Millennia before Matisse
The discovery of this 27,000-year-old “face” in a cave near Angouleme in western France last February had archaelogists consulting art historians about getting written up in the Guinness Records under “world’s oldest portrait” (photograph from Associated Press).
A Cro-Magnon Modigliani? A Palaeolithic Picasso?
“It is, of course, ironic that an ancient image discovered in France so uncannily resembles the Parisian modernism of the 1920s,” Jonathan Jones wrote in June in a fine essay for The Guardian, entitled “Old masters”.
If the caveman’s renderings of horses and mammoths had such marvellous detail and precision, Jones asks, “Why is the human face so much harder to decipher, so stylised? The earliest human instinct,” he suggests, “was not to photograph the face, but to decorate it, to ennoble it.” See the rest.
