by Nigel Spivey
In the book of Genesis, the change occurs as a direct consequence of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.The sons of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, are specified as a tiller of the soil and a shepherd respectively, fulfilling God’s edict that mortals should henceforth survive ‘by the sweat of their brow’. Göbekli Tepe raises an alternative possibility – that what instigated the first production of food was art.
About 30 kilometres (20 miles) south from Göbekli Tepe lies the Karacadag range. Research among these hills has shown that they are home to the closest wild relative of an early species of domesticated grain, einkorn wheat.The suggestion is that wild grain was brought from the Karacadag, and cultivated around Göbekli Tepe in order to feed all the hundreds of people building or simply frequenting the site.
So there is the momentous conclusion: that some 11,000 years ago imagery had become so powerful in the minds of human beings that it helped to bring about the greatest transformation in human history.
3
MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN
A WOMAN, UNCLOTHED, stands on a raised platform. She is posing for others who are studying her bodily features and trying to represent them on canvas.The scene captures one moment of a process that will certainly have endured for hours, probably days, and perhaps even weeks. It is an evocation of what many will recognize as a life class – a formal exercise in drawing, painting or sculpture that requires the apprentice artist to look very carefully at an example of the human body in order to represent it in two or three dimensions.
The life class has been a feature of institutional fine art training in the Western tradition since the sixteenth century. In Italy the Caracci family of painters made drawing from live models a key part of their ‘academy’ at Bologna, established c.1582. A generation or two later, the custom of practising draughtsmanship from male and female figures posed in the studio was taken up by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69) and his Dutch followers. Eventually, at around the time when London’s Royal Academy of Arts was founded in 1768, the English language devised a special term to denote the content of such apprenticeship.This was ‘the nude’, which means a body not caught naked by surprise, but deliberately stripped bare and consciously posturing for viewers.
The life class is important for understanding the distinction between nudity and nakedness. But of more immediate concern, surely, is the apparent breach between what a life class demands of the aspiring artist and what the successful artist goes on to produce. From the time of Michelangelo (1475–1564) onwards, most of the great names of Western art have submitted themselves to the discipline of the life-class. (Michelangelo himself is listed as president of an accademia del disegno (school of drawing) at Florence in 1563.) From associated testimonies – or our own experience – we know that the traditional purpose of the life class is to gain an understanding of the human form in its natural, unveiled state. Proportions of limbs, anatomical structure, the connectedness of muscles, flesh and bones – these are usually the aims of the exercise. For some teachers the aim of the life class is all about getting it right: making an image that matches what can be seen; creating, therefore, an essentially realistic image of the human body.
So far, so good.Anyone who is not a professional artist will be thinking that this is how it should be. If artists are going to show us the human body, they ought (we expect) to know their subject properly. But as soon as we start to scrutinize the end results of studio training, we see the problem here.Take Michelangelo, whom many would regard as a consummate draughtsman of the human form.To his own contemporaries, however, the bodies he carved and depicted were not realistic, but rather invested with a certain terribilità (awesomeness). The Biblical and theological themes that Michelangelo painted on the Sistine Chapel gave scope for huge-shouldered hulks, colossal types that would dwarf even the extreme bodybuilders of today. Michelangelo imagined mankind created this way (Fig.18); it is highly unlikely that any of his models even approximated such broad proportions. Conversely, to gain the effect of piteous attenuation, Michelangelo would also stretch his figures beyond normal length.That is clear enough from the piece he was still working on the day before he died (aged 89), a lamentation over the corpse of Christ (Fig. 19). Incomplete and unfinished as it is, the ensemble nonetheless relies upon exaggerated elongation.
We might suppose the case of Michelangelo to be merely a phenomenon of the past. But the extent of art’s divergence from actuality is easily measured if we pause to ask ourselves how many of the images of the body displayed in our modern galleries and public spaces are essentially realistic.
The answer is very few – if any.There is no shortage of representations that appear to be based on the human form. But, on reflection, we seem to be confronted by another species …
18 (above) The Creation of Adam (detail) from the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, Rome, by Michelangelo, 1511–12.
19 (left) The elongated figures of Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà, which he was working on when he died in 1564.
20 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso, 1907.
No period inWestern art saw more experimentation with the range of representing the human body than the twentieth century.
21 Draped Reclining Mother and Baby by Henry Moore, 1983.
22 The Venus of Willendorf, c.20–22,000 BC.
Why is this? What is it that makes us prefer unrealistic images of the body?
This is a mystery that takes us back to the very earliest images of the body made by humankind. Finding an answer will reveal something not just about our bodies, but ourselves – or at least, something fundamental about our human instinct for creating and responding to images of ourselves.
THE VENUS OF WILLENDORF: A CASE OF PEAK SHIFT?
Not everyone gets to open the cabinet containing one of the world’s oldest sculptures. But since the curators of the so-called ‘Venus of Willendorf’ (Fig. 22) – a stone statuette carved some 25,000 years ago, and now conserved at Vienna’s Natural History Museum – were kind enough to let the piece be caressed, one ought at least to share the experience, and report that permission to handle proved instructive.
