Prehistoric Sculpture

Stone Age art or stone age art - The first known period of prehistoric human culture, during which work was done with stone tools. The period began with the earliest human development, about 2 million years ago. It is divided into three periods:

The Paleolithic period, or Old Stone Age, was the longest phase of human history. Its most outstanding feature was the development of the human species-- Homo sapiens. Paleolithic peoples were generally nomadic hunters and gatherers who sheltered in caves, used fire, and fashioned stone tools. Their cultures are identified by distinctive stone-tool industries. By the Upper Paleolithic there is evidence of communal hunting, constructed shelters, and belief systems centering on magic and the supernatural. Rock carving and paintings reached their peak in the Magdalenian culture of Cro-Magnon man.

The Mesolithic period, or Middle Stone Age, began at the end of the last glacial era, over 10,000 years ago. Cultures included gradual domestication of plants and animals, formation of settled communities, use of the bow, and development of delicate stone microliths and pottery.

The time periods and cultural content of the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, vary with geographic location. The earliest known Neolithic culture developed from the Natufian in Southwestern Asia between 9000 and 7000 BCE. People lived in settled villages, cultivated grains and domesticated animals, developed pottery,spinning, and weaving, and evolved into the urban civilizations of the Bronze Age. In Southeast Asia a distinct type of Neolithic culture cultivated rice before 2000 BCE.. New World peoples independently domesticated plants and animals, and by 1500 BCE Neolithic cultures existed in Mesoamerica that led to the Aztec and Inca civilizations.

Venus of Willendorf , c. 30,0000 - 25,000 (1990 study 24,000-22,000)
medium: stone (porous oolitic limestone)
lenght: 11.1 centimeters 43/8 inches
housed: Vienna's Naturhistorisches Museum
technique: presumably done with flint tools

It is the most famous early image of a human, in 1908 by the archaeologist Josef Szombathy

Classical sculpture was forgotten for a thousand years and then revived again during the Italian Renaissance. One of the most important sculptors in the classical revival was Donatello. Many other sculptors such as Michelangelo also made works which can be considered classical. Modern Classicism contrasted in many ways with the classical sculpture of the 19th Century which was characterized by commitments to naturalism (Antoine-Louis Barye) -- the melodramatic (François Rude) sentimentality (Jean Baptiste Carpeaux) -- or a kind of stately grandiosity (Lord Leighton) Several different directions in the classical tradition were taken as the century turned, but the study of the live model and the post-Renaissance tradition was still fundamental to them.