Art History

The Connection of Art and Survival Man has studied survival as far back as humans can be recorded, although some not left by records, we can go back thousands of years with survival represented through art pieces of art all over the world. Paleolithic and Neolithic man showed their means of survival through their art as their way of recording things, whether or not they left it purposely for people to discover and excavate to learn this is questionable. It may have just been a meer coincidence but it has lead to our knowledge of how survival was the driving force for the Paleolithic and Neolithic man. How it depicts their survival is what this paper will show. One piece of Neolithic art that points towards survival is the Stonehenge, a cicular group of rocks located in England. It looks as though it could almost be a shrine, a place to praise the gods, or even a place to sacrifce an offering to the gods. To the Neolithic man that determined their lively hood, the gods could smile upon them and provide them with fertile land to produce crops or doom them to drought and famine. One other Neolithic representation of religious survival is the Human skull with restored features from Jericho. Only a part of the chin can be seen from the skull but you can see that is most defintely a human skull. The restoration of the features the skull could represent a different kind of survival that seems more uncommon, but seems like a religious practice among different Neolithic cultures. Besides religion another representation of survival through art was the depicition of animals in the cave paintings at Lascaux, France. The Rhinoceros, wounded man, and disemboweld bison, a Paleolithic piece, shows that the Paleolithic man more than likely hunted that animals show which is obviously a factor in their survival. In the painting it displays a man who has been struck by a bison and the bison has also been disemboweld by the man and to the left of them is a rhinoceros.