Stages of development of primitive art. The origin of primitive art

Milestones of development primitive art

Content

Introduction. 3

Monuments of primitive art. 24

Features of primitive art. 26

Conclusion. 32

Introduction

Primitive art, that is, the art of the era of the primitive communal system, developed over a very long time, and in some parts of the world - in Australia and Oceania, in many areas of Africa and America - it existed until modern times. In Europe and Asia, its origin dates back to the Ice Age, when most of Europe was covered with ice and tundra spread where southern France and Spain are now. In 4 - 1 millennia BC. primitive communal system first in North Africa and Western Asia, and then in southern and eastern Asia and in southern Europe gradually changed to slavery.

The oldest stages in the development of primitive culture, when art first appears, belong to the Paleolithic, and art, as already mentioned, appeared only in the late (or upper) Paleolithic, in the Aurignac-Solutrean time, that is, 40 - 20 millennia BC . It flourished in the Madeleine time (20 - 12 millennium BC). The later stages in the development of primitive culture already date back to the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), Neolithic (New Stone Age) and to the time of the spread of the first metal tools (Copper-Bronze Age).

Examples of the first works of primitive art are schematic contour drawings of animal heads on limestone slabs found in the caves of La Ferracy (France).

These ancient images are extremely primitive and conditional. But in them, no doubt, one can see the beginnings of those ideas in the minds of primitive people that were associated with hunting and hunting magic.

With the advent of settled life, continuing to use rock canopies, grottoes and caves for living, people began to arrange long-term settlements - parking lots, consisting of several dwellings. The so-called "big house" of the tribal community from the settlement of Kostenki I, near Voronezh, was of considerable size (35x16 m) and apparently had a roof made of poles.

It is in this kind of dwellings, in a number of settlements of mammoth and wild horse hunters dating back to the Aurignac-Solutrean period, that small sculptural figures depicting women were found carved from bone, horn or soft stone (5-10 cm). Most of the statuettes found depict a nude standing female figure; they clearly show the desire of the primitive artist to convey the features of a woman-mother (breasts, a huge belly, wide hips are emphasized).

Relatively accurately conveying the general proportions of the figure, primitive sculptors usually depicted the hands of these figurines as thin, small, most often folded on the chest or stomach, did not depict facial features at all, although they rather carefully conveyed the details of hairstyles, tattoos, etc.

Good examples of such figurines were found in Western Europe (figurines from Willendorf in Austria, from Menton and Lespug in southern France, etc.), and in the Soviet Union - in the Paleolithic sites of V villages Kostenki and Gagarino on the Don, Avdeevo near Kursk, etc. The figurines of eastern Siberia from the sites of Malta and Buret, related to the transitional Solutrean-Madlenian time, are more schematically executed.

To understand the role and place of human images in the life of a primitive tribal community, the reliefs carved on limestone slabs from the Lossel site in France (ill. 16) are especially interesting. One of these slabs depicts a hunter throwing a spear, three other slabs depict women reminiscent of figurines from Willendorf, Kostenki or Gagarin, and finally, on the fifth slab, an animal being hunted. The hunter is given in lively and natural movement, the female figures and, in particular, their hands are depicted anatomically more correctly than in the figurines. On one of the slabs, better preserved, a woman holds in her hand, bent at the elbow and raised up, a bull (turium) horn. S. Zamyatnin put forward a plausible hypothesis that in this case a scene of witchcraft is depicted associated with preparation for hunting, in which a woman played an important role.

Judging by the fact that figurines of this kind were found inside the dwelling, they were of great importance in the life of primitive people. They also testify to the great social role that belonged to a woman in the period of matriarchy.

Much more often, primitive artists turned to the image of animals. The most ancient of these images are still very schematic. Such, for example, are small and very simplified figurines of animals carved from soft stone or ivory - a mammoth, a cave bear, a cave lion (from the Kostenki I site), as well as drawings of animals made with a one-color contour line on the walls of a number of caves in France and Spain ( Nindal, La Mute, Castillo). Usually these contour images are carved on the stone or drawn on wet clay. Both in sculpture and in painting during this period only the most important features of animals are transmitted: the general shape of the body and head, the most noticeable external signs.

On the basis of such initial, primitive experiments, a mastery was gradually developed, which was clearly manifested in the art of the Madeleine time.

Primitive artists mastered the technique of processing bone and horn, invented more advanced means of conveying the forms of the surrounding reality (mainly the animal world). Madeleine art expressed a deeper understanding and perception of life. Remarkable wall paintings of this time were found from the 80s - 90s. 19th century in the caves of southern France (Font de Gome, Lascaux, Montignac, Combarelle, cave of the Three Brothers, Nio, etc.) and northern Spain (Altamira cave). It is possible that contour drawings of animals belong to the Paleolithic, though more primitive in character, found in Siberia on the banks of the Lena near the village of Shishkino. Along with painting, usually executed in red, yellow and black colors, among the works of Madeleine art there are drawings carved on stone, bone and horn, bas-relief images, and sometimes round sculpture. Hunting played an extremely important role in the life of the primitive tribal community, and therefore the images of animals occupied such a significant place in art. Among them you can see a variety of European animals of that time: bison, reindeer and red deer, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, cave lion, bear, wild pig, etc.; less common are various birds, fish and snakes. Plants were rarely depicted.

The image of the beast in the works of primitive people of the Madeleine time, in comparison with the previous period, acquired much more concrete and vitally truthful features. Primitive art has now come to a clear understanding of the structure and shape of the body, to the ability to correctly convey not only proportions, but also the movement of animals, fast running, strong turns and foreshortenings.

Remarkable liveliness and great persuasiveness in the transfer of movement are distinguished, for example, by a drawing scratched on a bone found in the grotto of Lorte (France), which depicts deer crossing a river (ill. 2 a). The artist with great observation conveyed the movement, managed to express a sense of alertness in the deer's head turned back. The river is designated by him conditionally, only by the image of salmon swimming between the legs of deer.

Perfectly convey the character of animals, the originality of their habits, the expressiveness of movements and such first-class monuments as engraved on stone drawings of a bison and a deer from the Upper Logerie (France), a mammoth and a bear from the Combarelle cave and many others.

The famous cave paintings of France and Spain are distinguished by the greatest artistic perfection among the monuments of art of the Madeleine period.

The most ancient here are contour drawings depicting the profile of an animal in red or black paint. Following the contour drawing, the shading of the body surface appeared with separate lines that convey wool. In the future, the figures began to be completely painted over with one paint with attempts at volumetric modeling. The pinnacle of Paleolithic painting is the depiction of animals, made in two or three colors with varying degrees of tonal saturation. In these large (about 1.5 m) figures, protrusions and uneven rocks are often used.

Everyday observations of the beast, the study of its habits helped primitive artists create amazingly vivid works of art. Accuracy of observation and masterful transmission of characteristic movements and poses, a clear clarity of drawing, the ability to convey the originality of the appearance and state of the animal - all this marks the best of the monuments of Madeleine painting. Such are the images of wounded bison in the Altamira cave (ill. 5), a roaring bison in the same cave (ill. 6), a reindeer grazing, slow and calm, in the Font de Gomes cave (ill. 7), inimitable in the power of the truth of life (ill. 7), running boar (in Altamira).

Elephant. Castillo Cave

In the paintings of the caves of the Madeleine time, there are mostly single images of animals. They are very truthful, but most often they are not connected in any way with one another. Sometimes, ignoring the image already made earlier, another one was performed directly on it; the viewer's point of view was also not taken into account, and individual images in relation to the horizontal level were in the most unexpected positions.

But already in the previous time, as the reliefs from Lossel testify to this, primitive people tried to convey by pictorial means some scenes of their life that were of particular importance. These beginnings of more complex solutions were further developed in the Madeleine period. On pieces of bone and horn, on stones, images appear not only of individual animals, but sometimes of a whole herd. So, for example, on a bone plate from the grotto of the City Hall in Teija (France; ill. 2 6), a drawing of a herd of deer is carved, where only the front figures of animals are highlighted, followed by a schematic representation of the rest of the herd in the form of conditional horns and straight sticks of legs, but the closing figures are again completely transferred. Another character is the image of a group of deer on a stone from Limeil (France; ill. 36), where the artist conveyed the characteristics and habits of each deer. Whether the artist’s goal here was to depict a herd, or these are simply images of separate figures not connected to each other, the opinions of scientists differ.

People are not depicted in the Madeleine murals, with the exception of the rarest cases (a drawing on a piece of horn from the Upper Lodge or on the wall of the cave of the Three Brothers), where not only animals are shown, but also people disguised as animals for a ritual dance or hunting.

Along with the development of paintings and drawings on bone and stone in the Madeleine period, there was a further development of sculpture from stone, bone and clay, and also, possibly, from wood. And in sculpture, depicting animals, primitive people achieved great skill.

One of the remarkable examples of sculpture of the Madeleine time is a horse’s head made of bone (ill. Za) found in the Maye d’Azil cave (France). The proportions of a short horse’s head are built with great truthfulness, jerky movement is clearly felt, notches are perfectly used to convey wool.

Also extremely interesting are the images of bison, bears, lions and horses molded from clay, discovered in the depths of the caves of the northern Pyrenees (Tuc d "Auduber and Montespan caves). These sculptures, made with great similarity, sometimes even, apparently, were covered with skins and had no sculpted, but attached real heads (the figure of a bear cub from the Montespan cave).

Along with the round sculpture, images of animals in relief were also performed at that time. An example is the sculptural frieze made of individual stones on the site of the Le Roque refuge (France). The carved figures of horses, bison, goats, a man with a mask on his head, apparently, as well as similar pictorial and graphic images, were created for the success of hunting wild animals. The magical meaning of some monuments of primitive art may also be indicated by images of spears and darts stuck into animal figures, flying stones, wounds on the body, etc. (for example, the image of a bison in the cave of Nio, a bear in the cave of the Three Brothers, etc.). With the help of such techniques, primitive man hoped to more easily master the beast, to bring him under the blows of his weapon.

New stage development of primitive art, reflecting deep changes in human ideas about the surrounding reality, is associated with the periods of the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Eneolithic (Copper Age). From the appropriation of the finished products of nature, primitive society at this time passes to more complex forms of labor.

Along with hunting and fishing, which continued to retain their importance, especially for forested and comparatively cold climate countries, agriculture and cattle breeding began to acquire more and more importance. It is quite natural that now that man has begun to remake nature for his own purposes, he has also entered into a much more complex relationship with the life around him.

This time is associated with the invention of bows and arrows, then - pottery, as well as the emergence of new types and improvement in the technique of making stone tools. Later, along with the dominant stone tools, individual objects made of metal (mainly copper) appeared.

At this time, man mastered more and more diverse building materials, learned, applying himself to various conditions, to build new types of dwellings. The improvement of the construction business prepared the way for the formation of architecture as an art.

In the northern and middle forest zone of Europe, along with the settlements that continued to exist, settlements began to appear from dugouts, built on a deck of poles on the shores of lakes. As a rule, the settlements of this era in the forest belt (settlements) did not have protective fortifications. On the lakes and swamps of central Europe, as well as in the Urals, there were so-called pile settlements, which were groups of huts of fishing tribes built on a log platform resting on piles driven into the bottom of a lake or swamp (for example, a pile settlement near Robengausen in Switzerland or Gorbunovsky peat bog in the Urals). The walls of rectangular huts were usually also log or wicker from branches with clay coating. Piled settlements were connected with the shore by footbridges or with the help of boats and rafts.

Along the middle and lower reaches of the Dnieper, along the Dniester and in western Ukraine in the 3rd - 2nd millennium BC. the so-called Tripoli culture, characteristic of the Eneolithic period, was widespread. The main occupations of the population here were agriculture and cattle breeding. A feature of the layout of Trypillia settlements (ancestral villages) was the arrangement of houses in concentric circles or ovals. The entrances faced the center of the settlement, where there was an open space that served as a corral for cattle (a settlement near the village of Khalepye, near Kyiv, etc.). Rectangular houses with a floor made of clay tiles had rectangular doors and round windows, as can be seen from the surviving clay models of Trypillia dwellings; the walls were made of wattle covered with clay and decorated with paintings inside; in the middle there was sometimes a cruciform altar made of clay, decorated with ornaments.

From a very early time, the agricultural and pastoral tribes in Western and Central Asia, Transcaucasia, and Iran began to build structures from sun-dried brick (raw). Hills have come down to us, formed from the remains of clay buildings (Anau hill in Central Asia, Shresh-blur in Armenia, etc.), rectangular or round in plan.

Very big changes in this period occurred in the visual arts. The gradually becoming more complex ideas of man about the nature around him forced him to seek explanations for the connection of phenomena. The direct brightness of the perception of Paleolithic time was lost, but at the same time, the primitive man of this new era learned to more deeply perceive reality in its interrelationships and diversity. In art, the schematization of images and at the same time narrative complexity is growing, leading to attempts to convey an action, an event. The examples of the new art are the overwhelmingly one-color (black or white) rock paintings full of rapid movement in Valtorta in Spain, in northern and southern Africa, recently discovered schematic hunting scenes in Uzbekistan (in the Zaraut-say gorge), as well as those found in many in some places, drawings carved on rocks, known as petroglyphs (stone writing). Along with the depiction of animals in the art of that time, the depiction of people in scenes of hunting or military clashes began to play an increasingly important role. The activity of people, the collective of ancient hunters, is now becoming the central theme of art. New tasks required new forms of artistic solution - a more developed composition, plot subordination of individual figures, some still rather primitive methods of transferring space.

Many so-called petroglyphs have been found on the rocks in Karelia, along the shores of the White Sea and Lake Onega. In a very conditional form, they tell about the hunt of the ancient inhabitants of the North for various animals and birds. Karelian petroglyphs belong to different eras; the most ancient of them, apparently, belong to the 2nd millennium BC. Although the technique of carving on hard stone left its mark on the nature of these drawings, which usually give only very schematic silhouettes of people, animals and objects, but, apparently, the goal of the artists of this time was only an extremely simplified transfer of some of the most common features. Individual figures are in most cases combined into complex compositions, and this compositional complexity distinguishes petroglyphs from artistic creations Paleolithic.

A very important new phenomenon in the art of the period under review was the extensive development of ornamentation. In geometric patterns covering clay vessels and other objects, the skills of constructing a rhythmic, ordered ornamental composition were born and developed, and at the same time, a special area of ​​artistic activity arose - applied art. Separate archaeological finds, as well as ethnographic data, allow us to assert that labor activity played a decisive role in the origin of the ornament. The assumptions that some types and types of ornament were basically associated with a conditional schematic transfer of the phenomena of reality are not without foundation. At the same time, the ornament on some types of clay vessels originally appeared as traces of wickerwork smeared with clay. Subsequently, this natural ornament was replaced by an artificially applied one, and a certain effect was attributed to it (for example, it was believed that it gives strength to the made vessel).

Trypillian vessels can serve as an example of ornamented pottery. A wide variety of forms are found here: large and wide flat-bottomed jugs with a narrow neck, deep bowls, double vessels similar in shape to binoculars. There are vessels with scratched and one-color ornaments made with black or red paint. The most common and artistically interesting are items with multi-color painting in white, black and red paint. The ornament here covers the entire surface with parallel colored stripes, a double helix running around the entire vessel, concentric circles, etc. (ill. 8a). Sometimes, along with the ornament, there are also highly schematized images of people and various animals or fantastic creatures.

It can be assumed that the ornaments of Trypillia vessels were associated with agricultural and pastoral labor, perhaps with the veneration of the sun and water as forces that help the success of this work. This is also confirmed by the fact that multi-colored ornaments on vessels similar to Trypillia (the so-called painted pottery) were found among the agricultural tribes of that time in a wide area from the Mediterranean, Western Asia and Iran up to China (see the relevant chapters for more on this).

In the Trypillia settlements, clay figurines of people and animals were common, which are also widely found in other places (in Asia Minor, Transcaucasia, Iran, etc.). Among the Trypillia finds, schematized female figurines predominate, which were present in almost every dwelling (ill. 86). Sculpted from clay, sometimes covered with paintings, the figurines depict a standing or sitting naked female figure with flowing hair and a hooked nose. In contrast to the Paleolithic figurines from Trypillia, the proportions and shapes of the body are much more conditionally conveyed. These figurines were possibly associated with the cult of the goddess of the earth.

The culture of hunters and fishermen who inhabited the Urals and Siberia clearly differed from the Trypillia culture of farmers. In the Gorbunovsky peat bog in the Urals, in the thickness of peat, the remains of a pile structure of the end of the 2nd - beginning of the 1st millennium BC, which, apparently, was some kind of cult center, were found. Peat quite well preserved the figures of anthropomorphic idols carved from wood and the remains of the gifts they brought: wooden and earthenware, weapons, implements, etc.

