, or how to draw, or how to create mood and feeling in an artwork.  Those things come directly from the artist themselves, their hard work, and their imagination.  David Hockney has done all artists a great service.  This book should be required reading for anyone studying art or art history. 

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/secret-knowledge-david-hockney/1112571044 )

Pamela Berger Shows How We Devalued the Mother Goddess, Even As We Continued To Ask For Her Help

 

The Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protrectress from Goddess to Saint – Pamela Berger (1985)

            Ahhh, the Grain Miracle. What is the Grain Miracle, you may ask?  It is a tale as old as humanity, from a bygone time when agriculture and its yearly seasonal cycles held deeply symbolic and spiritual meanings for us humans.  The story of the Grain Miracle helped us understand the connection between the life of plants and the life within us humans, as well as the correlation between the fecundity of human females and the fecundity of the Earth under our feet.  Even long after the initial impetus for the story was forgotten, or willfully erased, the tale continued its path through the collective consciousness of humanity, altered and shaped to fit the whims of whatever organized religion rose to prominence at the time.

            The original Grain Miracle story arose from our deep past.  Initially a story about the Great Mother Goddess, the divine being that brought forth all life in our world, it was passed on through oral tradition for millennia.  The story goes thusly, The Great Goddess is being pursued, and she arrives at a field, freshly sown by a farmer.  She asks the farmer to help her by telling her pursuers that she had passed by when the grain was freshly planted.  Upon saying this, the grain miraculously grows tall and full of seed, so, when the pursuer soon arrives and is told by the farmer that the Goddess passed by when the field was freshly planted (the truth!), he sees the full growth of grain, and calls off the chase, believing the Goddess to have passed by long before.  What originally served as an allegory for the cyclical nature of growth and death experienced by the initial farming humans was adapted and reformatted to fit in with the current religious ideals, first for the pantheistic religions of ancient Mesopotamia, Europe and Greece, and then for the monotheistic Abrahamic religions.  The main character, the Earth Goddess herself, slowly morphed into a lower deity, then a sainted human, until finally the story was shaped by the catholic church to refer to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

            Humans are shaped by our pattern recognition.  It is one of the skills inherent to our over-developed brains.  We are so good at it that we see patterns where there are none! (For example, visual pareidolia is the scientific name for our ability to see visual patterns, most often faces, in what is otherwise an ambiguous visual field.  This is the “skill” utilized by anyone gazing up at cloud formations, and seeing familiar shapes within.)   This ability to recognize pattern, especially throughout a period of time, is the foundation of much of our cognitive ability.

The largest, all-encompassing pattern on our planet Earth is the yearly cycle of the seasons.  The annual progression from the dead cold of Winter to the warming Spring to the full Sun of Summer to the rains and cooling temperatures of Autumn, and back again to Winter, could not be ignored.  It could also not be ignored that Life seemingly “died” every Winter, only to be “reborn” again in the Spring.  The cycle of the seasons provided the first repeated structures of Life to early humans.  The menstrual cycle of human females provided the second repeated structure.  These two events were not seen as separate by ancient man.  Instead, they were seen as mirrors of one another, as part of the all-encompassing whole of Life.  Ancient man understood that much of the animal world matched the cycles of the plant world, with most of the creatures familiar to us using Spring to impregnate each other, allowing for babies to be born during the plentiful time of the year, and to grow big, strong and fat in time for the hardships of Winter.

With those two cycles in mind, ancient man created allegories, seeking to not only understand the cycles, but to transmit that knowledge to the succeeding generations.  The Grain Miracle arose from the very ancient rituals associated with the planting of seed after the cold Winter.  For over ten thousand years, the arrival of Spring coincided with planting and with the awakening of the natural world.  Ancient humans understood that death precedes life in all things.  They understood that in Winter, the ground “dies” and is then “reborn” once the all-powerful Sun returns in its full glory.  What we call farming was rudimentary in the extreme, and therefore required supernatural help to ensure a good crop and bountiful harvest.  The Great Goddess, symbol of all that is reproductive, was asked to bless the fields before planting. 

