III.

Prehistoric and Ancient Painting

The earliest known Western paintings were executed deep within caves of southern Europe during the Paleolithic period, some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. The early development of painting continued in the Mediterranean littoral.

A.

Cave Paintings

The paintings still preserved on the walls of caves in Spain and southern France portray with amazing accuracy bison, horses, and deer. These representations were painted in bright colors composed of various minerals ground into powders and mixed with animal fat, egg whites, plant juices, fish glue, or even blood and applied with brushes made of twigs and reeds, or blown on. The pictures may have been part of a magic ritual, although their exact nature is unclear. In a cave painting at Lascaux, France, for example, a man is depicted among the animals, and several dark dots are included; the purpose of the design remains obscure, but shows the cave dwellers' ability to record their thoughts with images, signs, and symbols. See Paleolithic Art.

B.

Egyptian Painting

More than 5000 years ago the Egyptians began painting the walls of the pharaohs' tombs with mythological representations and scenes of everyday activities such as hunting, fishing, farming, or banqueting. As in Egyptian sculpture, two stylistic constants prevailed: The images, being conceptual rather than realistic, present the most characteristic anatomical features and thus combine frontal and profile views of the same figure; and scale indicates importance—thus, a pharaoh is shown taller than his consort, children, or courtiers. See Egyptian Art and Architecture.

C.

Minoan Painting

The Minoans, ancestors of the Greeks, created lively, realistic paintings on the walls of their palaces in Crete (Kríti) and also on pottery. For example, the famous Toreador Fresco (1500?bc, Heraklion Museum, Crete) shows a ritual game in which performers somersault over a bull's back. Marine life was a popular subject, as in the Dolphin Fresco (1500?bc) on the walls of the palace of King Minos in Knossos (Knosós), or on the Octopus Vase (1500?bc, Heraklion Museum), a globular container decorated with octopus tentacles that undulate around the pot, defining and emphasizing its shape. See Aegean Civilization.

D.

Greek Painting

Except for a few fragments, Greek wall paintings and panels have not survived. The naturalistic representations of mythological scenes on Greek pottery, however, may shed light on what this large-scale painting was like. In the Hellenistic era, scenes and designs represented in mosaics are probably also echoes of lost monumental paintings in other media. See Greek Art and Architecture.

E.

Roman Painting

The Romans decorated their villas with mosaic floors and exquisite wall frescoes portraying rituals, myths, landscapes, still-life, and scenes of daily activities. Using the technique known as aerial perspective, in which colors and outlines of more distant objects are softened and blurred to achieve spatial effects, Roman artists created the illusion of reality. In the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ad79 and excavated in modern times, a corpus of Roman painting, both secular and religious, has been preserved. See Roman Art and Architecture.

F.

Early Christian and Byzantine Painting

Surviving Early Christian painting dates from the 3rd and 4th centuries and consists of fresco paintings in the Roman catacombs and mosaics on the walls of churches. Certain stylizations and artistic conventions are characteristic of these representations of New Testament events. For example, Christ was shown as the Good Shepherd, a figural type adopted from representations of the Greek god Hermes; the resurrection was symbolized by depictions of the Old Testament story of Jonah, who was delivered from the fish. Among the most extraordinary works of this Early Christian period are the mosaics found in the 6th-century churches in Ravenna, Italy. San Vitale, in particular, is noted for its beautiful mosaics depicting both spiritual and secular subjects. On the church's walls, stylized elongated figures, mostly shown frontally, stare wide-eyed at the viewer and seem to float weightlessly, outside of time. See Early Christian Art and Architecture.

This otherworldly presentation became characteristic of Byzantine art, and the style came to be associated with the imperial Christian court of Constantinople (present-day İstanbul), which survived from ad330 until 1453. The Byzantine style is also seen on icons, conventionalized paintings on wooden panels of Christ, the Virgin, or the saints, made for veneration. Illuminated manuscripts both of non-Christian texts—for example, the Vatican Virgil (4th or early 5th century, Biblioteca Vaticana, Rome)—and Christian writings such as the Paris Psalter (10th century, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) show remnants of Greco-Roman art style. See Byzantine Art and Architecture.