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lends confirmation to the hypothesis that the cave and its art had a fundamental relationship to fantasies of origins, of birth, death, and rebirth. Most of the statuettes of these obese fertility figures date from about 22,000–25,000 years ago (White, 2003). The so-called Venus statuettes, such as the Venus of Willendorf, made of stone and 4 3/8 inches in height (Naturhistorische Museum, Vienna), and the elaborate ivory Venus of Lespugue (Musée de Homme, Paris) have been related to both human and animal fertility. The oldest know statuette is that of a woman, the Venus of Hohle Fels, found in 2000 in a cave near the village of Hohe Fels, Swabia, Germany. This statuette is 2.3 inches tall, made of mammoth bone, and about 37,000 years old. The arrival of Homo sapiens coincides with the birth of art. Art has since been found across the planet in all cultures and all subsequent times. The human creation of the arts is an intrinsic universal propensity of human nature. Functional pleasure in being able to represent external and internal images, to manipulate symbols, to express ideas and emotions, to create novelty, and to recreate what is absent or has had only a mental existence may well have been an underlying contribution to the origin of art. Paleolithic art carries tantalizing echoes of concerns in many succeeding epochs. Analogous to the painting on prehistoric cave walls, the walls of Egyptian royal tombs were painted with scenes of the journey from death to rebirth in life after death. ‘Twisted perspective’ reappears also in ancient Egyptian art, where the head and legs are shown in profile, while the torso is shown frontally. ‘Fluctuating perspectives’ in modern art may be a contemporary reiteration. Emotional power of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures resonates with the ‘partial representation’ of cave artists’ portrayals of headless and legless animal figures. In addition, the conflict of how to represent the three-dimensional life on a two- dimensional surface, having perhaps started in the Stone Age cave art, recurs through the history of art. The battle was still being fought in Cubism. Contemporary emphasis on the representation of the complexities of nature (involving uncertainty, ambiguity, and multiplicity), as well as an emphasis on subjectivity, reciprocity, and nonlinear systems, maintains continuity with and extends the structure latent in earlier representational styles. Representation in art has progressed from the flat two-dimensional plane of paleolithic art, to the intuitive representation of three-dimensional space in Greek art, to the systematic representation of depth in Renaissance art, to the emphasis of indeterminacy in a spatial—temporal field in modern art in which an articulated sense of self is essential in understanding, appreciating, and representing the complexity and multiplicity of nature (Blatt 1999).
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