According to Pamela Berger’s intensive research, this “blessing” formed into a ritual which humanity carried forward and continued over millennia, all the way up to our modern day.  On the arrival of Spring, (usually sometime in February), before the fields were plowed or furrowed, a figure of the Goddess was put on a cart, and driven around the field to be planted three times, all the while the people supplicated the Goddess with song and dance in order to bless the field, bless the grain to be planted, and bless the natural world to provide good air and rain and sunlight.  Women would bare their breasts as symbols of fecundity, and once completed, the ceremonies ended with revelry, for everyone was satisfied that a great crop of food was to come. In a time before our modern meteorological knowledge, before the use of fertilizers, pest control, etc., planting a field was a seriously risky endeavor.  Birds would eat the planted seed.  Animals such as shrews and deer would eat the young shoots.  Drought, flooding, or unexpected heat or frost would destroy an entire crop, leaving families to starve.  Most families grew their own food, and if unsuccessful, then entire regions could descend into mass-starvation.  The importance of a good harvest was paramount, and the blessing by the Mother Goddess was crucial to the process.

Sometime in the past five thousand years, the matriarchal, Mother Goddess worshipping tribes of what is now Europe were invaded by patriarchal hordes, bringing with them their male, all-powerful, sky deities.  As these male-oriented religions flourished, the Mother Goddess was reduced in scope and power, and transmuted into lesser goddesses, such as Artemis, Asherah, Hera, Cybele, etc.  It was after this societal change that the Grain Miracle stories began, seeking to maintain the respect and adoration of the goddess responsible for their crop’s successes.  The tale initially referred to the goddess, pursued by one of the powerful, invading male gods.  As mentioned above, she came across a farmer sowing his fields, and asked the farmer to tell her pursuers that she had passed by at the time of planting, whereupon the planted seed would miraculously sprout and grow to full height.  This would confuse the pursuers, leaving the goddess to escape.  This became one of the stories sung during the annual procession around the farmer’s fields and served as an allegorical reminder of the past Goddess worship.

The slow demotion of the Goddess continued apace after the christian church codified its dogma and beliefs.  They could not stand to see humans celebrating what they saw as “pagan” rituals and demons.  Their extreme patriarchy and hatred of anything related to female sexuality sought to completely subvert the natural world, the world where females are the source of life, where Mother Earth was seen as a womb, providing life to the planet.  Instead of a Great Mother birthing us all, they somehow managed to get everyone to believe that a male god, and a male Holy Spirit, birthed a male son.  The role of woman was so denigrated that the church, in its never-ending willful stupidity, decided that Jesus’ mom was a chaste virgin, and that she remained a chaste virgin her entire life. (the only ”good” woman is an a-sexual one, according to those deranged perverts they call priests.)  They willfully ignore the specific passages in the New Testament that detail how Mary had to “cleanse” herself after the birth of Jesus, something done by Jewish women to prepare their bodies for the next sexual occasion and possible next pregnancy.  The fear of women from seemingly powerful men is so pathetic and pointless.  It shows just how weak, spineless and corrupt they are.

It is in this mess that the Grain Miracle was transposed from minor pantheistic goddesses to the only female worth worshipping, according to the christian theologians, idiots all.  Instead of a goddess fleeing, the protagonist of the story was changed to one of many early female christian martyrs, eventually settling on Mary. Appending the Grain Miracle to the story of the Flight from Egypt was the only logical choice, and the tale was then dispersed that as they fled Egypt, the holy family asked a farmer to tell King Herod’s men that they had passed by when the seed was just planted, but of course, either Mary, or Jesus caused a miraculous growth, fooling King Herod and his men. 

Even through the repression of the Goddess, these rituals continued, for they spoke something deep and important to the people that work the fields and raise the food we all eat.  Throughout all the changes and thematic drift of the Grain Miracle stories, the simple truths persisted.  Life is cyclical.  The world is a womb, just like all women possess.  The female is the life provider, and the male is just along for the ride (pun intended).  Weak men fear the Female aspect of life.  It is a force too powerful for them to understand.  They seek to lift themselves up by subsuming women, as if that would somehow negate the awesome life-providing continuity which the blessing of childbirth brings and for which the female body was rightfully worshipped through most of human history.  It is through the effort of people like Pamela Berger that we manage to connect history, myth, folklore, and local tales, thereby allowing us modern humans to grasp the ideals and dreams of our ancestors.  For a fairly short book, this tome manages to explore an idea vast and deep within our collective mindtime.  It is highly recommended.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/204036/goddess-obscured-by-pamela-c-berger/ )

Geneviève Lacambre Shares Her Deep Love and Admiration for Gustave Moreau

 

Gustave Moreau: Magic and Symbols – Geneviève Lacambre (1999)

 

            Often, it is the small books that provide the most information.  Such is the case with this sumptuously illustrated volume exploring the life and art of Gustave Moreau.  One of publisher Harry N. Abrams’ “Discoveries” series, an amazing set of introductory books on Literature, Science, Art, and the Ancient World, this book benefits greatly from its erudite author, Geneviève Lacambre, previously the long-time director of the Musée National Gustave Moreau in Paris.  First-hand knowledge is awesome!  I much prefer reading the adoring words of an artist’s true admirer than the critical skewering which passes for art history these days.

