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| The first art
The first art
Originaldokument enthält an dieser Stelle eine Grafik!
Original document contains a graphic at this position!
Name
Martin
Stanzl
5.HB/a
Teacher
Mag. Elizabeth Schaludek -
Paletschek
Table of Contents
THE FIRST ART
Human beings have evolved over four million years, but
Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared only 35,000 years ago.
The period from the emergence of Homo Sapiens Sapiens to
the time when people began to settle down in groups and farm the land is called
the Old Stone Age.
They learned to keep themselves alive and they also
began to express themselves by drawing things which they saw around
them.
This was the first art.
Paintings, engravings and carvings showed people who
were hunting animals.
There were also pictures of lions, bears, fish, birds
and mammoths in some caves and not only the pictures of bison, deer and
horses.
SEEING SHAPES
Creating art is part of human instinct. Little children
start to draw simple impressions from an early age and these become more
realistic as they grow older.
The ability to draw seems to have evolved as people
became more advanced.
Early art has been found in Africa, Asia, the Americas
and Australia, but the finest evidence comes from Europe, particularly from the
caves in France and Spain.
DRAWING ON THE WALLS
The engravings are sometimes very difficult to make out
because they were not carved very deeply.The artists would have needed a range
of tools to carry out the carving.
To carve fine lines, they used a tool with a sharp point
and edge, called a “burin“, and a sharp pointed tool called an
“awl“, usually used for piercing hides.
Larger, stronger tools, such as flint blades and
hammers, could be used for chipping away bigger pieces of rock.
Ochre is a kind of earth made up of clay and other
minerals. It provided red, yellow and brown pigments, and charcoal provided
black. No evidence of blue or green paint has been found.
The pigments were mixed with water to make paint which
was applied to the wall with the artist’s hands or with a twig, stick or
brush made from animal hair.
Some artists used a simple technique. Someone placed his
hand against the wall and the artist sprayed paint on it.
When the hand was taken away, its shape was left on the
wall. The paint was probably sprayed on with a simple blowpipe made of bone.
Often a whole range of different subjects was represented in a
cave.
MAGIC RITUALS
What were these pictures all about ?
People are hardly ever shown in them. When pictures do
include people, they are often wearing masks, animal skins and antlers on their
heads.
The paintings are often in parts of caves which are hard
to reach.
The artists needed ladders to get to them and also
needed lights to work, because they didn´t paint near the mouth of the
cave.
They thought that the paintings of animals would make
the hunt more successful.
Some of the animals have been painted with arrows stuck
in them. Perhaps the people believed that this would help them to kill the
animals.
They also may have had religious
significance.
But nobody really knows the reason.
POTTERY
When people began to settle in groups and farm the land,
they needed containers for storing grain and other crops.
People noticed that clay can be shaped when it is wet
and sticky and that it bakes hard when it is heated. They used it to build
houses and they also began to make simple clay pots.Pottery is one of the oldest
crafts.
The earliest pottery found dates back to 10,000
BC.
In Europe it appeared by about 4,000
BC.
When the pots had been shaped, they had to be baked or
“fired“ so that the water in the clay evaporated and became
hard.
But the most obvious method was to put the pots into the
sun. This system was used in hot parts of the world.
EARLY KILNS
The heat of the sun or of an open fire wasn´t high
enough to make the clay water-tight. The answer was to put the fire into a
closed oven, or kiln, where higher temperatures can be reached.
Kilns have been found in China, dating back to about
4,500 BC.
They were used in Mesopotamia by about 4,000 BC and
1,000 years later in Egypt.
These early kilns consisted of two
chambers.
The lower chamber held the fire and the upper chamber
held the pots. The two chambers were connected by a chimney.
THE POTTER´S WHEEL
Early potters realised that their work would be made
easier if the pot was turned as they made it. The first step was to put the pot
on a disc fixed to a pivot, which was a piece of wood driven into the
ground.
This simple method was uncomfortable for the potter, so
the disc was raised up on a taller shaft and set into a stone or wooden
base.
This appeared in Mesopotamia in about 3,500 BC. But the
real potter´s wheel was developed 2,000 years later. A second disc was
fitted to the bottom of the shaft, enabling the potter to turn the wheel with
his feet.