Wooden vessels and spoons in the form of swans, geese, marsh hens are distinguished by special expressiveness and vital truthfulness (ill. 9 b). In the bend of the neck, in the laconic but surprisingly faithful rendering of the head and beak, in the shape of the vessel itself, which reproduces the body of a bird, the carver-artist was able to show with great grace the characteristic features of each of the birds. Along with these monuments, outstanding in their vital brightness, in the Ural peat bogs, slightly inferior wooden heads of an elk (ill. 11 6) and a bear, which probably served as tool handles, as well as statuettes of an elk, were found. These images of animals and birds differ from the Paleolithic monuments and, on the contrary, approach a number of Neolithic monuments (such as polished stone axes with animal heads) not only by the simplicity of the form that preserves the truthfulness of life, but also organic connection sculptures with an object having a utilitarian purpose.

Schematically carved anthropomorphic idols sharply differ from such images of animals. The striking differences between the primitive interpretation of the human figure and the very lively rendering of animals should not be attributed only to the greater or lesser talent of the performer, but must be connected with the cult purpose of such images (ill. 11 a). By this time, the connections of art with primitive religion - animism (the spiritualization of the forces of nature), the cult of ancestors and other forms of fantastic explanation of the phenomena of the surrounding life, which imposed on artistic creativity your seal.

The last stage in the history of primitive society is characterized by a number of new phenomena in art. The further development of production, the introduction of new forms of economy and new metal tools of labor slowly but profoundly changed man's attitude to the reality around him.

The main social unit at this time was the tribe, uniting several clans. The main branch of the economy among a number of tribes is first taming, and then raising and caring for livestock.

Shepherd tribes stand out from other tribes. According to F. Engels, "the first major social division of labor" is taking place, for the first time making regular exchange possible and laying the foundations for property stratification both within the tribe and between individual tribes. Mankind has come to the last stage in the development of the primitive communal system, to a patriarchal tribal society. Of great importance among the new tools of labor was the loom and, in particular, metal tools (tools made of copper, bronze, and, finally, iron), which became widespread in connection with the invention of smelting ore. The diversity and improvement of production led to the fact that all production processes could no longer, as before, be carried out by one person and required a certain specialization.

"A second major division of labor took place: handicraft separated from agriculture," points out F. Engels.

When in the valleys of large rivers - the Nile, the Euphrates and the Tigris, the Indus, the Yellow River - in the 4th - 3rd millennia BC. the first slave-owning states arose, then the social and cultural life of these states became a source of strong influence on the neighboring tribes, who still lived in the conditions of a primitive communal system. This introduced special features into the culture and art of the tribes that existed simultaneously with the state formations of a class society.

By the end of the existence of primitive society, a new, previously unseen type of architectural structures- fortresses. "It is not for nothing that formidable walls rise around the new fortified cities: in their ditches a grave gapes tribal system, and their towers already rest against civilization "(F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1952, p. 170). Especially characteristic are the so-called Cyclopean fortresses, the walls of which were made up of huge roughly hewn blocks of stone. Cyclopean fortresses survived in in many places in Europe (France, Sardinia, the Iberian and Balkan Peninsulas, etc.), as well as in Transcaucasia. fences and ditches.

Deer hunting. Valtorta

Along with defensive structures in the later stages of the development of primitive society, structures of a completely different kind, the so-called megalithic (that is, built from huge stones) buildings - menhirs, dolmens, cromlechs, were widely developed. Whole alleys of upright big stones- menhirs - are found in Transcaucasia and in Western Europe along the Mediterranean coast and Atlantic Ocean(for example, the famous alley of the Metzgir at Karnak in Brittany; ill. 12a). Dolmens are widespread in Western Europe, North Africa, Iran, India, the Crimea and the Caucasus; they are tombs built of huge stones placed upright, covered on top with one or two stone slabs (ill. 12 6). Structures of this nature are sometimes located inside burial mounds - for example, a dolmen in a mound near the village of Novosvobodnaya (in the Kuban), which has two chambers - one for burial, the other, apparently, for religious ceremonies.

The most complex megalithic structures are cromlechs. Examples of this type of structure are the shrines of Avebury and Stonehenge in southern England (ill. 13). At Stonehenge, a central platform with a large stone slab (perhaps serving as an altar) is surrounded by four concentric rows of vertically placed stones. The inner ring (in the form of an open oval) and the third from the middle consisted of relatively small menhirs. The second and fourth, outer, circles are formed by rows of evenly spaced giant boulders. Thirty stone pillars of the outer circle (of which sixteen still stand) are connected horizontally by stone beams lying on them; in the same way, ten huge carefully hewn stones of the second circle from the middle, rising 7 m above the surrounding plain north of the city of Salisbury, are connected in pairs. The crossbars (weighing almost 7 tons) were raised up with the help of earthen embankments, traces of which have been preserved. The unusually large size of the structure, the importation from afar of huge blocks of blue stone (for the outer fence of Stonehenge), orientation to the summer solstice, traces of sacrifices. - everything suggests that this building was given great importance. Most likely it was a sanctuary of the sun. The architectural form of Stonehenge contains a thoughtful solution to a complex spatial problem. Here there is a clear layout, clearly stands out and defines the role of bearing and carried parts. Stonehenge, like other megalithic structures, undoubtedly already had the goal of artistic impact on the audience, forcing them to bow and revere the grandiose grandeur of the solar cult so impressively and solemnly presented.

Megalithic buildings were erected by the labor of the entire primitive community. However, their construction undoubtedly required a rather complex social organization. Some other architectural monuments of the Bronze Age testify to the impending disintegration of the once united primitive society, such as, for example, special burial structures - large chambers arranged in the burial mounds of tribal leaders. The oldest monuments of this kind are the so-called royal tombs of Egypt in Negad (4th millennium BC). The later burials of tribal leaders include, for example, the Maikop mound in the northern Caucasus (late 3rd - early 2nd millennium BC); the bottom of his chamber, sunk into the ground by more than 1.5 m, was lined with pebbles and covered with mats, and the walls were lined with wood.

Stonehenge. Reconstruction

The grave was divided by wooden partitions into three parts: in the largest, southern part, there was the burial of the leader of the tribe, and in the others, apparently, the burial of his wives (and, perhaps, even slaves). From above, the grave was covered with wooden flooring and covered with earth. This type of burial structures appeared in the 2nd millennium BC. and in Georgia (Trialeti) and in Armenia.

Less significant during this period were the successes of sculpture. Actually, menhirs - vertically standing single stones - were not so much architectural structures as distant predecessors of later monuments of monumental sculpture. Found in many places on the globe, such monuments, in all likelihood, were associated with the cult of the dead or with the cult of ancestors. Roughly carved stone menhir-shaped statues, depicting a man, mostly a woman, in an extremely schematic way, are common in France and some other countries of Western Europe, in the Crimea, etc.

To the same type of monumental stone sculpture also include stone sculptures common in the Minusinsk Basin (southern Siberia), which are steles, in the lower part or in the middle of which a human face turned to face is depicted in low relief or graphic carving. Human features are combined in these images with animal features and symbolic ornamental motifs. Probably, these steles represent the personifications of tribal ancestors. Some of these steles end with the head of an animal (camel, ram), combining animal and human appearance in one image.

Artistic crafts were further developed during this period.

Among the items found in the burial in the Maykop kurgan, decorations made of gold for the funeral or front canopy stand out: figurines of bulls from the lower ends of the racks (ill. 10 b, c), plaques in the form of lions and bulls, which, apparently, were located on the cloth in four rows and formed a frieze-like composition; their identical appearance and the same direction of movement created the monotony of the compositional system, so common in the art of the states of the Ancient East and in this case, apparently, influenced the Maikop masters. Similar to these gold plaques are the depictions of animals on silver Maykop vessels, one of which depicts animals against a mountain landscape (ill. 10a). The organic inclusion in the composition of landscape elements - mountains, trees, rivers and lakes - is evidence of the emergence and development in art of new features unfamiliar to the previous period.

Remarkable examples of the artistic craft of this period include bronze knives with sculpted figures of animals on the handle, found in the Gorky region, in the Urals, in southern Siberia, in China. The figurines, and sometimes only the heads of animals on these knives, with all the simplification, seem expressive and lively. Like the Minusinsk steles, these things, connected in their origin and with art Ancient China and with the local traditions of the culture of the most ancient population of Siberia, played a significant role in the formation of the "animal style" (that is, ornamental motifs with figures of animals) in the art of ancient Siberia and Altai.

The cult of the sky and the sun is reflected in some objects of artistic crafts, decorated with sculpture, - for example, in the bronze "solar chariot" from Trundholm: a horse (rather schematically depicted) is carrying a large gilded disk on a wagon, probably denoting the sun. All the artist's attention was apparently absorbed by the rich linear-geometric ornamentation of the disk.

In Western Europe, late forms of primitive art lingered for a long time. Such, for example, are the monuments of the so-called Hallstadt period (10 - 5 centuries BC): clay vessels covered with geometric ornamental painting, with small schematic sculptural figures of people, horses, birds; bronze vessels in the form of buckets (situles), covered with several belts of very conditionally rendered everyday and military scenes, such as, for example, situla from Vach. The art of primitive society in the late period of its development came close to developing a plot composition that reflects mythological ideas and the real life of people .

But the real development and deepening of this most important task of art became possible only in a class, slave-owning society. At different times, the process of disintegration of primitive communal relations among a significant part of the tribes and peoples of southern Europe, Asia, North Africa led to the formation of a number of states, and although in large areas in the more northern regions of Europe and Asia the primitive communal system was preserved for many centuries , but also the social relations and culture of such tribes (Scythians, Sarmatians, Gauls, Germans, Slavs) were strongly influenced by the culture of slave-owning societies.

The discovery of Paleolithic art, represented mainly by rock paintings in Western Europe, was a real sensation in its time. Then in the middle of the 19th century, no art older than ancient Egyptian or Celtic was known, so it was assumed that any previous forms that could still be discovered would inevitably be much more primitive. It was not easy to believe that in the mists of time - from ten to thirty thousand years ago - in Europe there was an art worthy of admiration. Drawings, engravings, various figurines testify that primitive hunters were not as primitive as they seemed before. These contemporaries of mammoths and woolly rhinos rose to an artistic level that remained unattainable for subsequent generations of people for many millennia.

The first drawings were discovered over 120 years ago, but only at the beginning of our century were they comprehended as belonging to the Paleolithic era.

Monuments of primitive art

Most of the most ancient paintings were found in Europe (from Spain to the Urals). For obvious reasons, it is well preserved on the walls of abandoned caves, the entrances to which turned out to be tightly blocked up millennia ago. For thousands of years, nature itself maintained the same temperature and humidity in them. Therefore, not only wall paintings are well preserved, but also many other evidence of human activity, including clear footprints of bare feet of adults and, which is especially impressive, of children on the damp floor of some caves.

In terms of saturation with cave painting, the provinces of Dordogne, Ariège and the Hautes-Pyrenees in France, as well as the Spanish provinces of Cantabria and Asturias adjacent to the Pyrenees from the southwest, are especially distinguished. In the literature, the generalized name of these regions is "Franco-Cantabria". Less "dense" monuments of Paleolithic art are located on the French and Italian Riviera and on the island of Sicily. Two caves with paintings were discovered on the island of Sicily, two caves with paintings were discovered in the Southern Urals. Most of these caves and grottoes were open to science and became objects of special study. For a long time it was believed that the art of the Paleolithic era was an exclusively European or Eurasian phenomenon, and that there were no such monuments on other continents. A. Breuil even tried to substantiate this exclusivity of the proto-European culture. Later, in the 60s and 70s. it became clear that this was not the case. In Australia, on the Arnhem Land peninsula and elsewhere, images of kangaroos and handprints have been found that are over 12,000 years old. In South Africa, finds in the grotto of Apollo are especially interesting. Here, in 1969, in the layer between the Mousterian and the Upper Paleolithic, two palm-sized painted stone tiles were found. One of them was split into two fragments. On one of the tiles, the image of a rhinoceros was applied with black paint, on the other - some kind of ungulate animal. Their age is dated between 28 and 26 thousand years ago. Here, in South Africa, in the Lion's Cave, the oldest known ocher mining site was found, about 43.200 years old. Presumably, some ancient paintings in Siberia, southern Anatolia and northern China are attributed to the Upper Paleolithic, but there are no more accurate datings of these images yet.

The current data on the distribution of cave painting reflect no more than the degree of its preservation and study. The rarity of such finds in the space between Franco-Cantabria and the Urals is more likely due to natural conditions and the heterogeneous study of territories where there are caves than to any other reasons. In the study of primitive art, the process of "initial accumulation" of data is still far from complete, not only from sufficient completeness. Moreover, it is far from easy to determine the volume of this "sufficiency". Even in the south of France, where regular and large-scale searches have been going on for more than a hundred years in relatively small regions, unexpected discoveries happen. In the area most saturated with monuments of cave painting, seemingly well-trodden up and down in the days of Abbe A. Breuil and his first students, during the period from 1984 to 1994. 21 previously unknown caves with paintings were discovered. Among them are such as Koske and Chauvet, which, in antiquity, richness and diversity, are not inferior to the world-famous murals of Altamira, Lascaux, and others, and Chauvet, perhaps, now occupies the first place among them. And no one can exclude that tomorrow a cave with even more diverse, perfect and more ancient painting will not be discovered.

As of 1994, more than 300 caves, grottoes or canopies are known in Europe with images that undoubtedly belong to the Upper Paleolithic era. Of these, in France - 150, in Spain - 125, in Portugal - 3, in Italy - 21, in Yugoslavia - 1, in Romania - 1, in Germany - 2, in Russia - 2. In parking lots, in caves and randomly found an incalculable number of small plastic items. In Russia, their number has already exceeded 150 (the most eastern ones are in the Baikal region).

Features of primitive art

The oldest surviving works of art were created about sixty thousand years ago. At that time, people did not yet know metal, and tools were made from stone; hence the name of the era - the stone age. Stone Age people gave an artistic appearance to everyday items - stone tools and clay vessels, although there was no practical need for this. Why did they do this? We can only speculate about this. One of the reasons for the emergence of art is considered to be the human need for beauty and the joy of creativity, the other is the beliefs of that time. Beautiful monuments of the Stone Age are associated with beliefs - painted with paints, as well as images engraved on stone, which covered the walls and ceilings of underground caves - cave paintings. People of that time believed in magic: they believed that with the help of paintings and other images, one could influence nature. It was believed, for example, that it was necessary to hit a drawn animal with an arrow or spear in order to ensure the success of a real hunt.

Placement of drawings and engravings Rock paintings are most often placed in accessible places, at a height of 1.5-2 meters. They are found both on cave ceilings and vertical walls. It happens to find them in hard-to-reach places, in exceptional cases even where the artist probably could not reach without outside help or without a special design. There are also known drawings placed on the ceiling, on a grotto or cave tunnel hanging so low that it is impossible to view the entire image at once, as is customary to do today. But for the primitive artist, the overall aesthetic effect was not a first-order task. Wanting at all costs to place the image above the level that was achievable with natural possibilities, the artist had to resort to the help of a simple ladder or a stone nailed to a rock.

Manner and perspective Drawings and engravings on walls often differ in their manner of execution. The mutual proportions of the individual depicted animals are usually not respected. Among such animals as a mountain goat, a lion, etc., mammoths and bison were drawn in the same size. Often in one place the engravings are arbitrarily superimposed on one another. Since the proportions between the size of individual animals were not respected, they could not be depicted according to the laws of perspective. Our spatial vision of the world requires that the more distant animal be in the picture correspondingly smaller than the closer one, but the Paleolithic artist, without bothering with such "details", most likely painted each figure separately. His perspective vision (or rather, complete absence such) is manifested in the image of each object.

At the first acquaintance with Paleolithic art, the frequent superposition of images and the lack of composition immediately catches the eye. However, some images and groups are so impressive that one cannot help thinking that a primitive artist conceived and painted them as a whole. Even if a spatial or planar concept existed in Paleolithic art, it was fundamentally different from our current ideas.

Significant differences are also noted in the sequence of execution of individual parts of the body. In the understanding of a European, a human or animal body is a system consisting of parts of unequal significance, and Stone Age artists prefer a different order. In some caves, archaeologists have found images that lack the head as a minor detail.

Movement in rock art. Upon a closer examination of the monuments of Paleolithic art, we will be surprised to find that primitive man depicted movement much more often than it might seem at first glance. In the most ancient drawings and engravings, movement is expressed by the position of the legs, the tilt of the body or the turn of the head. There are almost no moving figures. The simple contours of an animal with crossed legs give us an example of such a movement. In almost all cases, when the Paleolithic artist tried to convey the four limbs of animals, he saw them in motion. The transmission of movement was relatively common for the Paleolithic artist.

Some images of animals are so perfect that some scientists are trying to determine from them not only the species, but also the subspecies of the animal. Drawings and engravings of horses are very numerous in the Paleolithic. But the favorite subject of Paleolithic art is bison. Numerous images of wild aurochs, mammoths and rhinos have also been found. The image of a reindeer is less common. Unique motifs include fish, snakes, some bird and insect species, and plant motifs.

