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Ancient, classical, and western art

For all intents and purposes, art began informally with modern humans approximately 2 million years ago. Nobody knows when men first consciously practiced art, but decorated artifacts fashioned by deft hands have been found dating from as early as tens of thousands of years ago. Many of these kinds of artistic endeavors date from the Ice Age, the glacial epoch which ended about 10,000 years ago.

One of the foremost examples of this kind of art was discovered in a cave in Lascaux, France in 1940. The cave contained  exceptionally fine Paleolithic wall paintings and engravings thought to date from late Magdalenian times, about 17,000 BCE.

  • See samples of the Lascaux cave paintings: click here.

Perhaps the oldest example of cave wall art yet found is Chavauet Cave in southern France, which dates from 32,00 years ago. Paleontologists who have studied the Chauvet wall drawings consider them to be the oldest and best examples of ancient human art yet discovered. They consider them equal in concept and quality to art work produced by modern artists.

A new technique for dating rock art sites called uranium-series disequilibrium dating, or more simply, uranium-series dating, is pushing back our current understanding of their true age when compared with the less accurate estimates derived from traditional carbon dating techniques. Archeologists using uranium-series dating are finding that the earliest cave paintings they are now examining in Western Europe reach as far back as at least 40,800 years. When existing estimates for art in caves like Altamira and Lascaux are revised with the new technique, it's likely that our estimates of their age will be elevated, as well.

The Muse of Fine Arts uses the term Ancient Art to describe the period in which this kind of art was practiced. The period in which Ancient Art took place may be said to extend up to the fifth century BCE; it includes the cultural outpourings of a number of civilizations. Noteworthy among these are the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, dating from about 5,000 BCE, the ancient Cretan civilization of Minos, dating from about 3,000 to 1,100 BCE, and that of the early and middle Egyptians, from around 3,000 to 1,500 BCE.

One of the most important of The Muse's time and geography coordinates intersects in a tradition called Classical Art. Classical art was invented by and flourished with Greek Hellenic culture in the fifth and fourth centuries, BCE. Classical art is a formal fine art focused on painting and sculpture that is characterized by balanced composition, the separation of figures from an architectural background, and the naturalistic rendering of anatomical details, spatial movement, and distribution of weight in a figure.

Classical art is a precursor of the so-called Western Art tradition. Western Art is art of the Western World. It began with and was nourished by the Classical tradition of the Ancient Greeks but it did not disappear with them; it is part of and continues to influence the art and culture of the Western World to the present day.

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