            I spent 2/3 of my time at University studying for my major, Studio Art, specifically oil painting.  I spent 1/3 of my time taking classes for my Art History minor.  In all that time, I was not introduced to the work of Gustave Moreau.  What a shame! Gustave Moreau, through supreme talent, practice, and pure willpower, created a synthesis of old-world myth, christian allegory, and his own innate creativity which served as the vanguard for the Symbolist movement of the very early 1900’s.  Much like the best artists, Moreau sought not to pander to the then-current and always-fickle tastes of the populace, or to the increasingly short-sighted ideas of the established Parisian Salons.  He sought to portray universal truths and wisdom, without overtly explaining his compositions. 

            Seen as an inspiration by many younger painters, Moreau never sought direct categorization of his style and work.  Even so, the path he carved through the world of painting led to the formation of the Symbolist movement in art.  These painters, much younger than Moreau, with many of them studying under him as assistants, used his techniques of theme, composition, and color to try and pull the art world away from the two main pillars of the time, Naturalism, and Impressionism.  The Naturalists sought to portray the inherent beauty of nature, life, and the world around us without embellishment, subtext, or mytho-historical context.  The Impressionists sought to portray the gossamer, fleeting, ever-changing nature of light upon the natural world, and specifically the way that light entered the human eye to create image and form.  Neither used the classic masters as inspiration, which Moreau explicitly did.  They also never sought to create narrative works, something Moreau excelled at, imbuing his art with a deep sense of history, myth, religion, fable, and the inherent human truths those forms espouse.

            Gustave Moreau was an obsessive personality.   He made countless sketches before he sought to portray anything in oil.  Moreau was one of the first fine artists to utilize watercolor paints as a finished product, whereas most artists of the time used watercolors for preliminary sketches.  In time, Moreau’s watercolor works sold just as well as his finished oil pieces, owing to his masterful and riotous use of color.  He also chose not to sell, or even exhibit, his favorite paintings, choosing to keep them for himself.  Who else would appreciate them as intensely?  Truly a bad-ass of the highest caliber. 

            Moreau eventually began teaching art at the École des Beaux-Arts, and according to the testimony of his many students, he was an inspiring and engaging instructor.  Some of the greats of 20^th century art studied under Moreau, giants such as Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, and Henri Evenepoel.  Unlike many great artists who also taught, Moreau never demanded his students follow his personal style or ideas.  He sought to have them each develop their own view, their own style, something that could never be taken from them.  This was far different from the other art professors at Beaux-Arts, most of whom were strictly academic painters, seeking to render the natural world and not the inner tumult of human experience.

            If there is a lesson to be learned from Moreau it is that an artist must seek their own internal, thematic guidance.  For writers, the dictum is “write what you know,” which is a fair one, as readers can immediately tell when an author is speaking about a topic they have no personal experience with.  I believe this should also apply to visual artists.  While many artists seek to defend their explorations, they often end up forcing a theme, or leaving their work feeling slapdash and incomplete.  Moreau loved the classical myths, and drew inspiration from them, re-purposing their symbols and allegories, combining them with christian themes and allegories, all the while portraying his subjects in a lavish way, almost overwhelming the viewer with attention to detail.  It is the exact opposite of minimalism, and his style influenced the Symbolists who followed.

            The amazing result of Gustave Moreau’s failure to sell much of his work, mostly by choice, is that upon his death, he left his entire collection, home, and studio to the country of France.  Several years after his passing, the paperwork went through, and the Musée National Gustave Moreau opened in Paris, where it remains to this day, a time capsule of, and a testament to, one of the most imaginative painters of his generation.  I hope to someday visit it, and see in person these large, impressive works of art.  Until then, books such as these will be my companion.

Kassia St. Clair Explores the History, Sources, and Meanings of Color

 

The Secret Lives of Color – Kassia St. Clair (2017)

            One of the greatest joys of my life is my ability to see color.  I delight in experiencing the vast quantity of shades and hues available to me on a daily basis.  I live fascinated by color.  Colors can affect me in ways nothing else can.  With this in mind, I found it most fortuitous to run into this great book by the columnist Kassia St. Clair.  It compiles and expands upon her weekly color column, providing intriguing details concerning the discovery/creation of individual colors, as well as describing the rise and fall of a given color’s popularity. 

