43 comments
inejge · 12 days ago
(Not related to the sculpture, just a bit of pedantry.) I appreciate the attempt to render the name of the locality in the present-day local alphabet (Czech), but the diacritic above the 'e' in "Vĕstonice" is wrong: the letter is "letter e with breve", but should be "letter e with caron", giving "Věstonice".

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yread · 12 days ago

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flocciput · 12 days ago
The lack of faces in most prehistoric art has always been fascinating to me, especially given the attention to detail paid to animals in cave paintings. Did people not give as much thought to individual identity before a certain milestone in our development as a species? Was it taboo or superstition to render someone's likeness? Were caves just not the place for portraiture? Why was this seemingly prevalent across cultures and geography? Etc etc; people with more to say than me have written about it at length I assume. This bust is from 24000BC, and the person depicted was 1) presumably already dead and 2) might have had a developmental deformity. Maybe that provides some clues about when, how, and why portraiture developed as an art form.
alkyon · 12 days ago

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metalman · 12 days ago
That they have a skelatal reconstruction of a persons face with similarities to the sculptue from the same site, it then could pehaps also be the first evidence for a comisioned work, and any evidence for industry and common curency would support that.....the first sale

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