The exact time of the creation of cave paintings has not yet been established. The most beautiful of them were created, according to scientists, about twenty to ten thousand years ago. At that time, a thick layer of ice covered most of Europe; only the southern part of the mainland remained habitable. The glacier slowly receded, and behind it the primitive hunters moved north. It can be assumed that in the most difficult conditions of that time, all human strength went to the fight against hunger, cold and predatory animals. Nevertheless, he created magnificent paintings. Dozens of large animals are depicted on the walls of the caves, which they already knew how to hunt; among them there were also those that would be tamed by man - bulls, horses, reindeer and others. Cave paintings have preserved the appearance of such animals that later completely died out: mammoths and cave bears. Primitive artists knew very well the animals on which the very existence of people depended. With a light and flexible line, they conveyed the poses and movements of the beast. Colorful chords - black, red, white, yellow - make a charming impression. Mineral dyes, mixed with water, animal fat and plant sap, made the color of the cave paintings especially bright. To create such great and perfect works then, as now, one had to learn. It is possible that the pebbles with images of animals scratched on them found in the caves were student works of the "art schools" of the Stone Age.

Along with cave paintings and drawings, various sculptures were made from bone and stone at that time. They were made with primitive tools, and this work required exceptional patience. The creation of statues, no doubt, was also associated with primitive beliefs.

Most known rock engravings, especially those with deep cuts, required the use of coarse cutting tools. For engravings of the Middle and Late Paleolithic, a more subtle study is typical. Their contours are conveyed, as a rule, by several shallow lines. Engravings combined with painting and engravings on bones, tusks, horns or stone tiles were made in the same technique. Some details are often shaded, such as the mane, fur on the belly of the animal, etc. In terms of age, this technique is apparently younger than simple contour engraving; she uses the methods inherent in graphic drawing rather than engraving or sculpture. Less common are images engraved with a finger or a stick on clay, most often on the floor of a cave. But most of them have not survived to our time because they are less durable than rock engravings. The man did not take advantage of the plastic properties of clay, he did not model bison, but he made the entire sculpture in the same technique that is used when working on stone.

One of the simplest and most easily performed techniques is engraving with a finger or a stick on clay, or drawing on a rock wall with a finger covered with colored clay. This technique is considered the oldest. Sometimes these curls and lines, in their unsystematic nature, resemble the clumsy scribbles of a child, at other times we see a clear image - for example, a fish or a buffalo, skillfully engraved with some sharp object on a floor with clay deposits. In monumental rock art, a combined technique of painting and engraving is sometimes encountered.

For engravings, various mineral dyes were also often used. Yellow, red and brown paints were usually prepared from ocher, black and dark brown - from manganese oxide. White paint it was produced from kaolin, various shades of yellow-red color - from lemonite and hemotite, charcoal gave black. The astringent in most cases was water, rarely fat. Separate finds of dishes from under paints are known. It is possible that red paint was then used to paint the body for ritual purposes. In the Late Paleolithic layers, reserves of powdered dyes or lumps of dyes were also found, which were used like pencils.

The Stone Age was followed by the Bronze Age (it got its name from the then widespread alloy of metals - bronze). The Bronze Age began in Western Europe relatively late, about four thousand years ago. Bronze was much easier to work than stone and could be molded and polished. Therefore, in the Bronze Age, all kinds of household items were made, richly decorated with ornaments and of high artistic value. Ornamental decorations consisted mostly of circles, spirals, wavy lines and similar motifs. Particular attention was paid to jewelry - they were large in size and immediately caught the eye.

The Bronze Age also includes peculiar, huge structures, which also owe their appearance to primitive beliefs. On the Brittany Peninsula in France, fields of so-called menhirs stretched for miles. In the language of the Celts, the later inhabitants of the peninsula, the name of these stone pillars several meters high means "long stone". Such groups are called cromlechs. Other structures have been preserved - dolmens, which originally served for burials: walls made of huge stone slabs were covered with a roof made of the same monolithic stone block. Numerous menhirs and dolmens were located in places that were considered sacred.

Conclusion

Speaking of primitive art, we voluntarily or involuntarily create some illusion of equality between it and the art of subsequent eras, up to the present. The formulations familiar to popular art criticism are widely used when considering ancient images ("aesthetic norms and principles", "ideological content", "reflection of life", "composition", "sense of beauty", etc.), but they lead to away from understanding the specifics of primitive art.

If now art is a special area of ​​culture, the boundaries and specialization of which are fully realized by both the creators and the "users" of art, then the deeper into antiquity, the more blurred these ideas were. In the mind of primitive man, art was not distinguished into any particular area of ​​activity.

The ability to create images (as now) had rare people. Some supernatural properties were attributed to them, like later shamans. It probably put them in special conditions among their relatives. The exact details of these conditions can only be guessed at.

The process of public awareness of the independent role of art and its various directions began only in late antiquity, dragged on for several centuries and ended no earlier than the Renaissance. Therefore, one can speak of primitive "creativity" only in an allegorical sense. The entire spiritual life of primitive people took place in a single cultural environment, not divided into separate spheres. It is naive to believe that in primitive art there were artists and spectators, like ours, or that then all people were amateur artists and spectators at the same time (something like our amateur art). The idea of ​​leisure, which ancient people allegedly filled with various arts, is also incorrect. Leisure in our understanding (as time free from "service") they simply did not have, since their life was not divided into work and "non-work". If at the end of the Upper Paleolithic era, a primitive man, in rare hours, not busy with a tense struggle for existence, had the opportunity to look around and look at the sky, then this time was filled with ritual and other actions that were not idle, but aimed at well-being kind and himself.

Literature:

Section IV. Early forms beliefs and the emergence of religion

As is well known, the primitive-communal epoch is considered to be the first step in proper human history. During this period, the formation of man as a special biological species is completed. At the turn of the early and late Paleolithic, the zoological, herd organization gradually turns into a tribal structure, which is already the initial human collective. Further evolution leads to the formation of a community-clan way of life and the development of various ways of social life.

According to the ideas existing in historical science, chronologically, this era begins in the late (upper) Paleolithic and covers a period of time up to the beginning of the Neolithic. In the "social space" it corresponds to the movement of mankind from the first forms of social organization (clan) to the emergence of a primitive neighborhood community.

For primitiveness, a high degree of combination of human existence with everything that happens in the surrounding nature is especially characteristic. Relationships to earth and sky, climatic changes, water and fire, flora and fauna in the conditions of an appropriating (collective-hunting) economy were not only objectively necessary factors of existence, but also constituted the direct content of the life process.

The inseparability of the existence of man and nature, obviously, should have been expressed in the identification of both already at the level of "living contemplation". The representations arising on the basis of the received sensations fixed and stored the impression of sensory perception, and thought and feeling acted as something integral, inseparable from each other. It is quite possible that the endowment of the mental image with the properties of a natural phenomenon perceived through the senses could be the result. Such a "fusion" of nature and its sensory-figurative reflection expresses the qualitative originality of primitive consciousness.

Primitiveness becomes characterized by such features of the archaic worldview as the identification of human existence with natural and the overwhelming predominance of collective ideas in individual thinking. In unity, they form a specific state of the psyche, which is denoted by the concept of primitive syncretism. The content of this type of mental activity lies in the undifferentiated perception of nature, human life (in its communal-clan quality) and the sensory-figurative picture of the world. Ancient people are so included in their environment that they think themselves involved in absolutely everything, without standing out from the world, especially without opposing themselves to it. The primitive integrity of being corresponds to a primitive-holistic consciousness, not divided into special forms, for which, to put it simply, "everything is everything."

Such an interpretation of the archaic stage of consciousness can serve as a methodological key to understanding the origins, content and role of early beliefs and rituals in primitive society.

It can be assumed that the most common version of primitive beliefs was the transfer of human, intra-clan relations, ideas and experiences to the processes and elements of nature. Simultaneously and inseparably with this, there was a "reverse" process of transfer: of natural properties into the area of ​​life of the human community.

Thus, the world appeared in the primitive consciousness not only as integral, when any phenomenon and the people themselves are "woven" into the fabric of a generalized being, but also possessing vital qualities, humanized. Since the human in this case is communal and tribal, to the extent that everything covered by the perception of an ancient person is identified with the familiar and familiar tribal way of life.

In a number of archaic beliefs, the first in importance is the attitude to nature as a living being with the same properties as man. In religious studies, there is a point of view according to which the early stage of such beliefs, animatism (from Latin animatus - animated), assumed the permeation of the world with a universal, ubiquitous, but impersonal, life-giving force.

Gradually, with the development of subject-practical activity, the image of the life-giving principle was differentiated. It began to correlate already with specific phenomena of nature and human life, with those aspects of them, the real development of which was beyond the reach. Each being or sensually perceived object, if necessary, was dualized, endowed with a kind of double. They could be represented in a bodily or some other material form (breath, blood, shadow, reflection in water, etc.). At the same time, they were essentially devoid of materiality and were conceived as ideal entities. The contradiction between ideality and objectivity was overcome thanks to the syncretism of primitive thinking: any object of the material world could at the same time act both in real and in incorporeal, a kind of spiritualistic quality. In the end, the double could also lead an independent life, leaving the person, for example, during sleep or in the event of death.

The general concept that has entered the scientific circulation to refer to such beliefs has become the term animism. Its content is quite extensive. First of all, it is associated with the belief in the existence of souls, that is, supersensible formations inherent in objects and natural phenomena, as well as in man.

Souls could be taken out of the bounds of a limited objective state. These are the so-called spirits. In this case, the possibilities of ideal entities increased dramatically: they could move freely in the material world, inhabit any object and acquire the ability to influence various items, plants, animals, climate and on the people themselves.

The multiplicity of spirits implies the diversity of their habitats. They are filled with almost the entire world around man. Therefore, most of the acts of everyday life of the tribal community were performed, probably, taking into account the existing views on relations with spirits, and the consequences associated with the influence of spirits are not always favorable. Difficulties and failures, individual and collective, are understood as manifestations of the cunning of evil spirits. The way out of this situation is the search for reliable mechanisms to counteract malicious intrigues. The use of amulets, that is, objects whose presence was considered as protection from the harmful influence of evil spirits, was widespread. As a rule, these are pieces of wood, stones, bones, teeth, animal skins, etc.

Items of a similar type could also be used for the purpose of positive interaction as intermediaries. In all cases, the intermediary object served as a conductor of human needs; with its help, people actually replenished the meager arsenal of means for mastering the natural world. The ability to store, protect from troubles or bring good luck was explained by the presence of magical, miraculous power in the object or the presence of some kind of spirit in it.

Such beliefs are called the concept of fetishism ("fetish" - - an enchanted thing; the term was proposed by the Dutch traveler V. Bosman in the beginning of the 18th century).

It is known that fetishes were often the embodiment of a person's personal patrons. However, those who carried the social burden were considered more important and revered - the defenders of the entire tribal team, ensuring the survival and continuation of the family. Sometimes fetishism was associated with the cult of ancestors, in a peculiar way reinforcing the idea of ​​the continuity of generations.

A natural consequence of the fetishistic attitude of consciousness was to be the transfer of magical and miraculous properties not only to natural or specially produced objects, but also to the people themselves. Proximity to a fetish enhanced the real meaning of a person (sorcerer, elder or leader), who through his experience ensured the unity and well-being of the clan. Over time, the sacralization of the tribal elite took place, especially the leaders, who became living fetishes when they were endowed with miraculous abilities.

Perceiving nature in the images of the tribal community understandable to him, primitive man treated any natural phenomenon as more or less "kindred". The inclusion of tribal ties in the process of interaction with the spheres of the animal and plant world creates the prerequisites for the development of faith in the common origin of human beings with any animals or, which was much less common, plants.

These beliefs, called totemism, are rooted in the blood relations and living conditions of early human groups that developed at the stage of primitiveness. Insufficient reliability and rather frequent turnover of fetishes gave rise to a desire for a more stable foundation, stabilizing the vital activity of tribal structures.

The common origin and blood relationship with the totem was understood in the most direct way. People sought to become like in their behavior the habits of "totem relatives", to acquire their properties and features of appearance. At the same time, the life of the animals chosen as totems and the attitude towards them was considered from the standpoint of human communal-tribal existence.

In addition to the related status, the totem had the function of a patron, a protector. Common totemic beliefs is the fetishization of the totem.

Numerous studies of primitive culture testify that all the named forms of behavior and orientation of the archaic consciousness - animism, fetishism, totemism - are of a stage-global nature. To build them in a certain sequence according to the degree of "development" would be unlawful. As necessary moments in the development of the world, they arise, unfold in the context of a single, holistic worldview, which distinguishes primitive syncretism.

The general cultural significance of these phenomena lies in their focus on meeting the vital needs of human existence; they reflect the real, practical interests of the community-clan organization.

At the primitive stage of culture, combined forms of rituals and beliefs arose, referred to by the general concept of magic (from Greek and Latin words translated as witchcraft, sorcery, sorcery).

The magical perception of the world is based on the idea of ​​universal similarity and interconnection, which makes it possible for a person who feels "participation in everything" to influence any objects and phenomena.

Magical actions are common among all peoples of the world and are extremely diverse. In ethnography and research on the history of religion, there are many classifications and typological schemes of magical beliefs and techniques.

The most common is the division of magic into well-intentioned, salutary, performed openly and for benefit - "white", and harmful, causing damage and misfortune - "black".

The typology has a similar character, distinguishing between offensive-aggressive and defensive-preserving magic.

In the latter case, taboos play an important role - prohibitions on actions, objects and words, which are endowed with the ability to automatically cause all kinds of trouble for a person. The elimination of taboos expresses the instinctive desire of the entire community-clan collective to protect itself from contact with factors that threaten survival.

Often the types of magic are classified according to the spheres of human activity where they are somehow necessary (agricultural, fishing, hunting, healing, meteorological, love, military varieties of magic). They are aimed at the very real everyday aspects of being.

The scales of magical actions differ, which can be individual, group, mass. Magic becomes mainstream professional occupation sorcerers, shamans, priests, etc. (institutionalization of magic).

So, a feature of the being and consciousness of people of the primitive era is a kind of integrity, uniting in a complex the natural and human, sensual and speculative, material and figurative, objective and subjective.

Direct dependence on the immediate conditions of existence stimulated such a warehouse of the psyche, in which adaptation to the world should probably consist in maximum self-identification with the environment. The collective organization of life extended the identity of man and nature to the entire tribal community. As a result, the dominant position of supra-individual attitudes of consciousness is established, which have an obligatory and indisputable significance for everyone. in the best way to consolidate them in such a status could be, first of all, a reference to an unquestionable absolute authority. They become symbols of the clan - totems or other fetishized objects, up to the sacralization of the tribal top.

There are many reasons to believe that it was practical needs that were decisive for the content of primitive beliefs. In ancient beliefs, the moments of life activity necessary for the organization and preservation of the communal-clan way of life (in work and life, marital relations, hunting, and the fight against hostile collectives) were recorded.

The syncretism of consciousness determines the combination of these real relations with irrationalistic views, bringing them to interpenetration and complete merging. The word becomes identical to the deed, the sign - to the subject, ideas receive a personified appearance. The emerging ideas and images were experienced and “lived through” by a person, first of all, as reality itself.

It can be assumed that the public consciousness of the primitive tribal formation did not know the opposition of the earthly to the unearthly. There were no characters or phenomena in it that stood outside this world, in the realm of transcendental beings. This consciousness did not allow the doubling of the world. The environment was perceived in its involvement with a person, without breaking up into amenable to development and beyond control. In addition, vital needs did not allow a passive-contemplative attitude to the world to take root, directing it into an active channel and strengthening it by means of magic.

Thus, in the primitive era, a special type of consciousness is formed. There is no clear distinction between the real and the ideal in it, fantasy is inseparable from genuine events, the generalization of reality is expressed in sensually concrete images and implies their direct interaction with a person, the collective prevails over the individual and almost completely replaces it. The reproduction of this type of mental activity should have led to the emergence of "constructions" that made it possible to transfer the collective experience of ancient people in a form adequate to the primitive worldview. This form, which combines sensuality and emotionality with didacticity, and comprehensibility and accessibility of assimilation with inducement-volitional motivation for action, becomes a myth (from the Greek. Tradition, legend).

In our time, this word and its derivatives (mythical, myth-making, mythologeme, etc.) designate, sometimes unjustifiably, a wide class of phenomena: from individual fiction in some everyday situation to ideological concepts and political doctrines. But in some areas the concepts of "myth", "mythology" are necessary. For example, in science, the concept of mythology denotes the forms of social consciousness of the primitive era and the field of scientific knowledge related to myths and methods of studying them.

For the first time the phenomenon of myth appears at the archaic stage of history. For a community-clan collective, a myth is not only a story about some kind of natural-human relationship, but also an undeniable reality. In this sense, myth and the world are identical. It is quite appropriate, therefore, to define the awareness of the world in the primitive communal era as mythological consciousness.

Through the myth, some aspects of the interaction of people within the clan and the attitude towards environment. However, the absence of the basic condition for the process of cognition - the distinction between the subject and the object of cognitive activity - calls into question the epistemological function of the archaic myth. Neither material production nor nature are perceived by mythological consciousness in this period as opposed to man, therefore they are not an object of knowledge.