The limestone figurine, a little over 11 centimetres (41/4 inches) in height, is surprisingly dense and heavy for its miniature scale. It also feels far more delicately finished than it can appear from photographs. But what the privilege of direct access confers above all is the distinct sensation of holding the Venus just as she was held in the remote past. She is a very tangible masterpiece, with her shape, size and heft all seeming to belong neatly in the palm of a hand. Certainly this was a portable objet d’art, and presumably it needed to be so – because although it was found in a Palaeolithic shelter-site, the statuette was not permanently installed there, but rather carried along as part of the minimalist baggage of the nomads to whom she belonged.
Willendorf is a village west of Vienna, lying along the banks of the River Danube in a region known as the Wachau.Today the landscape of the Wachau presents a picture of temperate habitation.Vineyards and apricot orchards occupy terraced slopes and valley meadows. Medieval turrets add to the effect of settled agriculture and economic importance.The pattern of farming here was essentially established over two millennia past, when the Danube formed the northern border of the Roman Empire. But it was not like this in prehistory. Around 40,000 years ago, when the first traces of human presence are located in these parts, it was a much colder and bleaker environment.This was Europe’s last period of major glaciation. Dense pine forest and icy scrubland were roamed by hunter-gatherers – people who obtained their food by foraging, not farming.
The diet of these foragers was not necessarily poor, but even allowing for seasonal variability, it is hard to imagine conditions of easy surplus. One of the problems posed by the Venus of Willendorf is that she looks conspicuously obese at a time when it was undoubtedly rare or difficult for any individual to build up stores of fat. So how did she get that way?
We may counter th
at question by claiming that no one, actually looked like that – allowing this Venus to be a fantasy figure. And if we look more closely at the carving – done very delicately with some flint instrument – we see that there was no intention, originally, to make an accurate assimilation of human features.The hair has been rendered as a sort of bonnet, but the face is utterly blank.The hands and arms are included as if of slight or secondary importance, folded across the top of the breasts; but there is no attempt at all to show the feet. By contrast, certain other bodily parts have been very carefully defined: the nipples, the navel, the vulva and its labia.
Why the disparity? Why should certain parts of the body be specified and others ignored? And, in tandem with that demand, why are certain parts of the body – breasts, hips, buttocks – so strikingly exaggerated?
A somewhat predictable answer to the first question comes from the science of evolutionary psychology (or evolutionary physiology), which may be summarized as the explanation of human behaviour (or body shape) in terms of sexual selection. If we accept that the development of the human species was determined by the principle of the survival of the fittest, it follows that the primary criteria for assessing bodily fitness in a man or woman depend upon perceived or evident capacities to keep the species going. The predominant male and female physiologies that evolve will be those showing most promise of successful reproduction.This does not only involve the mutual display of functioning sexual organs.A man will also be judged by his physical ability to protect the family and supply it with shelter and food; a woman, by those bodily resources that help her to endure the trauma of childbirth, and the potentially difficult phase of first feeding. So the evolutionary explanation of the Venus of Willendorf may be readily summarized. Her wide hips and robust thighs suggest the strength to survive pregnancy and giving birth; her huge breasts, an abundant supply of milk; and the layers of fat, sufficient reserves to sustain her, too, through any eventual shortages of nourishment.
These factors may persuade us to indulge the usual description of the Willendorf Venus as a ‘fertility figure’, or even a ‘fertility goddess’ (though there is little evidence for any associated cult worship).We might also like to be reminded that there are documented societies of hunter-gatherers, notably the Bushmen of southern Africa, where the actual condition of pronounced female steatopygia (fat-bottomedness) is demonstrably linked to local patterns of sexual selection. Nevertheless, the Venus is a statuette, a work of art. For some reason, the people who once hunted in the hills of the Wachau valley felt compelled to exaggerate some parts of her body, while completely ignoring others. If they were alone in this tendency for selective exaggeration, we might dismiss it as a local peculiarity. But the Venus of Willendorf is not, as a type, unique. Similarly proportioned female figurines have been found at a range of sites across central Europe, the Ukraine and Russia, with several also known from France and northern Italy. Carved mostly from some durable stone, they may have travelled long distances, and some show signs of having been often passed around.
Archaeologists may speculate about the use to which these statuettes were put (one suggestion is that they were a sort of Palaeolithic pornography). But the most vigorous explanation of why they are shaped as they are has come not from an archaeologist, but from a brain scientist.
Vilanyur Ramachandran has worked hard to popularize his theories about the ‘science of art’ beyond publication in specialized journals.What follows here is a digest of one part of a much wider hypothesis put forward by Ramachandran and his scientific colleagues about the universal principles operating in the brain whenever a work of art is instigated.We want to know why our Palaeolithic ancestors exaggerated, to a grotesque extent, certain features of these Venus figurines. In paraphrase, Ramachandran’s answer goes like this.The Willendorf Venus and similar statuettes were made by hunter-gatherers living in a harsh ice age environment. In such circumstances, as we have observed, features of fatness and fertility would have been highly desirable. In technical terms, those features amount to hypernormal stimuli that activate neuron responses in the brain.This is a cognitive mechanism – something that comes naturally to us because our brains are hard-wired to concentrate perceptive focus upon objects with pleasing associations, or those parts of objects that matter most. For Palaeolithic people, the female parts that mattered most were those required for successful reproduction: the breasts and pelvic girdle.The circuit of the Palaeolithic brain, therefore, isolated these parts and amplified them.