            Kassia St. Clair divides her book into sections for each “color,” starting with Whites, Yellows and Oranges, then Reds, Blues, Greens, etc., all the way to the various shades of “Black” used by artists.  Within each section, she selects specific examples to focus on.  For instance, in the section on “Red,” St. Clair examines colors and color sources such as Scarlet, Cochineal, Vermillion, and Hematite, and how each color came into and out of fashion.  Humans are fickle beings, and we make up rules for everything, including color.  During the European Medieval period, when nearly every social and cultural decision was dictated by the rigidity and stupidity of Roman Catholicism, colors such as Red were reserved for a very select few, such as royalty or Bishops.  If you happened to be born into the so-called Lower Classes, your clothing color choices were minimal, and ordered by law.  Poor people were forced to wear only drab, boring colors, such as brown, tan and grey.  This is as much a function of societal control as any other law.  To keep the masses down and subjugated, one must trick them into thinking that they are worthless, and what better way to do so that by requiring them to dress in the colors of refuse. Every single color comes with such drama, and the author well explores these human stupidities.

            Another great aspect of color is the many sources humans have discovered or invented to create pigment.  Ancient man used the basic colors available to them.  These include the wide range of earth tones, reddish ones coming from hematite deposits, brown ones from specific soils, and black from the soot and charcoal created by campfires.  Such colors are found in abundance in Chauvet Cave, and other paleolithic art sites.  As humans evolved, and proceeded to make basic chemical discoveries (such as vinegar reacting with metal to form oxides), new methods of color creation appeared.  One of the most widely-used colors was Lead White, created when sheets of lead are oxidized in a vinegar bath.  The resulting white powder that forms on the outside of the Lead strips is super white, opaque, color-fast, and worked with most binders without unwanted chemical reactions.  This caused Lead White to become ubiquitous in paints, both for artists and for homes, and for makeup and cosmetic applications.  Many rich and powerful ladies gave themselves lead poisoning because of the fashion of the day, calling for the wealthy aristocrats to exhibit extremely pale complexions, a sign of high-class, as the lowly people are tanned and brown from outdoor menial labor.  Color is, and has always been, used to subjugate and divide us humans. The irony of the rich killing themselves via their own standards of beauty while demeaning those who cannot “afford” to the same is one of the many examples of the great Cosmic Joke we all reside in.

            The sources of color are as varied as the hues themselves.  Certain reds come from the crushed bodies of tiny beetles.  Some purples come from the tiny ink sacs of a specific Mediterranean snail.  Old artist paints used brown pigments sourced from thousand-year-old mummies, and yellows extracted from the urine of malnourished cows force-fed mango leaves.  Other colors arise from plants and their constituent parts, often through painstaking and difficult chemical processes.  It is a testament to the wit and wisdom of humanity that our ancient ancestors discovered these colors and how to create them.  Even to this day, the discovery of a new color can bring the discoverer untold riches, much as it did in the past for those men who discovered cadmium pigments in their personal chemical laboratories.  In fact, the color Mauve was discovered by accident by a researcher trying to synthesize quinine, a treatment for malaria.  To think that ancient man did essentially the same with lead and copper, creating pigments through chemistry, is awe-inspiring and humbling.

            Colors affect us innately.  They are used for wordless communication to this day.  Bright Reds and Yellows warn us, cautioning in their intensity.  Greens represent Nature in all its wonder.  Many cultures see Black as a symbol for mourning, while others see White as the color of grief.  Our lives are suffused with colors, with new ones appearing every day.  If there is a lesson to be drawn from Kassia St. Clair’s work it is that the emotional/intellectual weight of colors is purely created by our human experience.   There is no universal definition of any color or its meaning.  As with all things outside of our consciousness, humans force meaning where it does not exist.  The lies we tell ourselves often end up oppressing our fellow man.  Learning about the human connection to color and pigment helps us fight the delusions, and should be required reading for any artist.  It may be that we all need to understand that Life, and everything in Life, is but a process, a step forward among a marathon of concurrent and disparate steps.  The old Zen koan concerning whether a tree falling in a wood makes a sound if no one is there to hear it has always rung false.  Sound exists independent of any receptor.  It is solely the variant vibration within air, water, or earth.  Hence, sound exists whether our ears receive it.  I believe the old koan was a way to force a student to understand how miniscule and largely unimportant the human is to the workings of Mother Nature.  Colors were not invented for the enjoyment of us humans.  Colors existed for billions of years before Mother Earth spat out hominids, and will exist for trillions of years after we have forced our own extinction.  Long live color!

