CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Art of the Upper Paleolithic
The first flourishing of figurative art, roughly 50,000 to 12,000 years ago: cave paintings, hand stencils and carved figures.
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The Upper Palaeolithic, roughly 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, is when images of animals and people become common in the archaeological record. On Sulawesi in Indonesia, a painted wild pig has been dated to more than 45,000 years ago, and in south-west Germany a carver shaped the Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel from mammoth ivory about 40,000 years ago.
In the caves of France and Spain, painters worked with charcoal, red and yellow ochre and manganese, letting bulges in the rock suggest a flank or a belly. Chauvet, painted around 36,000 years ago, shows lions and rhinoceroses modelled with shading; Lascaux, about 17,000 years old, has its procession of aurochs, horses and deer. Hand stencils, made by blowing pigment around a palm, recur from Europe to Indonesia. Small carved figures of women, from the ivory Venus of Hohle Fels to the limestone Venus of Willendorf, were made across Ice Age Europe over many millennia.
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