In an archaic myth, to explain means to describe in some images that cause absolute trust (the etiological significance of the myth). This description does not require rational activity. A sensuously concrete idea of ​​reality is enough, which, by the mere fact of its existence, is elevated to the status of reality itself. Ideas about the environment for the mythological consciousness are identical to what they reflect. The myth is able to explain the origin, structure, properties of things or phenomena, but it does this outside the logic of cause-and-effect relationships, replacing them either with a story about the emergence of an object of interest at a certain “original” time by means of “first action”, or simply referring to a precedent.

The unconditional truth of a myth for the "owner" of mythological consciousness removes the problem of separation of knowledge and faith. In an archaic myth, a generalizing image is always endowed with sensual properties and, therefore, is an integral part, obvious and reliable, of reality perceived by a person.

In their original state, animism, fetishism, totemism, magic and their various combinations reflect this general property of archaic mythological consciousness and are, in essence, its concrete incarnations.

With the expansion of the spectrum of human activity, more and more diverse natural and social material is involved in its orbit, and it is society that enters the category of the main sphere of application of efforts. The institution of private property is emerging. Structurally complex formations arise (crafts, military affairs, systems of land use and cattle breeding), which can no longer be identified with any single basis (spirit, fetish, totem) within the limits of earthly existence.

At the level of mythological representations, these processes also cause a number of evolutions. The ubiquitous animation of objects and phenomena is transformed into multifaceted generalizing images of certain areas of life. Being an extremely general expression of reality, these images are identical to it, that is, they themselves are reality, but they enter into the perception of people individualized, with specific features of appearance, character, proper names. Personified characters are increasingly acquiring an anthropomorphic appearance, endowed with quite understandable human qualities. In developed mythologies, they turn into various deities that displace and replace spirits, totemic ancestors, and various fetishes.

This state is called the term polytheism (polytheism). Usually, the transition to polytheistic beliefs accompanied the disintegration of tribal structures and the formation of early statehood.

Each deity was assigned a certain sphere of control in nature and society, a pantheon (a collection of gods) and a hierarchy of gods were formed. Myths arise that explain the origin of the gods, their genealogy and relationships within the pantheon (theogony).

Polytheism involves a rather complex system of cult actions addressed to specific gods and the pantheon as a whole. This significantly increases the importance of the priesthood, professionally wielding knowledge of the ritual.

With the development of states, the gods are increasingly assigned the role of the highest sanction of the socio-political orders established by people. The organization of earthly power is reflected in the pantheon. Stands out, in particular, the cult of the main, supreme god. The rest lose their former position up to the transformation of their functions and properties into the quality of the only god. Monotheism arises.

It should be emphasized that the former orientations of consciousness towards magical and miraculous ways of solving human problems both with polytheism and monotheism are preserved. Most beliefs and rituals still enter people's lives through the "mechanisms" of mythological consciousness. However, in general, the role of myths, their share in the public consciousness is undergoing significant changes.

Social relations in society are changing, and the person himself is changing. Mastering nature, he develops such ways of satisfying his needs that do not need to be supplemented by a magical operation.

But the most fundamental change is that people begin to perceive the world around them in a different way. Little by little, it loses its mystery and inaccessibility. Mastering the world, a person treats it as an external force. To some extent, this was a confirmation of the growing opportunities, power and relative freedom of the human community from the natural elements.

However, having stood out from nature and made it the object of their activity, people have lost their former integrity of being. In place of the feeling of unity with the entire universe comes the realization of oneself as something different from nature and opposed to it.

The gap arises not only with nature. With a new type of social organization (neighborhood community, early class relations), the way of life that was cultivated from generation to generation and determined the content of primitive consciousness is becoming a thing of the past. The connection with the clan is broken. Life is individualized, there is a distinction of one's own "I" in the environment of other human beings.

What archaic mythological consciousness understood directly and "humanized" turns out to be something external to people. It is becoming increasingly difficult to take myth literally as the true content of the life process. It is no coincidence that the allegorical tradition is born and strengthens - the interpretation of the ancient myth as a shell convenient for transferring knowledge about nature, ethical, philosophical and other ideas.

Mythology itself is moving into a new quality. It loses its universality and ceases to be the dominant form of social consciousness. There is a gradual differentiation of the "spiritual" sphere. There is an accumulation and processing of natural scientific knowledge, a philosophical and artistic understanding of the world is developing, political and legal institutions are being formed. At the same time, the formation of such an orientation in beliefs and worship is observed, which delimits the areas of the worldly (natural and human) and the sacred. The idea of ​​a special, mystical connection between the earthly and the unearthly, understood as the supernatural, that is, religion, is affirmed.

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All over the world, were banned. The system of training psychologists was seriously affected, the boundaries of the sphere of practical activity of psychologists narrowed to the limit. And yet, despite the general destructive direction of the administrative-ideological management of the development of psychology, thanks to the selfless activity of many psychologists, the foundations of psychology as a science were preserved, ...

PRIMARY ART - in a broad sense - the art of societies that are at the stage of pre-state and pre-literate development; in a narrow sense - the art of the Stone Age or developing in isolation from the centers of civilizations.

Sometimes primitive art is included in the framework of the nya-tia "tra-di-ci-on-folk art." There is a point of view that primitive art cannot be considered as an art, pre-la-ha-et-sya use the term-min "imo-bra -zi-tel-naya activity. In many works, primitive art, on the contrary, is not you-de-la-et-xia as a specific fe-no-men, but its memory-min-no-ki on -zy-va-yut according to epochs and re-gio-us.

Opening of the first-ever-life-but-th art-kus-st-va. For the first time, the pa-leo-li-ta art pa-leo-li-ta (iso-bra-zhe-la-ney, you-gra-vi-ro-van-noe on the bone of a deer-nya) was from- covered in 1834, during the time of the amateur races-co-pok in the grotto of Chaff-fo (France). However, the age of the walk-ki was put under doubt, and it was introduced into scientific circulation in 1887. On-whether hu-dozh. create-che-st-va in pa-leo-li-te na-cha-whether to recognize after that, as in the case of E. Lar-te and G. Cri-sti in La Madeleine (1864) nay-de-but you-gra-vi-ro-van-noe on the bi-not depict-bra-same ma-mon-ta. One-na-ko fi-gu-ram and sign-kam, about-na-ru-women-nym in Nyo (1864), didn’t give-da-va-elk sign-tion, but grew-pi- si, opened in Al-ta-mi-re (1879), at Me-zh-du-people's con-gres-se an-tro-po-lo-gov and ar-heo-lo-gov in Lis-sa-bo-ne (1880) would there be recognition of the under-del-coy. At-chi-on-to-that-from-no-she-niya to on-hod-kam - in the state-under-stvo-vav-shih evo-lu-cio-ni-st-sky pre-stav-le -ni-yah about the people of the ka-men-no-go-ve-ka as about the-mi-tiv-ny su-shche-st-wah, not capable of artistic creation-che-st -woo. The final recognition of the art of pa-leo-li-ta pro-isosh-lo after the discovery in 1901 by D. Pei-ro-ni, L. Ka-pi- ta-nom, A. Breuil engraved ri-sun-kov in Kom-ba-rel and live-in-pi-si in Font-de-Gaume.

Pro-ble-ma pro-is-ho-zh-de-niya art. This pro-ble-ma na-cha-la about-su-zh-give-sya to open-ty pa-myat-ni-kov pa-leo-li-tich. hu-dog. creative-che-st-va. Within the framework of the "theory of the game", based on es-te-tich. con-tse-tsi-yah by I. Kan-ta and F. Shil-le-ra, raz-vi-val-sya from-re-ra-zha-shchy spirit of ro-man-tiz-ma thesis that claim-in voz-nick-lo as re-zul-tat es-te-tich. create-che-so-go in-boo-g-de-niya che-lo-ve-ka to freedom-bo-de from the forces and for-to-new nature and society . In the future, the thesis about the vro-g-day-nim striving-le-ni-che-lo-ve-ka to hu-doge. creativity is one of the main ones in a number of theories (K. Bücher, French researcher J. A. Lu- ke, French is-to-ric first-in-life-no-sti L. R. Nu-zhye and others). Shi-ro-some recognition in-lu-chi-la point of view about the connection of P. and. with ma-gi-her, especially ben-but after the work of the French. ar-heo-lo-ga S. Rei-na-ka about all-general is-to-rii plastic. Arts (1904).

According to the measure of the factual ma-te-ria-la, the question arose about the gen-ne-zi-se of art. In the middle of the 19th century, J. Bou-chet de Perth you-dvi-null gi-po-te-zu “just one hundred stage-pa”, according to the voice of someone-swarm man-lo-vek -at first-at first, but sub-marked the similarity-in-some-natural objects (stones, reli-e-fa of caves walls, etc.) with animals and people, then began whether, approaching the images, some-rye su-s-st-in-va-li in his cons-on-ni, then he came to sa-mo -sto-yatelnomu artistic creation-che-st-vu. French ar-geo-log E. Piette considered sculpt-tu-ru the most simple and ancient form of my image-making, emerging in re- zul-ta-te under-ra-zha-niya che-lo-ve-ka natural samples. At the beginning of the 20th century, A. Breuil you-de-lil im-bra-zhe, someone could be from-the right point in the process of emerging -niya of the first pa-myat-ni-kov of art: “ma-ka-ro-ny”, or “me-an-d-ry” (groups of para-ral-lel-ny waves lines, drawn on the clay with fingers or on the surface of the rock volume); si-lu-these hands, you are full of both positive or non-positive (for example, from-press) image, and so -same con-tour-noy about-water-coy. In the 2nd half of the 20th century, A. Le-roy-Gurann in the scheme he created for the stylistic evolution of European art of the upper pa-leo-li -ta you-de-lil at the initial stage (style I), ha-rak-te-ri-zo-vav-shy-xia with separate signs and from-sut-st-vi-em syu -zhet-nyh iso-brothers. One-on-ko-opening in Sho-ve ri-sun-kov of the era Orin-yak in-sta-vi-lo under my doubt these and other evo-lu-cio-ni-st -skie theories.

Among the domestic research-after-do-va-te-lei, the most-bo-lea-ver-well-those concepts of the rise-nick-no-ve-nium of the art of sfor-mu-li-ro- vans A.P. Ok-lad-no-ko-vym and A.D. Hundred-la-rum, is-ho-div-shi-mi from the lo-zhe-tion, that the art of the top-not-go-pa-leo-li-ta should-women before-she-st-vo-vat the stage of the symbolic-personal activity of non-an-der-tal-ts and yes, ar-khan-tro-pov. The ancient-shim pro-yav-le-ni-em is an imaginative creation-che-st-va on the rub-be-same middle-not-go and top-not-go-pa-leo-li-ta , according to Sto-la-ru, would there be “on-tu-ral-nye ma-ke-you” of animals - es-those-st-ven-nye (for example, a hundred-lag-mit in ne -shche-rach Ba-zois, Italy) and art-cos-st-ven-nye (for example, stucco in Mont-tes-pan and Pech-Merle, France) os-no-you, co -that-rye-roof-wa-shku-ra-mi cave-ho-ho-honey. In modern research-sle-before-va-ni-yah, these pa-myat-no-ki from-but-syat to sign-chi-tel-but more late-no-mu-me-no, to the epo -he Mad-len, what puts you-said-su-zh-de-nie under co-me.

Modern knowledge about the chrono-lo-gy of cave art and art of small forms is described on radio-coal-le-native yes-you, in including the lu-chen-nye pig-men-tu ros-pi-sei (AMS 14C). But-new on-go-ki for-ka-for-whether that the most ancient pa-myat-ni-ki of primitive art de-mon-st-ri-ru-ut from-personal knowledge on-tu-ry, developed artistic images, layered-living-sya on-you-ki-ra-bo-you are red, complex com-in-zi- qi-on-nye solutions. Discovery of natural objects, on-of-my-nayu-che-lo-ve-che fi-gu-ry and under-ra-bo-tan-nyh trees -ni-mi people-mi in Ashe-le (sto-yan-ka Be-re-hat-Ram, Go-lan-you-so-you, Pa-le-sti-na, 1981; Tan-Tan ), again de-la-yut ak-tu-al-ny-mi gi-po-te-zy J. Bu-she de Per-ta and E. Piet-ta. One-to-pro-ble-ma rise-nick-but-ve-niya art os-ta-et-sya open-covered.

Pain-shin-st-in-the-oldest-my-pa-myat-nik-kov of primitive art ob-on-ru-same-but in the north of Eurasia, mainly in Western Europe ne, with the maximum con-tsen-tra-qi-ey (especially ben-no zhi-vo-pi-si) in the so-called franc-co-can-tab-ry-sky district (south-west France, north of Is-pa-nii).

General ha-rak-te-ri-sti-ka first-in-life-no-go is-kus-st-va

Memories of primitive art from vestments according to samples, you-full-n-nym on a solid breath, preserved to this day ma-te -ria-lah. Iz-bra-zhe-niya on the top-no-sti of a stone representing-becoming-le-na gra-fi-koy (including pet-rog-li-fa) and zhi-vo-pee-sue (see Ros-painting on the rock), someone-paradise was preserved only in the caves. This lets-la-et de-lyat-to-rock-pa-mint-ni-ki of pa-leo-li-tic art on os-ve-puppy-nye (ras-po-la-woof- walking on open tops; for example, Foch-Coa) and on-going in dark-but-those caves, for wasps-mot-ra and the creation of something-ryh tre-bo-va-lis-artificial sources of light. From pa-leo-li-ta from-west-com-po-zi-tion; some of them have a complex solution (for example, drawings of animals from Sho-ve). Color-va-pa-lit-ra is-cher-py-va-et-sya, like right-vi-lo, red-nym, black-nym, yellow-thy-ta-mi, re-is -pol-zu-et-sya white. A binder in paints doesn’t apply, but they are special -you. Already in pa-leo-whether they were from-wes-na-lo-same-flowers (for example, in Al-ta-mi-re), tech-no-pe-re-yes -chi volume-yo-ma with the help of a lu-that-new, one-to-one, yes, in a chrome image-bra-zh-ni-yah is it graphic -niya saves an important value. Our-about-times-we-pro-tsa-ra-pan-nye on clay-ni-steam on-cho-kams on the walls from-wi-li-stye lines, from red-ka-ra -zu-fi-gu-ra-tiv-nye images, as well as images of animals, pro-black-chen-nye and you-le-p- linen from clay on the floor of caves (for example, bi-zones from Nyo and Tuc-d'Auduber). Gra-fi-ka pre-ob-la-da-et and among the images of the brothers on the bones and not-large stones. The ancient-shay sculpt-tu-ra, presenting-le-on-a-shallow pla-sti-coy from tusk, bone, clay, stone, as well as a ba-rel- e-fa-mi, someone, basically, you-se-ka-were on rocky surfaces.

Among the pa-leo-lytic fi-gu-ra-tiv-nyh iso-brothers do-mi-ni-ru-yut about-ra-zy bulls, bi-zo-nov, lo-sha-day, deer-ney, ma-mon-tov, but-so-ro-gov, honey-ve-day, lions (birds and fish ma-lo). Iz-bra-zhe-ny che-lo-ve-ka from the West, but much less; pre-ob-la-da-yut female ob-ra-zy, especially ben-but in small pla-sti-ke (“Ve-ne-ry pa-leo-li-ta”). Fi-gu-ra che-lo-ve-ka can have zoo-morphic ones (for example, “kol-dun” from the Three Cave-brothers), including or-no-to- morphic (for example, “women-schi-we-birds” in Me-zi-ne, Al-ta-mi-re, men with a bird’s head in Las-ko ), elements-men-you; there are stylized images of the female body (the so-called cla-vi-forms). On-a-row with fi-gu-ra-tiv-ny-mi iso-bra-zhe-niya-mi, su-sche-st-vo-va-li signs, a number of them inter-pre -ti-ru-yut as a symbol of female in-lo-or-ga-news, the sun, the moon, natural phenomena, etc. The most ancient or-na-men-you (po-lo-sy, spi-ra-li, plant mo-ti-you), as right-vi-lo, ob-ra-zo-va- we are rit-mich-but in-second-shchi-mi-sya lines-niya-mi, yam-ka-mi, ok-ruzh-no-stya-mi, etc. In me-zo-li-those and neo-li-those images of people and animals de-la-ut-sya more schemes-ma-tich-ny-mi, me-nya-yut-sya sti-li-sti-ka and prin-ci-py or-ga-ni-za-tion com-by-zi-tion, more-more-but-about-time-us- mi sta-but-vyat-sya or-na-men-you.

There is no doubt that primitive art would not be alien to mu-zy-ka, dances, about which we-de-tel-st-vu-yut, for example, on-hod-ki bone flutes, the oldest of some, yes-ti-ru-yut-xia in the middle pa-leo-li-tom (for example, Mo-lo-do-wa). In no-o-whether they are-yav-la-et-sya ar-khi-tek-tu-ra (a number of settlements of the Fertile Crescent; see also Me-ga-lit, Me-ga-li- ty-che-kul-tu-ry).