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Lives-Color-Kassia-Clair/dp/0143131141 )

Fred Gettings Gives us Eyes to See and Ears to Hear

 

 The Occult in Art – Fred Gettings (1978)

            “Occultism is the study of the spiritual world which is hidden from ordinary vision.  The word itself is derived from the Latin occulta, ‘hidden things’, and implies that the visible world is not the only one of importance to man.”

            Thus begins the most enlightening and insightful book on the occult images and ideas hidden in classical art I have ever come across.  This Library I work for is a GOLD MINE!  Born in 1937, Fred Gettings wrote extensively on occult and symbological matters, publishing many works before his death in 2013.  This book deals specifically with artists who embedded hidden imagery or knowledge within their artwork, and how to best “read” these works to understand the occult information conveyed within.

            First, I must define the “Occult” and what it means in this context.  As stated in the quote above, occult knowledge just means hidden knowledge.  Too many people buy into the lie told by christian leaders that occult knowledge is inherently evil, or satanic.  This is how they scare the deluded idiots into not asking questions or making their own decisions.  For example, when telling very young children about procreation, the story of the stork is often used.  This story occults the true process of procreation (carnal fornication, male ejaculation inside the female, and the coming together of two zygotes to form a living cell, which then splits and splits, cells differentiating, until a baby is popped out the vaginal tube, ready to breathe the good air of this world), replacing it with an inert and inoffensive tale of a stork that delivers all new babies to their mothers.  Until the child grows up and is taught, or discovers, the actual truth of procreation that knowledge is willfully occulted.  The reality has been hidden from children for their own good, or so many parents used to think.  This is also how religious and political leaders think of the great unwashed masses of humans outside their castles, temples, and private mansions.

            Fred Gettings was exasperated with the state of art criticism and art history at the time of his writing this work.  He was adamant that to understand the art of the past, historians and critics must take into account the intended purposes and meanings portrayed in the art itself, many of which related to the occulted knowledge shared by mystery schools, secret religious orders, and others who seek to retain and disseminate these ancient ideas.  Gettings’ complaints about art critics and historians still ring true today.  Too many art critics analyze work from the past through a very modern lens, one that places importance on modern artistic ideals, instead of the ideals of the artists in question.

            For example, one may view a 300-year-old painting of the crucifixion, which, through modern eyes and ideas, can be analyzed structurally, compositionally, and emotionally.  It is a valid form of criticism, but it leaves out the most important part of the artwork, the theme and subject, as well as the artist’s personal connection to the image he or she created.  William Blake was a well-known mystic and weirdo, yet many of the modern analysis and critiques of his work ignore that most salient point.  Each of Blake’s artworks come from a place of deep wonder and exploration into the metaphysical and spiritual inner mind of man.  In order to share those ideas in a visual medium, new symbols and metaphors must be created.  These symbols and the compositional elements are what Fred Gettings masterfully describes.

            Occult knowledge has a deep human past.  Initially drawn from the ancient Mystery schools that kept the advanced knowledge of our world and universe secret and safe amongst chosen initiates and away from the ignorant and violent masses, this knowledge has reached our modern world, surviving the past two thousand years of omnipresent suppression by the Catholic Church.  Many of the early christians had deeply symbolic and mythical ideas about the trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and the role of man in the cosmos.  It is man’s place in the world that many of the artists in this book analyze and explore.  Because of this, great insight is gained into the work of William Blake, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and other masters.  It is impressive how occult knowledge influenced the creation of abstract art, something modern critics fail to recognize, even as it stares them in the face.

            The main way to maintain occult knowledge and to share it with subsequent generations is through architecture.  It lasts much longer than written texts, or painted images.  The modern fraternal organization of Freemasonry is one of the descendants, at least in spirit, of the early secret societies.  During the first thousand years of organized christianity the builders of the churches designed and decorated them with many occult symbols and ideas.  If the wisdom is displayed in stone, it is available to any and all, even the illiterate and uneducated.  Including esoteric teachings and wisdom in images and architectural details ensured that only those “with eyes to see and ears to hear” understood the message, preserving the hidden knowledge from those that seek to destroy it, namely, the catholic church that styles itself as the supreme arbiter of what is real, important, christian, holy, etc. 