The neurological principle here is that of ‘peak shift’. It is, as Ramachandran points out, a principle well recognized in patterns of discrimination among other animals. A rat, for instance, can be taught to differentiate between a square and a rectangle. Reward the rat with a piece of cheese every time it opts for a rectangle, and the rat learns to prefer not just a particular rectangle, but rectangularity itself.The more a rectangle is exaggerated – by elongating two sides, so as to look even more different from a square – the more promptly the rat will respond to it. As it happens, Ramachandran’s favourite example of peak shift comes from the noisy world of the common seagull (see below), although neither gulls (nor rodents) produce works of art. Peak shift may account for the shape of a few figurines from prehistory.What happens next down the ages? Can a primeval instinct comprehensively explain why human beings like to create unrealistic images of the body?
THE HERRING GULL TEST
IT IS A BASIC tenet of this book that humans are the only creatures with the aesthetic capacity for making art.To hold such a belief does not mean, however, that there is nothing to be learnt from other species about how the human brain functions in terms of visual perception and response.This is one of the many applications of ethology – the study of animal customs and behaviour, with particular regard to evolutionary function. And it was a pioneer of ethology, the Dutch Nobel Prize-winning scientist Niko Tinbergen (1907–88), who conducted the experiment with herring gulls referred to above.
Herring gull chicks, like most animal offspring, begin clamouring for food as soon as they are born. They are fed with half-digested morsels from their mother’s beak, which is yellow and distinctly marked on the lower mandible with a red patch. Habitually, the chicks tap the beak in their eagerness for food: whatever the extent of their eyesight, these new-borns apparently recognize their mother’s beak as a sign stimulus for the feeding process. Such is the power of this sign stimulus that, as Tinbergen discovered, its tapping response could be triggered not only without the mother gull’s beak, but without any beak at all.Testing his theory a thousand times and more,Tinbergen found that gull chicks will seek food from a yellow or light-coloured stick marked with a red stripe. But what is most germane to peak-shift theory is how the effect of the red mark is increased by multiplication. A stick with one red stripe gets the chicks to beg for food. A stick with three red stripes gets them three times more excited. Given a choice of sticks – one with a single red stripe, the other with three red stripes – the chicks will peck more enthusiastically at the triple stimulus.
What is important, then, is not that the stick itself resembles a maternal beak, but rather the exaggeration of the red-patch signal in what Professor Ramachandran calls a ‘superbeak’ or ‘ultrabeak’. ‘If seagulls had an art gallery,’ argues Ramachandran, ‘they would take this long thin stick with its three red stripes, hang it on the wall, pay millions of dollars to purchase it, worship it, call it a Picasso … ’
EGYPT AND THE ORDERED BODY
At about the same time as the climate of central Europe began to soften and become more temperate – c. 10,000–5000 years ago, when the archaeological transition from Palaeolithic to Neolithic occurs – a large expanse of northern Africa became desiccated. An ecosystem reliant on lush vegetation was ended: the Sahara desert appeared.The hunter-gatherers who had roamed in this region were forced to move eastwards and congregate where water flowed.This water supply was a river that must have seemed miraculous – running for s
everal thousand kilometres through arid land, apparently without tributaries or rainfall on its way, and then gushing over its banks between July and October – the driest time of the year. No wonder that nomads began to settle along the banks of the Nile, especially by its area of fullest inundation – the D-shape or delta formed where the river separates into the Mediterranean Sea. And no wonder, perhaps, that the agricultural subsistence they created along this river developed into a society characterized above all by its sense of precise and cosmic regularity. So long as the river flooded in season, farmers could plan ahead, and surpluses could be stored for the eventuality of crop failure or famine. Central organization was essential. From c. 3000 BC that central organization assumed a distinctly hierarchical structure. One ruler, who would be known as the pharaoh, stood at the peak.This ruler was divine in status, yet ruled only on behalf of, and with the support of, all those who made up the lower social levels. It is irresistible to liken this system to the shape of the pyramids that came to symbolize the civilization of ancient Egypt.
From the numerous illiterate peasants who tilled the floodplain of the Nile, to the priests and scribes who devised the picture-writing script known as hieroglyphics (literally ‘holy engravings’), everyone within the ancient Egyptian hierarchy belonged, as it were, to the pharoah. Somewhere in the lower middle section of the hierarchy were the artisans whose handiwork remains such a conspicuous presence in Egypt to this day. These artisans were not creative individuals at liberty to undertake commissions as they pleased.They lived and worked in groups, and they worked to a preordained set of rules and specifications.There was no value of originality.Art existed to illustrate the cosmic order of things. Conformity was paramount.