The inclusion of the pro-of-ve-de-niy of primitive art in religious ri-tua-ly already in the pa-leo-li-te is confirmed by the race -ni-em pa-myat-ni-kov in hard-to-do-stupid places-tah caves, on-not-se-ni-em on the image of the “wounds”, for -ho-ro-no-no-eat sta-tu-etok in special pits, etc. Perhaps, already pa-leo-li-tic plot-com-po-zi-tions are connected with mi-fa-mi.

primitive art

Origin of art

N.Dmitriev

Art as a special area of ​​human activity, with its own independent tasks, special qualities, served by professional artists, became possible only on the basis of the division of labor. Engels says about this: "... the creation of arts and sciences - all this was possible only with the help of an intensified division of labor, which had as its basis a large division of labor between the masses engaged in simple physical labor and a few privileged ones who manage the work, engage in trade, state affairs, and later also science and art. The simplest, completely spontaneously formed form of this division of labor was precisely slavery "( F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1951, p. 170).

But since artistic activity is a peculiar form of cognition and creative labor, its origins are much more ancient, since people worked and in the process of this labor cognized the world around them long before the division of society into classes. Archaeological discoveries over the past hundred years have discovered numerous works of fine art by primitive man, the prescription of which is estimated at tens of thousands of years. These are rock paintings; figurines made of stone and bone; images and ornamental patterns carved on pieces of deer antlers or on stone slabs. They are found in Europe, Asia and Africa. These are works that appeared long before a conscious idea of ​​artistic creativity could arise. Very many of them, reproducing mainly figures of animals - deer, bison, wild horses, mammoths - are so vital, so expressive and true to nature that they are not only precious historical monuments, but also retain their artistic power to this day.

The material, objective nature of works of fine art determines especially favorable conditions for the researcher of the origin of fine art in comparison with historians studying the origin of other types of art. If the initial stages of the epic, music, dance have to be judged mainly by indirect data and by analogy with the work of modern tribes, which are in the early stages community development(the analogy is very relative, which can be relied upon only with great caution), then the childhood of painting, sculpture and graphics stands before us with our own eyes.

It does not coincide with the childhood of human society, that is, the most ancient epochs of its formation. According to modern science, the process of humanization of human ape-like ancestors began even before the first glaciation of the Quaternary era and, therefore, the "age" of mankind is approximately one million years. The very first traces of primitive art date back to the Upper (Late) Paleolithic, which began about a few tens of millennia BC. so-called Aurignacian time The Shellic, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian stages of the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) are named after the places of the first finds.) This was the time of the comparative maturity of the primitive communal system: the man of this era in his physical constitution was no different from the modern man, he already spoke and knew how to make rather complex tools from stone, bone and horn. He led a collective hunt for a large animal with a spear and darts. The clans united into tribes, a matriarchy arose.

More than 900 thousand years had to pass, separating the most ancient people from the modern type of man, before the hand and brain were ripe for artistic creativity.

Meanwhile, the manufacture of primitive stone tools dates back to much more ancient times of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. Already Sinanthropes (whose remains were found near Beijing) reached a fairly high level in the manufacture of stone tools and knew how to use fire. People of a later, Neanderthal type processed tools more carefully, adapting them to special purposes. Only thanks to such a “school”, which lasted for many millennia, did the necessary flexibility of the hand, fidelity of the eye and the ability to generalize the visible, highlighting the most essential and characteristic features in it, that is, all those qualities that manifested themselves in the wonderful drawings of the Altamira cave, developed. If a person did not exercise and refine his hand, processing such difficult-to-process material as stone for food, he would not be able to learn to draw: without mastering the creation of utilitarian forms, he could not create an artistic form. If many and many generations had not concentrated the ability of thinking on the capture of the beast - the main source of life for primitive man - it would not have occurred to them to depict this beast.

So, firstly, “labor is older than art” (this idea was brilliantly argued by G. Plekhanov in his “Letters without an Address”) and, secondly, art owes its emergence to labor. But what caused the transition from the production of exceptionally useful, practically necessary tools to the production of “useless” images along with them? It was this question that was most debated and most confused by bourgeois scholars, who strove at all costs to apply I. Kant's thesis about the "purposelessness", "disinterest", "intrinsic value" of the aesthetic attitude to the world to primitive art. K. Bücher, K. Gross, E. Gross, Luke, Vreul, W. Gauzenstein and others who wrote about primitive art argued that primitive people were engaged in “art for art’s sake”, that the first and defining stimulus for artistic creativity was the innate human desire to play .

Theories of “play” in their various varieties were based on the aesthetics of Kant and Schiller, according to which the main sign of aesthetic, artistic experience is precisely the desire for “free play of appearances” - free from any practical goal, from logical and moral evaluation.

“Aesthetic creative impulse,” wrote Friedrich Schiller, “imperceptibly builds in the midst of the terrible realm of forces and in the midst of the sacred realm of laws a third, cheerful realm of play and appearance, in which it removes the shackles of all relationships from a person and frees him from everything that is called coercion, as in physically as well as morally" F. Schiller, Articles on Aesthetics, p. 291.).

Schiller applied this basic position of his aesthetics to the question of the origin of art (long before the discovery of genuine monuments of Paleolithic creativity), believing that the “fun kingdom of play” was already being erected at the dawn of human society: “... now the ancient German is looking for more brilliant animal skins , more magnificent horns, more elegant vessels, and the Caledonian seeks out the most beautiful shells for his festivities. Not content with introducing an excess of the aesthetic into the necessary, the free impulse to play finally breaks completely with the fetters of need, and beauty itself becomes the object of human aspirations. He decorates himself. Free pleasure is credited to his need, and the useless soon becomes the best part of his joy. F. Schiller, Articles on Aesthetics, pp. 289, 290.). However, this view is refuted by the facts.

First of all, it is absolutely incredible that cavemen, who spent their days in the most cruel struggle for existence, helpless in the face of natural forces that opposed them as something alien and incomprehensible, constantly suffering from insecurity of food sources, could devote so much attention and energy to "free pleasures" . Moreover, these “pleasures” were very laborious: it cost a lot of work to carve large relief images on stone, similar to a sculptural frieze in a shelter under the rock of Le Roque de Ser (near Angouleme, France). Finally, numerous data, including ethnographic data, directly indicate that images (as well as dances and various kinds of dramatic actions) were given some exceptionally important and purely practical significance. Ritual rites were associated with them, aimed at ensuring the success of the hunt; it is possible that they made sacrifices associated with the cult of the totem, that is, the beast - the patron of the tribe. Drawings have been preserved that reproduce a staged hunt, images of people in animal masks, animals pierced by arrows and bleeding.

Even the tattoo and the custom of wearing all kinds of jewelry were by no means caused by the desire for “free play of appearances” - they were either dictated by the need to frighten enemies, or protect the skin from insect bites, or again played the role of sacred amulets or testified to the exploits of a hunter - for example, a necklace of bear teeth could indicate that the wearer took part in the hunt for a bear. In addition, in the images on pieces of deer antler, on small tiles, one should see the beginnings of pictography ( Pictography is the primary form of writing in the form of images of individual objects.), that is, a means of communication. Plekhanov in Letters Without an Address cites the story of one traveler that “one day he found on the coastal sand of one of the Brazilian rivers an image of a fish drawn by the natives, belonging to one of the local breeds. He ordered the Indians accompanying him to throw down the net, and they pulled out several pieces of fish of the same breed that is depicted on the sand. It is clear that by making this image, the native wanted to bring to the attention of his comrades that such and such a fish is found in this place ”( G. V. PLEKHANOV Art and Literature, 1948, p. 148.). It is obvious that Paleolithic people also used letters and drawings in the same way.

There are many eyewitness accounts of the hunting dances of Australian, African and other tribes and the rituals of "killing" the painted images of the beast, and these dances and rituals combine elements of a magical ritual with an exercise in appropriate actions, that is, with a kind of rehearsal, practical preparation for hunting. . A number of facts indicate that the Paleolithic images also served similar purposes. Numerous clay sculptures of animals - lions, bears, horses - were found in the Montespan cave in France, in the region of the northern Pyrenees, covered with traces of spear blows, apparently inflicted during some kind of magical ceremony ( See the description, according to Beguin, in the book by A. S. Gushchin “The Origin of Art”, L.-M., 1937, p. 88.).

The incontrovertibility and abundance of such facts forced the later bourgeois researchers to reconsider the "game theory" and put forward a "magic theory" as an addition to it. At the same time, the theory of the game was not discarded: most bourgeois scientists continued to assert that, although works of art were used as objects of magical action, the impetus for their creation lay in an innate tendency to play, to imitate, to decorate.

It is necessary to point out another version of this theory, which asserts the biological innateness of the sense of beauty, which is allegedly characteristic not only of man, but also of animals. If Schiller's idealism interpreted "free play" as a divine property of the human spirit - specifically the human one - then scientists prone to vulgar positivism saw the same property in the animal world and, accordingly, connected the origins of art with the biological instincts of self-decoration. The basis for this statement was some of Darwin's observations and statements about the phenomena of sexual selection in animals. Darwin, noting that in some breeds of birds, males attract females with the brightness of plumage, that, for example, hummingbirds decorate their nests with colorful and shiny objects, etc., suggested that aesthetic emotions are not alien to animals.

The facts established by Darwin and other natural scientists are not in themselves subject to doubt. But there is no doubt that to deduce from this the origin of the art of human society is just as unjustified as to explain, for example, the causes of travel and geographical discoveries made by people, by the instinct that induces birds to their seasonal flights. The conscious activity of man is opposed to the instinctive, unaccountable activity of animals. Certain color, sound, and other stimuli do indeed exert a certain influence on the biological sphere of animals and, becoming fixed in the process of evolution, acquire the significance of unconditioned reflexes (and only in some, comparatively rare cases, the nature of these stimuli coincides with human concepts of beauty and harmony).

It cannot be denied that colors, lines, as well as sounds and smells, also affect the human body - some in an irritating, repulsive way, others, on the contrary, strengthen and contribute to its correct and active functioning. One way or another, this is taken into account by a person in his artistic activity, but in no way lies at its basis. The impulses that forced Paleolithic man to draw and carve figures of animals on the walls of caves, of course, have nothing to do with instinctive impulses: this is a conscious and purposeful creative act of a being who has long since broken the chains of blind instinct and embarked on the path of mastering the forces of nature, and therefore, and understanding of these forces.

Marx wrote: “The spider performs operations reminiscent of the operations of a weaver, and the bee, by building its wax cells, puts some human architects to shame. But even the worst architect differs from the best bee from the very beginning in that, before building a cell out of wax, he has already built it in his head. At the end of the labor process, a result is obtained that already at the beginning of this process was in the mind of the worker, that is, ideally. The worker differs from the bee not only in that he changes the form of what is given by nature: in what is given by nature, he realizes at the same time his conscious goal, which, like a law, determines the method and nature of his actions and to which he must subordinate his will" ( ).

To be able to realize a conscious goal, a person must know the natural object with which he is dealing, must comprehend its natural properties. The ability to know also does not appear immediately: it belongs to those “dormant forces” that develop in man in the process of his influence on nature. As a manifestation of this ability, art also arises - it arises just when labor itself has already moved away from the “first animal-like instinctive forms of labor”, “freed itself from its primitive, instinctive form” ( K. Marx, Capital, vol. I, 1951, p. 185.). Art and, in particular, the visual arts at its origins was one of the aspects of labor that developed to a certain level of consciousness.

Man draws the beast: in this way he synthesizes his observations on him; he more and more confidently reproduces his figure, habits, movements, his various states. He formulates his knowledge in this drawing and reinforces it. At the same time, he learns to generalize: in one image of a deer, features observed in a number of deer are transmitted. This in itself gives a huge impetus to the development of thinking. It is difficult to overestimate the progressive role of artistic creativity in changing the consciousness of man and his relationship to nature. The latter is now not so dark for him, not so encrypted - little by little, still groping, he studies it.

Thus, primitive fine arts are at the same time the germs of science, more precisely, primitive knowledge. It is clear that at that infantile, primitive stage of social development these forms of cognition could not yet be dissected, as they were dismembered in later times; they first acted together. It was not yet art in the full scope of this concept and was not knowledge in the proper sense of the word, but something in which the primary elements of both were inseparably combined.

In this regard, it becomes understandable why Paleolithic art pays so much attention to the beast and relatively little to man. It is aimed primarily at the knowledge of external nature. At the very time when animals have already learned to depict remarkably realistically and vividly, human figures are almost always depicted very primitively, simply clumsily, with the exception of some rare exceptions, such as, for example, the reliefs from Lossel.

1 6. Woman with a horn. Hunter. Reliefs from Lossel (France, Dordogne department). Limestone. Height approx. 0.5 m. Upper Paleolithic, Aurignacian time.

Paleolithic art does not yet have that predominant interest in the world of human relationships, which distinguishes art, which delimited its sphere from the sphere of science. From the monuments of primitive art (at least - fine art) it is difficult to learn anything about the life of the tribal community other than its hunting and related magical rites; the main place is occupied by the very object of hunting - the beast. It was his study that was of the main practical interest, since it was the main source of existence - and the utilitarian-cognitive approach to painting and sculpture was reflected in the fact that they depicted mainly animals, and such breeds, the extraction of which was especially important and at the same time difficult and dangerous, and therefore, required especially careful study. Birds and plants were rarely depicted.

Of course, people of the Paleolithic era could not yet correctly understand both the laws of the natural world around them and the laws of their own actions. There was still no distinct consciousness of the difference between the real and the apparent: what was seen in a dream probably seemed to be the same reality as what was seen in reality. Out of all this chaos of fairy-tale ideas, primitive magic arose, which was a direct consequence of the extreme underdevelopment, extreme naivety and inconsistency of the consciousness of primitive man, who mixed the material with the spiritual, who, out of ignorance, attributed material existence to the immaterial facts of consciousness.

Drawing the figure of an animal, a person in in a certain sense really "mastered" the animal, because he knew him, and knowledge is the source of domination over nature. The vital necessity of figurative knowledge was the reason for the emergence of art. But our ancestor understood this "mastery" in the literal sense and performed magical rites around the drawing he made to ensure the success of the hunt. He fantastically rethought the true, rational motives of his actions. True, it is very likely that by far not always fine art had a ritual purpose; here, obviously, other motives also participated, which were already mentioned above: the need for the exchange of information, etc. But, in any case, it can hardly be denied that most of the paintings and sculptures also served magical purposes.

People began to engage in art much earlier than they had a concept of art, and much earlier than they could understand for themselves its real meaning, its real usefulness.

Mastering the ability to depict the visible world, people also did not realize the true social significance of this skill. Something similar happened later development sciences, also gradually freed from the captivity of naive fantastic ideas: medieval alchemists sought to find the "philosopher's stone" and spent years of hard work on this. They never found the Philosopher's Stone, but they gained valuable experience in studying the properties of metals, acids, salts, etc., which paved the way for the subsequent development of chemistry.

Speaking about the fact that primitive art was one of the original forms of knowledge, the study of the surrounding world, we should not assume that, consequently, there was nothing in it in the proper sense of the word aesthetic. The aesthetic is not something fundamentally opposed to the useful.

Already the labor processes associated with the manufacture of tools and, as we know, which began many millennia earlier than drawing and sculpting, to a certain extent prepared a person's ability of aesthetic judgment, taught him the principle of expediency and correspondence of form to content. The oldest tools are almost shapeless: these are pieces of stone, hewn on one side, and later on both sides: they served for different purposes: for digging, for cutting, etc. , scrapers, incisors, needles), they acquire a more definite and consistent, and thus more elegant form: in this process, the significance of symmetry, proportions is realized, that sense of the necessary measure is developed, which is so important in art. And when people who sought to increase the efficiency of their work and learned to appreciate and feel the vital significance of an expedient form, approached the transfer of complex forms of the living world, they managed to create works that are aesthetically very significant and effective.

With economical, bold strokes and large spots of red, yellow and black paint, the monolithic, powerful carcass of a bison was conveyed. The image was full of life: it felt the trembling of tensing muscles, the elasticity of short strong legs, one felt the readiness of the beast to rush forward, bowing its massive head, sticking out its horns and looking down with bloodshot eyes. The painter probably vividly recreated in his imagination his heavy run through the thicket, his furious roar and warlike cries of the crowd of hunters pursuing him.

In numerous images of deer and fallow deer, primitive artists very well conveyed the slenderness of the figures of these animals, the nervous grace of their silhouette and that sensitive alertness that is reflected in the turn of the head, in the pricked ears, in the curves of the body when they listen for danger. Depicting both the formidable, powerful buffalo and the graceful doe with amazing accuracy, people could not help assimilating these concepts themselves - strength and grace, rudeness and grace - although, perhaps, they still did not know how to formulate them. And a somewhat later image of an elephant, covering her baby elephant with a trunk from a tiger attack, doesn’t it indicate that the artist began to be interested in something more than the appearance of the beast, that he looked at the very life of animals and its various manifestations seemed interesting to him and instructive. He noticed touching and expressive moments in the animal world, a manifestation of maternal instinct. In a word, the emotional experiences of a person, undoubtedly, were refined and enriched with the help of his artistic activity even at these stages of its development.