Fred Gettings is clear and concise in his explanations, and astute in his observations.  His attempt to share the hidden world of art serves to expand the mind, and open it up to new ways of seeing, of learning, and of understanding the artistic creations of our ancestors.  I look forward to digging up some more of Mr. Gettings insightful books, and sharing my thoughts about them with my readers.

Amber is Both an Object of Beauty and a Time Capsule of Ancient Flora and Fauna

 

Amber: Window to the Past – David A. Grimaldi (1996)

 

            Sunlight solidified.  That is how ancient man saw amber, initially discovered washed up on sea beds and beaches, reflecting the bright sun with its rich, often golden hues.  It must have seemed like such a magical material.  Sometimes completely transparent, sometimes opaque, this material came in a wide range of colors, from green to bright red, and possessed seemingly magical properties.  It felt warm to the touch, unlike other stones, and built-up static electricity. One of only two items used as gemstones that arise from natural, biological processes (the other being pearls), amber remains highly prized and very beautiful.  My fascination with amber has been lifelong, and because I am not fortunate enough to reside in an amber-rich location, I adore books such as this one by David A. Grimaldi, for they bring me not only a deep and considered history of the precious material itself, but also countless amazing photographs and reproductions from collections worldwide.  My jealousies abound.

            This wonderful book is divided into two sections, Amber in Nature, and Amber in Art.  The first chapter of the Amber in Nature section details exactly what is considered amber, its origins, and its properties.  True amber is very old.  Starting out as the resinous sap from a variety of trees (many of which are extinct), amber is created when this sap drips or falls to the ground and is covered by either water or oxygen-poor soil.  This allows the highly volatile chemicals found in the resins to either dissipate or break down while preserving the resin itself, sometimes for tens of millions of years.  Erosion and other factors work to bring up these deposits, oftentimes breaking off pieces and washing them away with the tide.  This is how early people found amber on beaches near ancient deposits.  In a world with very few transparent substances, it makes sense that amber was highly prized and divine.

            While prized for millennia for its gem-like qualities, in modern times the greatest value of amber lies in the inclusions found within.  Humans have always prized amber specimens with visible animals or plants trapped inside, often using these for jewelry or decoration.  Most did not know or understand how old the amber was, or the included animals and plants.  Scientists began to understand that the animals and plants in amber were sometimes tens of millions of years old, which led them to use the old amber collections for taxonomy purposes.  In even more recent times, the rise of scanning electron microscopy and other even better microscopes helped us see how much detail and preserved material was actually available within the amber itself.  Whereas most fossils found in rock strata are compressed, flattened through time and pressure, the fossils inside amber often retain their three-dimensional structure.  It has been found that the chemical composition of the amber not only sealed the specimens away from harmful oxygen, but the process of desiccation within the amber preserved many soft tissue organs, such as the brains, muscles and lungs of a hundred-million-year-old fly, all plainly visible under the microscope.  Amazing.  Even more insane is that individual mitochondria have been preserved.  These are some of the smallest constituents of any living animal’s cells.  I cannot imagine the glee and shock whenever a scientist first laid eyes on hundred-million-year-old mitochondria.  Those moments are truly singular, and are what scientist dreams are made of.

            Reading about the history of amber in art and decorative pieces was also enlightening.  While most amber is ancient, it is not an inert material.  Exposure to the atmosphere and bright lights can cause the usually shiny amber to be covered in cracks and crazed bits, rendering the outer “skin” of the amber opaque.  Because of this, many of the oldest art pieces do not glimmer or shine as they did originally.  If left alone, the amber would eventually crumble to dust.  Due to its fragility, amber was rarely used as a showpiece gemstone.  It did find much use in bead form, and as accent pieces for large, crafted items.  In fact, one of the most widespread uses for amber was in crafting rosary beads, meant to be touched one by one as prayers are recited.

            My fascination with amber has increased ten-fold due to this book.  It is a magnificent reference work and includes maps detailing the many places on Earth where amber is either found in situ or mined.  The closest location to me would be around El Paso, Texas, a 12-hour drive away.  Seeing as how I have family living there, I will someday go hunting for amber among the desert plants and animals.  If I am lucky my wife will come with me, although her loathing of dust may preclude such adventures.  Either way, this book entertained and enlightened me, and I highly recommend it to anyone seeking an expansive exploration of amber and its many uses.

(For a very informative website about Amber, click here: https://amber-fossils.com/ )

Early Humans and their Fantastic Art Help Us Understand the Rise of Human Consciousness

 

The Mind In the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art – David Lewis-Williams (2002)

 

            Yet again, my employment and its proximity to amazing books yields delicious fruit.  As a sojourner into the mind and an avid reader of books studying and exploring consciousness, I am always on the look-out for seminal works in this field.  This book is one such tome.  Reading countless references to it in other works spurred me to keep a mental note, should I ever come across this book at a bookstore of library.  I was ecstatic when I saw The Mind in The Cave while perusing the shelves at my workplace.

