Читать книгу Art History For Dummies - Jesse Bryant Wilder - Страница 72

Initially researchers believed cave art was connected to hunting. Hunting was primitive man’s main job, and the paintings are mostly of animals — with the exception of a few human stick figures, handprints, and geometric patterns in some caves.

Did primitive humans believe that capturing an animal’s likeness on a wall with paint made it easier to kill the animal in the wild? If so, then primitive painting was probably a type of sympathetic magic, kind of like voodoo. The idea is that if you paint a picture of a creature, then you have power over it. In some cave paintings, spears and arrows seem to pierce the animals (like needles sticking in a voodoo doll).

If you wanted to kill lots of bulls, you painted lots of bulls on the walls of your cave! In the Lascaux cave, the roughly 65-foot-long cave gallery known today as the Great Hall of the Bulls could be an example of a large-scale, prehistoric magic ritual. But today researchers suspect that cave art was more than just hunting magic.