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A Strain of Continuity
Following Art through the Ages
Art, even as old as the dawn of time, from when man first put color to stone, has always been dictated by the world around the artist. Cave paintings depicted an achievement, the ability to gather food in a harsh environment. Sculptures and carvings showed their religion, when no tongue could pronounce their glory. A splintered world had a story to be told, but when two men from opposite ends of the earth tried to tell it, they couldn’t rely on simple language. The written word had yet to be defined, and even when it was, a cultural difference could make or break a statement. Art would come to represent three major things in the world: legacy, religion, and nature.
The Mona Lisa, the Roman busts, and the Hall of Bulls have one thing in common. They are a legacy, a story told to forever mark its creator or its subject in the volumes of history. A merchant during the High Renaissance could pay an artist for a portrait that would hang in the halls of his home for centuries, passed down and touched up by his descendents, similar to the creation of the Mona Lisa. Likewise, the Roman busts, created for a people that seemed to revere their ancestors more so than their gods, were carved out of smooth marble to preserve the likeness of their deceased in their heyday. Mankind has wanted a way to immortalize itself from the beginning, and the only way to do that was to leave their visible mark. This is still a world of a thousand voices, all speaking in a language different even if only in dialect. The only way a man could let everyone in the entire world know he had lived, was with, simply, a picture. The Hall of Bulls, created when man knew almost nothing about himself and even less about the world in which he inhabited, was able to depict in such a way, his triumph of learning. Even though his name was lost to the ages, his moment, in which he was able to describe an appropriate food source, has always been looked upon in awe.
There has always been a reason for religion in art. Although at first it may have been for the sake of adoration, it turned into a fine art of gracing churches with the story of their beginnings. When the clergy began patronizing artists, we received some of the most awesome and terrifying works of beauty the rest of the world has ever known. The Snake Goddess from Mycenaean culture shows a powerful side to women’s history in ancient times. All the work the Greeks put into their temples to their pantheon of gods is still used today in the architecture for the buildings of the elite today. And to see the mosques that the Muslims built, colorfully decorated and with open rooms, is truly a joy to a people who had such strict regulations about their religion. Religion, being a huge part of a person’s life, held a very important reason to put it visibly for others to see and admire, if only to say “my god is better and more loved than your god”.
Finally, nature, or the world around the artist, was another reason for art to be created. Flowers on vases, the giant hummingbird by the Nazcas, or even mixing religion and the mature of the time, the massive achievements made in architecture due to the effort put into the Christian churches in the early Middle Ages, all of these reflected the beauty found in the world, or to help illustrate a point of grandeur related to the outside. Bright colors and flower patterns graced the pages of illuminated manuscripts, projecting the light of the gospel to the reader. Mankind has always had the ability to capture the essence of the literal nature he saw day to day, from the nude sculptures to the simple landscape paintings on vases. Sometimes, the art reflected the culture, like the warriors on vases describing the Mycenaean world view. All of this was a way for the artist to describe his world to another of a different circumstance.
All in all, art has been the ultimate translator. Art has been able to translate a man’s legacy, his devotion to his god, and the world in which he inhabits to someone who would know nothing else and be able to stand in awe of his works. For if civilization, as we know it now, was to be destroyed, all of our roads, our massive buildings, our steel and iron frameworks would be destroyed, save for the bronze statues of antiquity. Art will outlast us all and be able to tell the story of our world better than the history books, which only the winners ever write.