            I first became fascinated with prehistoric art as an art and art history student.  The images ancient humans drew, painted and etched into the walls of caves are amazing and as beautiful as anything created by us in the past thousand years.  Checking out books on the art found in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet opened my mind to the vast stretches of pre-history lost to us, and to the inherent artistic sensibilities and beautiful works of our ancient brethren.

            While the actual images and artworks created by early humans are indeed beautiful and moving, David Lewis-Williams’ focus is not on them.  Instead, the author seeks to use these early artworks to explore the how they detail the rise of what we term human consciousness.  By a careful, deliberate, and wide-ranging analysis, Lewis-Williams weaves together the story of how modern humans, Homo sapiens, developed our specific mind/consciousness, and how it differed from our nearest ancestor, Homo neanderthalensis, who co-existed with Homo sapiens for quite some time in what is now Western Europe.

            It may be hard to imagine but the uproar caused by the discovery of ancient human artworks in caves was virulent, and for a time, it stifled the proper scientific and art historical study of the cave art.  In a world where people blindly believed what con-artist priests told them, the idea that the earth was older than 6,000 years old was seen as a blasphemy of the highest order.  Everyone “knew” that god created the world, and everything on it, very recently.  They “knew” this because it was told to them as irrefutable, divinely-inspired fact.  To think this was around one hundred years ago, after Isaac Newton, Galileo and Darwin, baffles me.  The human drive to remain ignorant and accept the simplest explanation, regardless of evidence or counter-evidence, drives me insane.  It took decades for anyone to take the primitive art seriously, for, much like in today’s world, you always have idiots and the willfully ignorant railing against evidence of deep time such as fossils, claiming them to be placed in the earth by their exceedingly stupid and malevolent god to “trick” us and to “test” our faith.  What a hopeless well of stupidity.

            David Lewis-Williams describes the many ways this knowledge was resisted and ignored.  Not only did people think the artwork found in the caves could not be as old as it seemed, but they also did not wish to allow that ancient man was the equal of modern man.  Humans have an innate need to self-aggrandize, and to consider the present day to be a pinnacle of sorts.  Many people still think this way.  They truly believe that the entirety of existence, the billions of years-old Cosmos, and the near infinite expanse of galaxies around us, was created by a god whose sole purpose in doing so was forging the human race in its image. 

Another obstacle was that humans always sought a superficial understanding of things, leaving them mostly ignorant.  It is in this way that many humans at the time, and even today, inferred that what Darwin posited when he proposed Natural Selection as the means by which life evolves on Earth was that us humans are the pinnacle of evolution, that the billions of years of preparation and shifting forms of life were all in anticipation of the masterpiece that is the human race.  This is as asinine, destructive, and egotistical an idea as any created by the human race.  It is the sole basis for much of the entrenched racism found in the world, for the ignorant and self-proud racists obviously put themselves at the top of creation, closest to god, while everyone else was “obviously” beneath them.  Seemingly sensible people would expound on how the “natural order” of things meant that anyone not of pale skin was closer to the animals than to divinity.  Even in a document created by enlightened minds, such as the US Constitution, the value of a non-white male was seen as 3/5 of what a white male was.  Systematic and entrenched racism spoils much of scientific discovery and human advancement.

            Having discussed the topic at length, and how the ignorance was overcome, the author explores the differences between the artwork created by Homo neanderthalensis and that created by Homo sapiens, and how this shines a light on the rise of human consciousness.  Using the data gathered by archeologists and anthropologists, Lewis-Williams differentiates between Neanderthal and Human consciousness in a very clear manner.  While the debate concerning whether consciousness is an inherent part of life still rages, it is plain to most humans that the living creatures around us exhibit self-awareness of a sort, and awareness of their environment.  It is clear that other animals plan, strategize, and experience a wide range of emotions, just like humans do.  What is also clear from neurological and neuropathological studies is that the other consciousnesses around us lack something we humans all share.  This is the ability to “see” ourselves in a detached manner, to self-analyze, and to understand that the current moment will, if certain actions are made, lead to specific outcomes in the future.  One of the key pieces of evidence for this is that for over three hundred thousand years, Neanderthals thrived without agriculture.  The sowing, care, and harvest of plants for food and other uses requires the ability to step outside of the immediate moment, and posit a future that exists solely in the imagination.  The seasons must be considered.  The appropriate soil and needs of the crop must be noted and remembered.  This is a purely human characteristic, something lacking in the neanderthal record.  There are very few Neanderthal burials found, and they are rudimentary.  Quite a big difference from the elaborate, and ritualized human burials of early man.  Lewis-Williams posits that early man, able to step outside of his immediate mind-state to experience all the higher-consciousness effects we take for granted, began to understand that life is temporary, that the world existed before, and will continue after, we die.  Neanderthal man did not have this capability, which seems to arise from our specific neuronal structure. 