4. Picturesque images on the ceiling of the Altamira cave (Spain, Santander province). General form. Upper Paleolithic, Madeleine time.

We cannot deny Paleolithic visual arts the nascent ability to arrange. True, the images on the walls of the caves are for the most part arranged randomly, without proper correlation with each other and without an attempt to convey the background, the environment (for example, the painting on the ceiling of the Altamira cave. But where the drawings were placed in some kind of natural frame (for example, on deer antlers, on bone tools, on the so-called "wands of leaders", etc.), they fit into this frame quite skillfully. On wands, which are oblong in shape, but wide enough, most often they are carved going in a row, one after another, horses or deer.On narrower ones - fish or even snakes.Often sculptural images of animals are placed on the handle of a knife or some kind of tool, and in these cases they are given such poses that are characteristic of this animal and at the same time adapted in shape to the purpose of the handle Here, therefore, elements of the future “applied art” are born with its inevitable subordination of the pictorial principles to the practical purpose of the subject (ill. 2 a).

2 6. Herd of deer. Eagle bone carving from the grotto of the City Hall in Teija (France, Dordogne department). Upper Paleolithic.

Finally, in the era of the Upper Paleolithic, there are, although not often, multi-figured compositions, and by no means always they represent a primitive "enumeration" of individual figures on a plane. There are images of a herd of deer, a herd of horses, as a kind of whole, where the feeling of a large mass is conveyed by the fact that a whole forest of perspectively decreasing horns or a string of heads is visible, and only some figures of animals standing in the foreground or away from the herd are completely drawn. Even more indicative are such compositions as deer crossing the river (bone carving from Lorte or a herd drawing on a stone from Limeil, where the figures of walking deer are spatially combined and at the same time each figure has its own characteristics ( See the analysis of this drawing in the book by A. S. Gushchin "The Origin of Art", p. 68.). These and similar compositions already show a rather high level of generalizing thinking that has developed in the process of labor and with the help of fine art: people are already aware of the qualitative difference between the singular and the plural, seeing in the latter not only the sum of units, but also a new quality that itself has a certain unity.

3 6. Herd of deer. Drawing on a stone from Limeil (France, Dordogne department).

The development and development of the initial forms of ornamentation, which went in parallel with the development of fine art proper, also had an effect on the ability to generalize - to abstract and highlight some common properties and patterns of various natural forms. From the observation of these forms, the concepts of a circle, a straight line, a wavy line, a zigzag line, and, finally, as already noted, about symmetry, rhythmic repetition, etc., arise. Of course, an ornament is not an arbitrary invention of a person: it, like any kind of art , is based on real prototypes. First of all, nature itself provides many examples of ornament, so to speak, “in its purest form” and even “geometric” ornament: patterns covering the wings of many species of butterflies, bird feathers (peacock tail), scaly skin of a snake, the structure of snowflakes, crystals, shells and etc. In the structure of the calyx of a flower, in the wavy streams of a stream, in the plant and animal organisms themselves - in all this, too, more or less clearly, an “ornamental” structure appears, that is, a certain rhythmic alternation of forms. Symmetry and rhythm are one of the external manifestations of the general natural laws of interconnection and balance of the constituent parts of any organism ( E-Haeckel's remarkable book The Beauty of Forms in Nature (St. Petersburg, 1907) gives many examples of such "natural ornaments".).

As you can see, creating ornamental art in the image and likeness of nature, man was also guided by the need for knowledge, in the study of natural laws, although, of course, he did not realize this clearly.

The Paleolithic era already knows the ornament in the form of parallel wavy lines, teeth, spirals, which covered the tools. It is possible that these drawings were originally comprehended in the same way as images of a certain object, or rather, a part of the object, and were perceived as its conventional designation. Be that as it may, a special branch of fine art - the ornamental - is outlined in the most ancient times. greatest development it reaches already in the Neolithic era, with the advent of pottery. Neolithic earthenware vessels were decorated with various patterns: concentric circles, triangles, checkerboards, etc.

But in the art of the Neolithic and then the Bronze Age, new, special features are observed that are noted by all researchers: not only the improvement of ornamental art as such, but also the transfer of ornamental techniques to images of animal and human figures and, in connection with this, the schematization of the latter.

If we consider the works of primitive creativity in chronological order (which, of course, can only be done very approximately, since it is impossible to establish an exact chronology), then the following is striking. The earliest images of animals (of the Aurignacian time) are still primitive, made with only one linear contour, without any elaboration of details, and it is not always possible to understand from them which animal is depicted. This is a clear consequence of the ineptness, the uncertainty of the hand, trying to depict something, or the first imperfect experiments. In the future, they are improved, and the Madeleine time gives those wonderful, one might say "classical", examples of primitive realism that have already been mentioned. At the end of the Paleolithic, as well as in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, schematically simplified drawings are increasingly common, where simplicity comes not so much from inability, but from a certain deliberateness, intentionality.

The growing division of labor within the primitive community, the formation of the tribal system with its already more complex relations of people to each other also led to the splitting of that original, naive view of the world, in which both the strength and weakness of the Paleolithic people are manifested. In particular, primitive magic, which initially did not break away from a simple and unbiased perception of things as they are, gradually turns into a complicated system of mythological ideas, and then cults - a system that implies the existence of a "second world", mysterious and not similar to the real world. . The horizon of a person is expanding, an increasing number of phenomena enter his field of vision, but at the same time the number of mysteries that can no longer be resolved by simple analogies with the closest and most understandable objects is multiplying. Human thought strives to delve deeper into these riddles, prompted to this again by the interests of material development, but on this path it faces the dangers of estrangement from reality.

In connection with the complication of cults, a group of priests, sorcerers, who use art, which in their hands loses its originally realistic character, separates and stands out. Before, as we know, it served as an object of magical actions, but for the Paleolithic hunter, the course of reflection boiled down to something like this: the more similar the drawn animal is to a real, living one, the more achievable the goal. When an image is no longer viewed as a “double” of a real being, but becomes an idol, a fetish, the embodiment of mysterious dark forces, then it should not have a real character at all, it, on the contrary, gradually turns into a very distant, fantastically transformed likeness of what exists. in everyday reality. The data speak for the fact that among all peoples their specially cult images are most often the most deformed, the most removed from reality. On this path, monstrous, frightening idols of the Aztecs, formidable idols of the Polynesians, etc., appear.

It would be wrong to reduce to this line of cult art all the art of the period of the tribal system in general. The trend towards schematization was far from all-consuming. Along with it, the realistic line continued to develop, but in somewhat different forms: it is mainly carried out in areas of creativity that have the least connection with religion, that is, in applied arts, in crafts, the separation of which from agriculture already creates the prerequisites for commodity production and marks the transition from a tribal system to a class society. This so-called era of military democracy, which different peoples went through at different times, is characterized by the flourishing of artistic crafts: it is in them that the progress of artistic creativity is embodied at this stage of social development. It is clear, however, that the sphere of applied arts is always one way or another limited by the practical purpose of a thing, therefore, all those possibilities that were already lurking in embryonic form in the art of the Paleolithic could not receive full and comprehensive development in them.

The art of the primitive communal system bears the stamp of masculinity, simplicity and strength. Within its limits, it is realistic and full of sincerity. There can be no question of the "professionalism" of primitive art. Of course, this does not mean that all members of the tribal community were engaged in painting and sculpture without exception. It is possible that elements of personal giftedness already played a certain role in these studies. But they did not give any privileges: what the artist did was a natural manifestation of the whole team, it was done for everyone and on behalf of everyone.

But the content of this art is still poor, its outlook is closed, its very integrity rests on the underdevelopment of social consciousness. The further progress of art could be carried out only at the cost of the loss of this original integrity, which we already see at the later stages of the primitive communal formation. Compared with the art of the Upper Paleolithic, they mark a certain decline in artistic activity, but this decline is only relative. Schematizing the image, the primitive artist learns to generalize, abstract the concepts of a straight or curved line, circle, etc., acquires the skills of conscious construction, rational distribution of drawing elements on a plane. Without these latently accumulated skills, the transition to those new artistic values ​​that are created in the art of ancient slave-owning societies would have been impossible. We can say that in the Neolithic period, the concepts of rhythm and composition finally take shape. Thus, the artistic creativity of the later stages of the tribal system is, on the one hand, a natural symptom of its decomposition, and on the other hand, a transitional stage to the art of the slave-owning formation.

The main stages in the development of primitive art

Primitive art, that is, the art of the era of the primitive communal system, developed over a very long time, and in some parts of the world - in Australia and Oceania, in many areas of Africa and America - it existed until modern times. In Europe and Asia, its origin dates back to the Ice Age, when most of Europe was covered with ice and tundra spread where southern France and Spain are now. In 4 - 1 millennia BC. the primitive communal system, first in northern Africa and Western Asia, and then in southern and eastern Asia and southern Europe, was gradually replaced by a slave-owning system.

The oldest stages in the development of primitive culture, when art first appears, belong to the Paleolithic, and art, as already mentioned, appeared only in the late (or upper) Paleolithic, in the Aurignac-Solutrean time, that is, 40 - 20 millennia BC . It flourished in the Madeleine time (20 - 12 millennium BC. The later stages of the development of primitive culture date back to the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), Neolithic (New Stone Age) and to the time of the spread of the first metal tools (Copper-Bronze Age ).

Examples of the first works of primitive art are schematic contour drawings of animal heads on limestone slabs found in the caves of La Ferracy (France).

These ancient images are extremely primitive and conditional. But in them, no doubt, one can see the beginnings of those ideas in the minds of primitive people that were associated with hunting and hunting magic.

With the advent of settled life, continuing to use rock canopies, grottoes and caves for living, people began to arrange long-term settlements - parking lots, consisting of several dwellings. The so-called "big house" of the tribal community from the settlement of Kostenki I, near Voronezh, was of considerable size (35x16 m) and apparently had a roof made of poles.

It is in this kind of dwellings, in a number of settlements of mammoth and wild horse hunters dating back to the Aurignac-Solutrean period, that small sculptural figures depicting women were found carved from bone, horn or soft stone (5-10 cm). Most of the statuettes found depict a nude standing female figure; they clearly show the desire of the primitive artist to convey the features of a woman-mother (breasts, a huge belly, wide hips are emphasized).

Relatively correctly conveying the general proportions of the figure, primitive sculptors usually depicted the hands of these figurines as thin, small, most often folded on the chest or stomach, they did not depict facial features at all, although they rather carefully conveyed the details of hairstyles, tattoos, etc.

Paleolithic in Western Europe

Good examples of such figurines were found in Western Europe (figurines from Willendorf in Austria, from Menton and Lespug in southern France, etc.), and in the Soviet Union - in the Paleolithic sites of V villages Kostenki and Gagarino on the Don, Avdeevo near Kursk, etc. The figurines of eastern Siberia from the sites of Malta and Buret, related to the transitional Solutrean-Madlenian time, are more schematically executed.

Neighborhood Les Eisy

To understand the role and place of human images in the life of a primitive tribal community, the reliefs carved on limestone slabs from the Lossel site in France are especially interesting. One of these slabs depicts a hunter throwing a spear, three other slabs depict women reminiscent of figurines from Willendorf, Kostenki or Gagarin, and finally, on the fifth slab, an animal being hunted. The hunter is given in lively and natural movement, the female figures and, in particular, their hands are depicted anatomically more correctly than in the figurines. On one of the slabs, better preserved, a woman holds in her hand, bent at the elbow and raised up, a bull (turium) horn. S. Zamyatnin put forward a plausible hypothesis that in this case a scene of witchcraft is depicted associated with preparation for hunting, in which a woman played an important role.

1 a. Female figurine from Willendorf (Austria). Limestone. Upper Paleolithic, Aurignacian time. Vein. Natural History Museum.

Judging by the fact that figurines of this kind were found inside the dwelling, they were of great importance in the life of primitive people. They also testify to the great social role that belonged to a woman in the period of matriarchy.

Much more often, primitive artists turned to the image of animals. The most ancient of these images are still very schematic. Such, for example, are small and very simplified figurines of animals carved from soft stone or ivory - a mammoth, a cave bear, a cave lion (from the Kostenki I site), as well as drawings of animals made with a one-color contour line on the walls of a number of caves in France and Spain ( Nindal, La Mute, Castillo). Usually these contour images are carved on the stone or drawn on wet clay. Both in sculpture and in painting during this period only the most important features of animals are transmitted: the general shape of the body and head, the most noticeable external signs.

On the basis of such initial, primitive experiments, a mastery was gradually developed, which was clearly manifested in the art of the Madeleine time.

Primitive artists mastered the technique of processing bone and horn, invented more advanced means of conveying the forms of the surrounding reality (mainly the animal world). Madeleine art expressed a deeper understanding and perception of life. Remarkable wall paintings of this time were found from the 80s - 90s. 19th century in the caves of southern France (Font de Gome, Lascaux, Montignac, Combarelle, cave of the Three Brothers, Nio, etc.) and northern Spain (al-tamira cave). It is possible that contour drawings of animals belong to the Paleolithic, though more primitive in character, found in Siberia on the banks of the Lena near the village of Shishkino. Along with painting, usually executed in red, yellow and black colors, among the works of Madeleine art there are drawings carved on stone, bone and horn, bas-relief images, and sometimes round sculpture. Hunting played an extremely important role in the life of the primitive tribal community, and therefore the images of animals occupied such a significant place in art. Among them you can see a variety of European animals of that time: bison, reindeer and red deer, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, cave lion, bear, wild pig, etc.; less common are various birds, fish and snakes. Plants were rarely depicted.

Mammoth. Font de Gome Cave

The image of the beast in the works of primitive people of the Madeleine time, in comparison with the previous period, acquired much more concrete and vitally truthful features. Primitive art has now come to a clear understanding of the structure and shape of the body, to the ability to correctly convey not only proportions, but also the movement of animals, fast running, strong turns and foreshortenings.

2 a. Deer swimming across the river. Carving on a deer antler (the image is given in expanded form). From the Lorte cave (France, Hautes-Pyrenees department). Upper Paleolithic. Museum in Saint Germain-en-Laye.

Remarkable liveliness and great persuasiveness in the transfer of movement are distinguished, for example, by a drawing scratched on a bone found in the grotto of Lorte (France), which depicts deer crossing a river. The artist with great observation conveyed the movement, managed to express a sense of alertness in the deer's head turned back. The river is designated by him conditionally, only by the image of salmon swimming between the legs of deer.

Perfectly convey the character of animals, the originality of their habits, the expressiveness of movements and such first-class monuments as engraved on stone drawings of a bison and a deer from the Upper Logerie (France), a mammoth and a bear from the Combarelle cave and many others.

The famous cave paintings of France and Spain are distinguished by the greatest artistic perfection among the monuments of art of the Madeleine period.

The most ancient here are contour drawings depicting the profile of an animal in red or black paint. Following the contour drawing, the shading of the body surface appeared with separate lines that convey wool. In the future, the figures began to be completely painted over with one paint with attempts at volumetric modeling. The pinnacle of Paleolithic painting is the depiction of animals, made in two or three colors with varying degrees of tonal saturation. In these large (about 1.5 m) figures, protrusions and uneven rocks are often used.

Everyday observations of the beast, the study of its habits helped primitive artists create amazingly vivid works of art. Accuracy of observation and masterful transmission of characteristic movements and poses, a clear clarity of drawing, the ability to convey the originality of the appearance and state of the animal - all this marks the best of the monuments of Madeleine painting. Such are the images of wounded bison in the Altamira cave, inimitable in the power of the truth of life, a roaring bison in the same cave, a grazing reindeer, slow and calm, a running wild boar in the Font de Gome cave (in Altamira).

5. Wounded bison. Picturesque image in the Altamira cave.

6. Roaring bison. Picturesque image in the Altamira cave.

7. Grazing reindeer. Picturesque image in the Font de Gome cave (France, Dordogne department). Upper Paleolithic, Madeleine time.

Rhinoceros. Cave von de Gohm

Elephant. Pindag Cave

Elephant.Castillo Cave

In the paintings of the caves of the Madeleine Time, there are mostly single images of animals. They are very truthful, but most often they are not connected in any way with one another. Sometimes, ignoring the image already made earlier, another one was performed directly on it; the viewer's point of view was also not taken into account, and individual images in relation to the horizontal level were in the most unexpected positions.

But already in the previous time, as the reliefs from Lossel testify to this, primitive people tried to convey by pictorial means some scenes of their life that were of particular importance. These beginnings of more complex solutions were further developed in the Madeleine period. On pieces of bone and horn, on stones, images appear not only of individual animals, but sometimes of a whole herd. So, for example, on a bone plate from the grotto of the City Hall in Teija, a drawing of a herd of deer is carved, where only the front figures of animals are highlighted, followed by a schematic representation of the rest of the herd in the form of conditional horns and straight sticks of legs, but the closing figures are again completely rendered. Another character is the image of a group of deer on a stone from Limeil, where the artist conveyed the characteristics and habits of each deer. Whether the artist’s goal here was to depict a herd, or these are simply images of separate figures not related to each other, the opinions of scientists differ (France; ill. 2 6, France; ill. 3 6)

People are not depicted in the Madeleine murals, with the exception of the rarest cases (a drawing on a piece of horn from the Upper Lodge or on the wall of the cave of the Three Brothers), where not only animals are shown, but also people disguised as animals for a ritual dance or hunting.