The potter could now spin the wheel much faster and also
had both hands free to shape the pot.
GLASS
It was easy to make use of the properties of clay, but
it wasn´t so easy to find out something about glass.
Glass is a mixture of substances. The main ingredient is
“silica“ or sand.
Silica will only melt at a temperature of 1,500°C
or more.
CARVING and SHAPING
By about 2,600 BC, glass-makers in Mesopotamia had
learned to make glass.
The Egyptians seem to have been the first to master the
art of making beautiful glass objects, as we can see from vessels found in royal
tombs.
GLASS-BLOWING
The technique of glass-blowing for shaping items such as
drinking glasses and bottles was invented about 100 BC, probably by the
Syrians.
The Romans had the largest glass industry of any
civilisation in the ancient world.
ArchaeoIogists have discovered glass bottles, beakers,
plates, jugs, vases and bottles for cosmetics.
These things have been found in the towns of Pompeii and
Herculaneum in Italy, which were buried under ash and lava after the eruption of
Vesuvius in AD 79.
Some pieces have a moulded trademark which tells
archaeologists where they were made. For example, the trademark CCA (Colonia
Claudia Agrippinensis) tells us that the piece was made in Cologne,
German.
METAL
About 9,000 years ago a group of craft-workers made the
discovery that was to change the world. They realised that metal was a natural
mineral.
Four centuries, stone had been the only material that
people used for making tools.
Metal´s great advantage over stone was that it
could be poured into moulds and shaped in a variety of ways.
When it cooled, it became hard and
strong.
Someone had the idea of beating it with a hammer. It
didn´t break like stone.
HEAT and HAMMERS
The first metals to be found were copper and gold. Gold
can be hammered into shape easily, but copper is brittle and breaks if it is
hammered too much.
The next discovery was that copper could be shaped
without breaking if it was first hammered, then heated and hammered again. This
process is called “annealing“.
People began to realise that, if they could find rock
with metal in it, the two could be separated by heating the rock until the
liquid metal flowed out.
This process, known as “smelting“ was
discovered by metal-workers in the Middle East in about 7.000
BC.
THE BRONZE AGE
As the search for metals progressed, silver, lead and
tin were discovered. The metal-workers realised that these metals all had
different properties which made them harder or softer, stronger or more brittle
than each other.
Copper was used for making ornaments because it was soft
and dented easily.
As metal-workers began to experiment with mixing metals
together, they discovered that adding tin to copper made a metal that was both
attractive and strong.
Bronze, as this new metal was called, was the first
“alloy“, or artificial metal made by mixing two or more natural
metals together.
Copper was used over a large part of Europe and Asia by
about 3,000 BC. In Asia, bronze was being used as well. By about 2,000 BC, most
metal-workers had switched to bronze.
The main sources of copper were Austria and the Balkans,
and tin was mainly found in Britain, France, Spain and northern
Italy.
The bronze armour, helmets and weapons of an army were
symbols of its strength.
THE IRON AGE BEGINS
Gold and silver were always luxury metals for the
rich.
Bronze was the dominant metal used for tools until about
500 BC.
About 2,000 BC, however, a new metal was discovered
which was much more plentiful than the others. This new metal was
iron.
Iron was probably first smelted in Asia between 2,000
and 1,500 BC, but it was not widely used until about 500 BC, because it was a
difficult metal to work. It would only melt at temperatures much higher than
early furnaces could produce.
Chinese metal-workers had discovered a way of heating
iron to such a temperature that it melted and could be cast in moulds. They also
discovered that they could lower the melting point of iron by mixing it with a
mineral known as “black earth“.
Vocabulary
to evolve sich entwickeln
to appear erscheinen
impression Eindruck
evidence Beweis
particulary besonders
engraving Stich, Holzschnitt
chip(ping) Splitter, Span /
meiseln
significance Bedeutung
grain Samen, Korn, Getreide
crop (Feld-)Frucht, Getreide,
Ernte
obvious offensichtlich, einleuchtend,
klar
pivot Zapfen, Dreh-,
Angelpunkt
property Eigentum, Eigenschaft,
Besitz
ingredient Bestandteil, Zutat
copper Kupfer
tin Zinn
lead Blei
furnaces Schmelz-, Hochofen,
Kessel
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