            Even in the relatively short period where Neanderthal and Homo sapiens lived alongside each other in what is now Europe, a period lasting over 20 thousand years at least, it is evident that Neanderthals did not understand their Homo sapiens neighbors.  Interbreeding happened, as is now evident by the genetic testing showing that most European people have between 1-4% neanderthal DNA in them, something that none of the human populations in Africa have.  What did not happen is the migration of ideas and knowledge.  Neanderthal tools never improved once they mingled with modern humans.  They may have seen the proto-agriculture and animal husbandry practiced by early humans, but they did not assimilate it.  They also would have seen the burial rituals of early Homo sapiens, but they never assimilated the concept.  The author’s claim is that the Neanderthal were physically unable to do so, their brain structure preventing the development of higher consciousness.

            This ability to create metaphor and symbolism led humans to explore deep, dangerous cave systems, and to leave behind the amazing artwork we are in awe of today.  While too many people try to explain and analyze these images through the prism of modern art and art theory, the author instead seeks to understand the mental state of the cave artists themselves.  In this way he explores why the art was made, and how the caves were used for ritual purposes.  One of the enlightening parts describes how the entrances of these caves, the areas that may still get some outdoor natural light, were used communally by ancient man, not as living sites or shelters, but for communal ritual purposes.  The excavation of these caves shows that while they were used repeatedly, they were never a place for habitation, apart from purely temporary use as emergency shelters.  This flies in the face of the accepted and ignorant idea of the “caveman” that suffuses modern thought.  Ancient Homo sapiens built homes and structures, just like modern humans do.  The caves were, from the start, living symbols of the cosmos, the womb of the Earth Mother, and were used by the shamans and shamanistic humans for specific ritual purposes.

            The author posits that the artwork created in these caves should be seen as the end result of the neuropsychological effects which arise in all humans through either trance, ritual, or psychoactive substances. This hypothesis fits the data we have, and avoids the pre-judged dogma that most archeologists and historians bring to the study of ancient man, which presupposes that the reasons ancient man created the artworks is of the same motivation as that of a modern human creating art.  The fallacy that the author counters forgets that the world we currently live in is an aggregate of the collective human experience, and that the making of images to a current human is filled with suggestion and analogy of which ancient man would have never conceived.  Lewis-Williams explains how the imagery, from dots, dashes, chevrons and lines, to the representations of animals, or animal “spirits,” all arise from the workings of our extremely complex neurological processes. 

For the most part, the individual artworks were created in private and remained private.  Very few humans actually ventured deep into the caves themselves, for they were and are fraught with danger.  In this manner, Lewis-Williams suggests that the creation of art was done by those either designated as or seeking to be, shamans.  The artwork was not on public view, and was never intended to be communicative.  The primitive art, consisting mainly of a specific group of deified animals (bears, bulls, ibex, horses) served the shaman’s purposes, and not the tribes.   Comparing the types of images created by our ancestors with the images seen by those who hallucinate due to mental illness, or the use of psychoactive substances, is where the author truly shines.

It is this skill to imagine form, and find meaning in such forms, that modern Homo sapiens acquired or developed, and which the hominids predating Homo sapiens (Homo neanderthalensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus) did not.  This innate ability we have, and which we cannot seem to find in any other creature, led us to create Art, and Language, the two greatest and most valuable developments leading to the modern world we all share.  The ability to think symbolically allows for anyone to enjoy art and literature, and for humans to pass on acquired knowledge and wisdom to the subsequent generations.  We all contain the inherent mental hardware which allows such thought, purely because of our shared humanity. The skill to imagine, to hold a thought for longer than the current moment, differentiates us from any preceding creatures, and make us unique.   I am so glad I found this book, and I cannot wait to explore more of our primate ancestry through the beautiful, exquisite artwork they created.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/mind-in-the-cave-consciousness-and-the-origins-of-art-softcover )