Along with the development of paintings and drawings on bone and stone in the Madeleine period, there was a further development of sculpture from stone, bone and clay, and also, possibly, from wood. And in sculpture, depicting animals, primitive people achieved great skill.

One of the remarkable examples of sculpture of the Madeleine time is a horse’s head made of bone found in the Maye d’Azil cave (France). The proportions of a short horse’s head are built with great truthfulness, jerky movement is clearly felt, notches are perfectly used to convey wool.

Behind. Head of a horse from the Mas d'Azil cave (France, Ariège department). Reindeer horn. Length 5.7 cm. Upper Paleolithic. Collected by E. Piette (France).

Extremely interesting are also the images of bison, bears, lions and horses sculpted from clay, discovered in the depths of the caves of the northern Pyrenees (Tuc d "Auduber and Montespan caves). These sculptures, made with great similarity, sometimes even, apparently, were covered with skins and were not sculptural, and attached real heads (the figure of a bear cub from the Montespan cave).

Along with the round sculpture, images of animals in relief were also performed at that time. An example is the sculptural frieze made of individual stones on the site of the Le Roque refuge (France). Figures carved on stones of horses, bison, goats, a man with a mask on his head, apparently, as well as similar pictorial and graphic images, were created for the success of hunting wild animals. The magical meaning of some monuments of primitive art may also be indicated by images of spears and darts stuck in animal figures, flying stones, wounds on the body, etc. (for example, the image of a bison in the cave of Nio, a bear in the cave of the Three Brothers, etc. .). With the help of such techniques, primitive man hoped to more easily master the beast, to bring him under the blows of his weapon.

A new stage in the development of primitive art, reflecting profound changes in man's ideas about the surrounding reality, is associated with the periods of the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Eneolithic (Copper Age). From the appropriation of the finished products of nature, primitive society at this time passes to more complex forms of labor.

Along with hunting and fishing, which continued to retain their importance, especially for forested and comparatively cold climate countries, agriculture and cattle breeding began to acquire more and more importance. It is quite natural that now that man has begun to remake nature for his own purposes, he has also entered into a much more complex relationship with the life around him.

This time is associated with the invention of bows and arrows, then - pottery, as well as the emergence of new types and improvement in the technique of making stone tools. Later, along with the dominant stone tools, individual objects made of metal (mainly copper) appeared.

At this time, man mastered more and more diverse building materials, learned, applying himself to various conditions, to build new types of dwellings. The improvement of the construction business prepared the way for the formation of architecture as an art.

Neolithic and Bronze Age in Western Europe

Paleolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age in the USSR

In the northern and middle forest zone of Europe, along with the settlements that continued to exist, settlements began to appear from dugouts, built on a deck of poles on the shores of lakes. As a rule, the settlements of this era in the forest belt (settlements) did not have protective fortifications. On the lakes and swamps of central Europe, as well as in the Urals, there were so-called pile settlements, which were groups of huts of fishing tribes built on a log platform resting on piles driven into the bottom of a lake or swamp (for example, a pile settlement near Robengausen in Switzerland or Gorbunovsky peat bog in the Urals). The walls of rectangular huts were usually also log or wicker from branches with clay coating. Piled settlements were connected with the shore by footbridges or with the help of boats and rafts.

Along the middle and lower reaches of the Dnieper, along the Dniester and in western Ukraine in the 3rd - 2nd millennium BC. the so-called Tripoli culture, characteristic of the Eneolithic period, was widespread. The main occupations of the population here were agriculture and cattle breeding. A feature of the layout of Trypillia settlements (ancestral villages) was the arrangement of houses in concentric circles or ovals. The entrances faced the center of the settlement, where there was an open space that served as a corral for cattle (a settlement near the village of Khalepye, near Kyiv, etc.). Rectangular houses with a floor made of clay tiles had rectangular doors and round windows, as can be seen from the surviving clay models of Trypillia dwellings; the walls were made of wattle covered with clay and decorated with paintings inside; in the middle there was sometimes a cruciform altar made of clay, decorated with ornaments.

From a very early time, the agricultural and pastoral tribes in Western and Central Asia, Transcaucasia, and Iran began to build structures from sun-dried brick (raw). Hills have come down to us, formed from the remains of clay buildings (Anau hill in Central Asia, Shresh-blur in Armenia, etc.), rectangular or round in plan.

Very big changes in this period occurred in the visual arts. The gradually becoming more complex ideas of man about the nature around him forced him to seek explanations for the connection of phenomena. The direct brightness of the perception of Paleolithic time was lost, but at the same time, the primitive man of this new era learned to more deeply perceive reality in its interrelationships and diversity. In art, the schematization of images and at the same time narrative complexity is growing, leading to attempts to convey an action, an event. The examples of the new art are the overwhelmingly one-color (black or white) rock paintings full of rapid movement in Valtorta in Spain, in northern and southern Africa, recently discovered schematic hunting scenes in Uzbekistan (in the Zaraut-say gorge), as well as those found in many in some places, drawings carved on rocks, known as petroglyphs (stone writing). Along with the depiction of animals in the art of that time, the depiction of people in scenes of hunting or military clashes began to play an increasingly important role. The activity of people, the collective of ancient hunters, is now becoming the central theme of art. New tasks required new forms of artistic solution - a more developed composition, plot subordination of individual figures, some still rather primitive methods of transferring space.

Many so-called petroglyphs have been found on the rocks in Karelia, along the shores of the White Sea and Lake Onega. In a very conditional form, they tell about the hunt of the ancient inhabitants of the North for various animals and birds. Karelian petroglyphs belong to different eras; the most ancient of them, apparently, belong to the 2nd millennium BC. Although the technique of carving on hard stone left its mark on the nature of these drawings, which usually give only very schematic silhouettes of people, animals and objects, but, apparently, the goal of the artists of this time was only an extremely simplified transfer of some of the most common features. Individual figures in most cases are combined into complex compositions, and this compositional complexity distinguishes petroglyphs from the artistic creations of the Paleolithic.

A very important new phenomenon in the art of the period under review was the extensive development of ornamentation. In the geometric patterns covering clay vessels and other objects, the skills of constructing a rhythmic, ordered ornamental composition were born and developed, and at the same time, a special area of ​​artistic activity arose - applied art. Separate archaeological finds, as well as ethnographic data, allow us to assert that labor activity played a decisive role in the origin of the ornament. The assumptions that some types and types of ornament were basically associated with a conditional schematic transfer of the phenomena of reality are not without foundation. At the same time, the ornament on some types of clay vessels originally appeared as traces of wickerwork smeared with clay. Subsequently, this natural ornament was replaced by an artificially applied one, and a certain effect was attributed to it (for example, it was believed that it gives strength to the made vessel).

Tripol-sky vessels can serve as an example of ornamented ceramic products. A wide variety of forms are found here: large and wide flat-bottomed jugs with a narrow neck, deep bowls, double vessels similar in shape to binoculars. There are vessels with scratched and one-color ornaments made with black or red paint. The most common and artistically interesting are items with multi-color painting in white, black and red paint. The ornament here covers the entire surface with parallel colored stripes, a double helix running around the entire vessel, concentric circles, etc. Sometimes, along with the ornament, there are also highly schematized images of people and various animals or fantastic creatures.

8 a. Painted clay vessel from the settlement of the Trypillia culture (Ukrainian SSR). Eneolithic. 3 thousand BC e. Moscow. Historical Museum.

Petroglyphs of Karelia

It can be assumed that the ornaments of Trypillia vessels were associated with agricultural and pastoral labor, perhaps with the veneration of the sun and water as forces that help the success of this work. This is also confirmed by the fact that multi-colored ornaments on vessels similar to Trypillia (the so-called painted pottery) were found among the agricultural tribes of that time in a wide area from the Mediterranean, Western Asia and Iran up to China (see the relevant chapters for more on this).

8 6. Women's clay figurines from the Tripoli culture settlement (Ukrainian SSR). Eneolithic. 3 thousand BC e. Moscow. Historical Museum.

In the Trypillia settlements, clay figurines of people and animals were common, which are also widely found in other places (in Asia Minor, Transcaucasia, Iran, etc.). Among the Trypillia finds, schematized female figurines predominate, which were available in almost every dwelling. Sculpted from clay, sometimes covered with paintings, the figurines depict a standing or sitting naked female figure with flowing hair and a hooked nose. In contrast to the Paleolithic figurines from Trypillia, the proportions and shapes of the body are much more conditionally conveyed. These figurines were possibly associated with the cult of the goddess of the earth.

The culture of hunters and fishermen who inhabited the Urals and Siberia clearly differed from the Trypillia culture of farmers. In the Gorbunovsky peat bog in the Urals, in the thickness of peat, the remains of a pile structure of the end of the 2nd - beginning of the 1st millennium BC, which, apparently, was some kind of cult center, were found. Peat quite well preserved the figures of anthropomorphic idols carved from wood and the remains of the gifts they brought: wooden and earthenware, weapons, implements, etc.

9 6. Wooden bucket in the form of a swan from the Gorbunovsky peat bog (near Nizhny Tagil). Length 17 cm. 3-2 thousand BC. e. Moscow. Historical Museum.

11 6. Head of an elk from the Shigir peat bog (near the city of Nevyansk, Sverdlovsk region). Horn. Length 15.2 cm. 3-2 thousand BC. e. Leningrad. Hermitage Museum.

Wooden vessels and spoons in the form of swans, geese, marsh hens are distinguished by special expressiveness and vital truthfulness. In the bend of the neck, in the laconic but surprisingly faithful rendering of the head and beak, in the shape of the vessel itself, which reproduces the body of a bird, the carver-artist was able to show with great grace the characteristic features of each of the birds. Along with these monuments, outstanding in their vital brightness, in the Ural peat bogs were found slightly inferior to them wooden heads of an elk and a bear, which probably served as tool handles, as well as statuettes of an elk. These images of animals and birds differ from the Paleolithic monuments and, on the contrary, are close to a number of Neolithic monuments (such as polished stone axes with animal heads) not only in the simplicity of the form that preserves the truthfulness of life, but also in the organic connection of sculpture with an object that has a utilitarian purpose. .

11 a. Head of a marble figurine from the Cyclades (Amorgos island). OK. 2000 BC e. Paris. Louvre.

Schematically carved anthropomorphic idols sharply differ from such images of animals. The striking differences between the primitive interpretation of the human figure and the very lively rendering of animals should not be attributed only to the greater or lesser talent of the performer, but must be connected with the cult purpose of such images. By this time, the connections of art with primitive religion - animism (the spiritualization of the forces of nature), the cult of ancestors and other forms of fantastic explanation of the phenomena of the surrounding life, which left their mark on artistic creativity, were being strengthened.

The last stage in the history of primitive society is characterized by a number of new phenomena in art. The further development of production, the introduction of new forms of economy and new metal tools of labor slowly but profoundly changed man's attitude to the reality around him.

The main social unit at this time was the tribe, uniting several clans. The main branch of the economy among a number of tribes is first taming, and then raising and caring for livestock.

Shepherd tribes stand out from other tribes. According to F. Engels, “the first major social division of labor” is taking place, which for the first time made regular exchange possible and laid the foundations for property stratification both within the tribe and between individual tribes. Mankind has come to the last stage in the development of the primitive communal system, to a patriarchal tribal society. Of great importance among the new tools of labor was the loom and, in particular, metal tools (tools made of copper, bronze, and, finally, iron), which became widespread in connection with the invention of smelting ore. The diversity and improvement of production led to the fact that all production processes could no longer, as before, be carried out by one person and required a certain specialization.

“A second major division of labor took place: craft separated from agriculture,” points out F. Engels.

When in the valleys of large rivers - the Nile, the Euphrates and the Tigris, the Indus, the Yellow River - in the 4th - 3rd millennia BC. the first slave-owning states arose, then the social and cultural life of these states became a source of strong influence on the neighboring tribes, who still lived in the conditions of a primitive communal system. This introduced special features into the culture and art of the tribes that existed simultaneously with the state formations of a class society.

By the end of the existence of primitive society, a new, previously unseen type of architectural structures appeared - fortresses. “It is not for nothing that formidable walls rise around the new fortified cities: in their ditches the grave of the tribal system gapes, and their towers already rest against civilization” ( F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1952, p. 170.). Especially characteristic are the so-called Cyclopean fortresses, the walls of which were made up of huge roughly hewn blocks of stone. Cyclopean fortresses have been preserved in many places in Europe (France, Sardinia, the Iberian and Balkan Peninsulas, etc.); as well as in the Caucasus. In the middle, forest zone of Europe, from the second half of the 1st millennium BC. settlements spread - "fortifications", fortified with earthen ramparts, log fences and ditches.

Deer hunting.Valtorta

Along with defensive structures in the later stages of the development of primitive society, structures of a completely different kind, the so-called megalithic (that is, built from huge stones) buildings - menhirs, dolmens, cromlechs, were widely developed. Entire alleys of vertically standing large stones - menhirs - are found in Transcaucasia and Western Europe along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean (for example, the famous alley of metzgirs near Karnak in Brittany). Dolmens are widespread in Western Europe, North Africa, Iran, India, the Crimea and the Caucasus; they are tombs built of huge stones placed upright, covered on top with one or two stone slabs. Structures of this nature are sometimes located inside burial mounds - for example, a dolmen in a mound near the village of Novosvobodnaya (in the Kuban), which has two chambers - one for burial, the other, apparently, for religious ceremonies.

Primitive art geographically covers all continents, except for Antarctica, and in time - the entire era of human existence, preserved by some peoples living in remote corners of the planet to this day. The conversion of primitive people to a new type of activity for them - art - is one of the greatest events in the history of mankind. Primitive art reflected the first ideas of man about the world around him, thanks to him knowledge and skills were preserved and transferred, people communicated with each other. In the spiritual culture of the primitive world, art began to play the same universal role that a pointed stone played in labor activity.

Ancient people could come up with the idea of ​​depicting objects not in one, but in many ways.

Until recently, scholars held two opposing views on the history of primitive art. Some experts considered cave naturalistic painting and sculpture to be the most ancient, others - schematic signs and geometric figures. Now most researchers are of the opinion that both forms appeared at about the same time. For example, among the most ancient images on the walls of caves of the Paleolithic era are prints of a human hand, and random interweaving of wavy lines, pressed into wet clay with the fingers of the same hand.

Features of primitive art

The transition of a person to a new way of life and other than before, relations with the surrounding nature occurred simultaneously with the formation of a different perception of the world. Behind each concept was an image, a living action. In ancient times, the role of art was even more important than now: in the absence of science, it contained almost the entire experience of knowing the world.

The people of the ancient Stone Age did not know the ornament. On the images of animals and people made of bone, rhythmically repeating strokes or zigzags are sometimes seen, as if similar to an ornament. But, looking closely, you see that this is a conventional designation for wool, bird feathers or hair. Just as the image of an animal “continues” the rocky background, so these ornament-like motifs have not yet become independent, conditional figures separated from the thing, which can be applied to any surface.

The same connection with natural forms is found in tools and other products. The oldest of them were just chipped stones. Gradually, the tools began to take on forms that only remotely resembled what can be seen in nature. Often people kept what was created by nature unchanged.

Thus, the prevailing in the perception of nature was following it, attention to changing forms, specific phenomena, and not to common features between them, not to constantly repeating signs, which we now call regularities. World settled farmers became different. Characteristically, ornament begins to play a leading role in their fine arts. Rhythmically repeating figures cover the smooth walls of vessels, the walls of dwellings. Probably, carpets and fabrics that have not survived to our time were also decorated with ornaments. The ornament appeared when people discovered stable features in the structure of the things they created.

Ornament motifs often conveyed images of people, animals, and birds in a conditional form. But many of them were geometric, and over time there are more and more such ornaments. Geometric outlines were given to both decorations and stamps, which were used to apply images to plastic materials (clay, dough). The figures of people who sculpted from clay, in their outlines, approached geometric shapes. All this shows that they began to look at the world differently than before: after all, there are not so many objects and creatures in nature that look like strict geometric shapes.

So far, distant signs of written signs began to appear in ornaments: after all, it is known that the signs of the most ancient writings were pictorial. Their meaning is closely related to what they depicted.

Paleolithic Art

The first works of primitive art were created about thirty thousand years ago, at the end of the Paleolithic era, or the ancient Stone Age.

The most ancient sculptural images today are the so-called "Paleolithic Venuses" - primitive female figures. All of them have some common features: enlarged hips, abdomen and chest, lack of feet. Primitive sculptors were not even interested in facial features. Their task was not to reproduce a specific nature, but to create a certain generalized image of a woman-mother, a symbol of fertility and the keeper of the hearth. Male images in the Paleolithic era are very rare. Almost all Paleolithic sculpture is made of stone or bone.

