Dolni Vestonic’s head: 26,000 -year -old portrait in mammoth ivory portrait

From ivory records to digital photography, portraits (portraits In English) has been one of the main ways to protect people’s visual memory. More than universality and documentary value, The ability to capture human essence was one of the first artistic manifestationsIn addition to a treatment evidence Homo sapiens.

Interestingly, the object, which is the oldest portrait in the world, is actually a very small sculpture carved in Mamut Ivory, 4.8 centimeters high. In the 1920s, Artifakt was discovered in the archaeological region of Dolni Vestonic in the Czech Republic, where cult culture (28 thousand to 22,000 years ago) developed during the upper Paleolithic.

These ice -people are famous for their sophisticated art productions such as the famous Paleolithic “Venus”. portrait It is one of the most famous examples of prehistoric. With their highly advanced cognitive and motor skills, these ancestors developed advanced hunting technologies, created the world’s first known ceramics and established complex settlements.

President of Dolni Vestonic

In 26,000 years, Dolni Vestonic’s mini -mirrati is a small head slightly larger than a 4.8 -inch marble marble. The woman looks like a realistic portrait of her face, her eyes are recorded, jawed, chin, nose and mouth raised. It looks like the hair is back or scanned under the hat.

The object draws attention because mammoth ivory, a direct rare and durable material, makes it suitable for records and sculptures, but relatively soft (such as bone). However, the richness of detail indicates that sophisticated notching techniques are used. The millennium sculpture is part of women’s representations, a series of other “Venus”, which has a meaning in that culture.

What gives an unprecedented character is a distinctive attempt to capture its unique facial features. How can I want to portray a particular person. For this reason, the small sculpture stands out as one of the first personalized representations of a already discovered person in the history of world art.

Gotet rather than Dolni Vestonic

The culture of Gotrat rays, who founded the camp in the village of Dolni (a small village in the Czech Republic), consisted of mammoth hunters. They lived during the last glacial period known as Würm glacier, popularly called the last major ice period.

The archaeological field, which is accepted as the Pompeii of the Stone Age, revealed an invaluable richness of artifacts, which contain tens of thousands of ceramics, stone tools and bone objects and many graves. In 1949, one of these funerals discovered by archaeologists had a face reconstruction with judicial techniques, a remarkable female skeleton with a remarkable similarity to the small ivory sculpture.

The middle -aged body was covered with a red grid and used an ornament with a ten -drilled fox -to -female female. He revealed that there was a possible traumatic injury in childhood in his asymmetric skull. The pattern repeats itself in the sculpture with a much smaller left eye than the right. This lady would be a source of inspiration portrait ivory?

The Birth of Art in Dolni Vestonym in the Ice Age

During an exhibition of Dolni Vestony in London, in the beginning of 2013, the British Museum curator Jill Cook explained why the guardian was a portrait of a small head. “He has a beautifully recorded eye; On the other hand, the lid is opened and there is only one slit. […] Anyway, he had a suspicious eye. And there is a small pit on his chin: this is the royal and the image of a living woman. ”
For Cook, this deep need for objects without a practical function makes you think of a new artistic world. These first modern men in Europe were able to reproduce both extremely natural images and abstract representations. Everything we think of as art was already present in the culture of these primitive peoples of the expert in prehistoric sculptures.

He remembers that most people who look at art only think of the representation of the last 500 years, that the story looks like “five minutes midnight”. You are used to separating such works with the word “prehistoric”.
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