In the history of cave painting of the Paleolithic era, experts distinguish several periods. In ancient times (from about the 30th millennium BC), primitive artists filled the surface inside the outline of the drawing with black or red paint.

Later (from about the 18th to the 15th millennium BC), primitive masters began to pay more attention to detail: they depicted wool with oblique parallel strokes, learned to use additional colors (various shades of yellow and red paint) to paint spots on the skins of bulls, horses and bison. The contour line also changed: it became brighter and darker, marking the light and shadow parts of the figure, skin folds and thick hair (for example, horse manes, massive buffalo manes), thus conveying volume. In some cases, the contours or the most expressive details were emphasized by ancient artists with a carved line.

In 1868, in Spain, in the province of Santander, the Altamira cave was discovered, the entrance to which had previously been covered with a landslide.

An outstanding discovery was made quite by accident in September 1940. The Lascaux Cave in France, which became even more famous than Altamira, was discovered by four boys who, while playing, climbed into a hole that opened under the roots of a tree that had fallen after a storm. In the future, cave images lost their liveliness, volume; stylization (generalization and schematization of objects) intensified. In the last period, realistic images are completely absent.

Mesolithic Art

In the era of the Mesolithic, or the Middle Stone Age (XII-VIII millennium BC), the climatic conditions on the planet changed. Some of the hunted animals have disappeared; they were replaced by others. Fisheries began to develop. People created new types of tools, weapons (bows and arrows), tamed the dog.

Previously, the focus of the ancient artist was the animals he hunted, now - the figures of people depicted in rapid movement. If Paleolithic cave paintings represented separate, unrelated figures, then Mesolithic rock art began to be dominated by multi-figured compositions and tracks that vividly reproduce various episodes from the life of hunters of that time. In addition to various shades of red paint, black and occasionally white were used, and egg white, blood, and possibly honey served as a stable binder.

Central to the rock art were hunting scenes, in which hunters and animals are linked in a vigorously unfolding action.

Large paintings were replaced by small ones. Human figures are very conditional, they are rather symbols that serve to depict mass scenes.

Neolithic art

The melting of glaciers in the Neolithic, or New Stone Age (5000-3000 BC), set in motion peoples who began to populate new spaces. Intensified intertribal struggle for the possession of the most favorable hunting grounds, for the seizure of new lands. In the Neolithic era, man was threatened by the worst of dangers - another person! Rock art in the Neolithic era becomes more and more schematic and conditional: images only slightly resemble a person or animal.

Rock art has existed in all parts of the world, but nowhere has it been as widespread as in Africa.

In the III-II millennium BC. e. there were structures from huge stone blocks - megaliths (from the Greek "megas" - "big" and "lithos" - "stone"). Megalithic structures include menhirs - vertically standing stones more than two meters high; dolmens - several stones dug into the ground, covered with a stone slab; cromlechs are complex structures in the form of circular fences with a diameter of up to one hundred meters from huge boulders.

The most famous of them is Stonehenge cromlech (II millennium BC), not far from the city of Salisbury in England.

In addition to schematism, they are distinguished by careless execution. Along with stylized drawings of people and animals, there are various geometric figures (circles, rectangles, rhombuses and spirals, etc.), images of weapons (axes and daggers) and vehicles (boats and ships). Reproduction of wildlife fades into the background. Having learned to create images (sculptural, graphic, pictorial), a person has acquired some power over time.

The main stages in the development of primitive art

Introduction. 3

Petroglyphs of Karelia. 15

Monuments of primitive art. 24

Features of primitive art. 26

As is well known, the primitive-communal epoch is considered to be the first step in proper human history. During this period, the formation of man as a special biological species is completed. At the turn of the early and late Paleolithic, the zoological, herd organization gradually turns into a tribal structure, which is already the initial human collective. Further evolution leads to the formation of a community-clan way of life and the development of various ways of social life.

According to the ideas existing in historical science, chronologically, this era begins in the late (upper) Paleolithic and covers a period of time up to the beginning of the Neolithic. In the "social space" it corresponds to the movement of mankind from the first forms of social organization (clan) to the emergence of a primitive neighborhood community.

For primitiveness, a high degree of combination of human existence with everything that happens in the surrounding nature is especially characteristic. Relationships to earth and sky, climatic changes, water and fire, flora and fauna in the conditions of an appropriating (collective-hunting) economy were not only objectively necessary factors of existence, but also constituted the direct content of the life process.

The inseparability of the existence of man and nature, obviously, should have been expressed in the identification of both already at the level of "living contemplation". The representations arising on the basis of the received sensations fixed and stored the impression of sensory perception, and thought and feeling acted as something integral, inseparable from each other. It is quite possible that the endowment of the mental image with the properties of a natural phenomenon perceived through the senses could be the result. Such a "fusion" of nature and its sensory-figurative reflection expresses the qualitative originality of primitive consciousness.

Primitiveness becomes characterized by such features of the archaic worldview as the identification of human existence with natural and the overwhelming predominance of collective ideas in individual thinking. In unity, they form a specific state of the psyche, which is denoted by the concept of primitive syncretism. The content of this type of mental activity lies in the undifferentiated perception of nature, human life (in its communal-clan quality) and the sensory-figurative picture of the world. Ancient people are so included in their environment that they think themselves involved in absolutely everything, without standing out from the world, especially without opposing themselves to it. The primitive integrity of being corresponds to a primitive-holistic consciousness, not divided into special forms, for which, to put it simply, "everything is everything."

Such an interpretation of the archaic stage of consciousness can serve as a methodological key to understanding the origins, content and role of early beliefs and rituals in primitive society.

It can be assumed that the most common version of primitive beliefs was the transfer of human, intra-clan relations, ideas and experiences to the processes and elements of nature. Simultaneously and inseparably with this, there was a "reverse" process of transfer: of natural properties into the area of ​​life of the human community.

Thus, the world appeared in the primitive consciousness not only as integral, when any phenomenon and the people themselves are "woven" into the fabric of a generalized being, but also possessing vital qualities, humanized. Since the human in this case is communal and tribal, to the extent that everything covered by the perception of an ancient person is identified with the familiar and familiar tribal way of life.

In a number of archaic beliefs, the first in importance is the attitude to nature as a living being with the same properties as man. In religious studies, there is a point of view according to which the early stage of such beliefs, animatism (from Latin animatus - animated), assumed the permeation of the world with a universal, ubiquitous, but impersonal, life-giving force.

Gradually, with the development of subject-practical activity, the image of the life-giving principle was differentiated. It began to correlate already with specific phenomena of nature and human life, with those aspects of them, the real development of which was beyond the reach. Each being or sensually perceived object, if necessary, was dualized, endowed with a kind of double. They could be represented in a bodily or some other material form (breath, blood, shadow, reflection in water, etc.). At the same time, they were essentially devoid of materiality and were conceived as ideal entities. The contradiction between ideality and objectivity was overcome thanks to the syncretism of primitive thinking: any object of the material world could at the same time act both in real and in incorporeal, a kind of spiritualistic quality. In the end, the double could also lead an independent life, leaving the person, for example, during sleep or in the event of death.

The general concept that has entered the scientific circulation to refer to such beliefs has become the term animism. Its content is quite extensive. First of all, it is associated with the belief in the existence of souls, that is, supersensible formations inherent in objects and natural phenomena, as well as in man.

Souls could be taken out of the bounds of a limited objective state. These are the so-called spirits. In this case, the possibilities of ideal entities increased dramatically: they could move freely in the material world, inhabit any object and acquire the ability to influence various objects, plants, animals, climate and people themselves.

The multiplicity of spirits implies the diversity of their habitats. They are filled with almost the entire world around man. Therefore, most of the acts of everyday life of the tribal community were performed, probably, taking into account the existing views on relations with spirits, and the consequences associated with the influence of spirits are not always favorable. Difficulties and failures, individual and collective, are understood as manifestations of the cunning of evil spirits. The way out of this situation is the search for reliable mechanisms to counteract malicious intrigues. The use of amulets, that is, objects whose presence was considered as protection from the harmful influence of evil spirits, was widespread. As a rule, these are pieces of wood, stones, bones, teeth, animal skins, etc.

Items of a similar type could also be used for the purpose of positive interaction as intermediaries. In all cases, the intermediary object served as a conductor of human needs; with its help, people actually replenished the meager arsenal of means for mastering the natural world. The ability to store, protect from troubles or bring good luck was explained by the presence of magical, miraculous power in the object or the presence of some kind of spirit in it.

Such beliefs are called the concept of fetishism ("fetish" - - an enchanted thing; the term was proposed by the Dutch traveler V. Bosman in the beginning of the 18th century).

It is known that fetishes were often the embodiment of a person's personal patrons. However, those who carried the social burden were considered more important and revered - the defenders of the entire tribal team, ensuring the survival and continuation of the family. Sometimes fetishism was associated with the cult of ancestors, in a peculiar way reinforcing the idea of ​​the continuity of generations.

A natural consequence of the fetishistic attitude of consciousness was to be the transfer of magical and miraculous properties not only to natural or specially produced objects, but also to the people themselves. Proximity to a fetish enhanced the real meaning of a person (sorcerer, elder or leader), who through his experience ensured the unity and well-being of the clan. Over time, the sacralization of the tribal elite took place, especially the leaders, who became living fetishes when they were endowed with miraculous abilities.

Perceiving nature in the images of the tribal community understandable to him, primitive man treated any natural phenomenon as more or less "kindred". The inclusion of tribal ties in the process of interaction with the spheres of the animal and plant world creates the prerequisites for the development of faith in the common origin of human beings with any animals or, which was much less common, plants.

These beliefs, called totemism, are rooted in the blood relations and living conditions of early human groups that developed at the stage of primitiveness. Insufficient reliability and rather frequent turnover of fetishes gave rise to a desire for a more stable foundation, stabilizing the vital activity of tribal structures.

The common origin and blood relationship with the totem was understood in the most direct way. People sought to become like in their behavior the habits of "totem relatives", to acquire their properties and features of appearance. At the same time, the life of the animals chosen as totems and the attitude towards them was considered from the standpoint of human communal-tribal existence.

In addition to the related status, the totem had the function of a patron, a protector. Common totemic beliefs is the fetishization of the totem.

Numerous studies of primitive culture testify that all the named forms of behavior and orientation of the archaic consciousness - animism, fetishism, totemism - are of a stage-global nature. To build them in a certain sequence according to the degree of "development" would be unlawful. As necessary moments in the development of the world, they arise, unfold in the context of a single, holistic worldview, which distinguishes primitive syncretism.

The general cultural significance of these phenomena lies in their focus on meeting the vital needs of human existence; they reflect the real, practical interests of the community-clan organization.

At the primitive stage of culture, combined forms of rituals and beliefs arose, referred to by the general concept of magic (from Greek and Latin words translated as witchcraft, sorcery, sorcery).

The magical perception of the world is based on the idea of ​​universal similarity and interconnection, which makes it possible for a person who feels "participation in everything" to influence any objects and phenomena.

Magical actions are common among all peoples of the world and are extremely diverse. In ethnography and research on the history of religion, there are many classifications and typological schemes of magical beliefs and techniques.

The most common is the division of magic into well-intentioned, salutary, performed openly and for benefit - "white", and harmful, causing damage and misfortune - "black".

The typology has a similar character, distinguishing between offensive-aggressive and defensive-preserving magic.

In the latter case, taboos play an important role - prohibitions on actions, objects and words, which are endowed with the ability to automatically cause all kinds of trouble for a person. The elimination of taboos expresses the instinctive desire of the entire community-clan collective to protect itself from contact with factors that threaten survival.

Often the types of magic are classified according to the spheres of human activity where they are somehow necessary (agricultural, fishing, hunting, healing, meteorological, love, military varieties of magic). They are aimed at the very real everyday aspects of being.

The scales of magical actions differ, which can be individual, group, mass. Magic becomes the main professional occupation of sorcerers, shamans, priests, etc. (institutionalization of magic).

So, a feature of the being and consciousness of people of the primitive era is a kind of integrity, uniting in a complex the natural and human, sensual and speculative, material and figurative, objective and subjective.

Direct dependence on the immediate conditions of existence stimulated such a warehouse of the psyche, in which adaptation to the world should probably consist in maximum self-identification with the environment. The collective organization of life extended the identity of man and nature to the entire tribal community. As a result, the dominant position of supra-individual attitudes of consciousness is established, which have an obligatory and indisputable significance for everyone. The best way to fix them in such a status could be, first of all, by referring to unquestioned absolute authority. They become symbols of the clan - totems or other fetishized objects, up to the sacralization of the tribal top.

There are many reasons to believe that it was practical needs that were decisive for the content of primitive beliefs. In ancient beliefs, the moments of life activity necessary for the organization and preservation of the communal-clan way of life (in work and life, marital relations, hunting, and the fight against hostile collectives) were recorded.

The syncretism of consciousness determines the combination of these real relations with irrationalistic views, bringing them to interpenetration and complete merging. The word becomes identical to the deed, the sign - to the subject, ideas receive a personified appearance. The emerging ideas and images were experienced and “lived through” by a person, first of all, as reality itself.

It can be assumed that the public consciousness of the primitive tribal formation did not know the opposition of the earthly to the unearthly. There were no characters or phenomena in it that stood outside this world, in the realm of transcendental beings. This consciousness did not allow the doubling of the world. The environment was perceived in its involvement with a person, without breaking up into amenable to development and beyond control. In addition, vital needs did not allow a passive-contemplative attitude to the world to take root, directing it into an active channel and strengthening it by means of magic.

Thus, in the primitive era, a special type of consciousness is formed. There is no clear distinction between the real and the ideal in it, fantasy is inseparable from genuine events, the generalization of reality is expressed in sensually concrete images and implies their direct interaction with a person, the collective prevails over the individual and almost completely replaces it. The reproduction of this type of mental activity should have led to the emergence of "constructions" that made it possible to transfer the collective experience of ancient people in a form adequate to the primitive worldview. This form, which combines sensuality and emotionality with didacticity, and comprehensibility and accessibility of assimilation with inducement-volitional motivation for action, becomes a myth (from the Greek. Tradition, legend).

In our time, this word and its derivatives (mythical, myth-making, mythologeme, etc.) designate, sometimes unjustifiably, a wide class of phenomena: from individual fiction in some everyday situation to ideological concepts and political doctrines. But in some areas the concepts of "myth", "mythology" are necessary. For example, in science, the concept of mythology denotes the forms of social consciousness of the primitive era and the field of scientific knowledge related to myths and methods of studying them.

For the first time the phenomenon of myth appears at the archaic stage of history. For a community-clan collective, a myth is not only a story about some kind of natural-human relationship, but also an undeniable reality. In this sense, myth and the world are identical. It is quite appropriate, therefore, to define the awareness of the world in the primitive communal era as mythological consciousness.

Through the myth, some aspects of the interaction of people within the clan and the attitude towards the environment were assimilated. However, the absence of the basic condition for the process of cognition - the distinction between the subject and the object of cognitive activity - calls into question the epistemological function of the archaic myth. Neither material production nor nature are perceived by mythological consciousness in this period as opposed to man, therefore they are not an object of knowledge.

In an archaic myth, to explain means to describe in some images that cause absolute trust (the etiological significance of the myth). This description does not require rational activity. A sensuously concrete idea of ​​reality is enough, which, by the mere fact of its existence, is elevated to the status of reality itself. Ideas about the environment for the mythological consciousness are identical to what they reflect. The myth is able to explain the origin, structure, properties of things or phenomena, but it does this outside the logic of cause-and-effect relationships, replacing them either with a story about the emergence of an object of interest at a certain “original” time by means of “first action”, or simply referring to a precedent.

The unconditional truth of a myth for the "owner" of mythological consciousness removes the problem of separation of knowledge and faith. In an archaic myth, a generalizing image is always endowed with sensual properties and, therefore, is an integral part, obvious and reliable, of reality perceived by a person.

In their original state, animism, fetishism, totemism, magic and their various combinations reflect this general property of archaic mythological consciousness and are, in essence, its concrete incarnations.

With the expansion of the spectrum of human activity, more and more diverse natural and social material is involved in its orbit, and it is society that enters the category of the main sphere of application of efforts. The institution of private property is emerging. Structurally complex formations arise (crafts, military affairs, systems of land use and cattle breeding), which can no longer be identified with any single basis (spirit, fetish, totem) within the limits of earthly existence.

At the level of mythological representations, these processes also cause a number of evolutions. The ubiquitous animation of objects and phenomena is transformed into multifaceted generalizing images of certain areas of life. Being an extremely general expression of reality, these images are identical to it, that is, they themselves are reality, but they enter into the perception of people individualized, with specific features of appearance, character, proper names. Personified characters are increasingly acquiring an anthropomorphic appearance, endowed with quite understandable human qualities. In developed mythologies, they turn into various deities that displace and replace spirits, totemic ancestors, and various fetishes.

This state is called the term polytheism (polytheism). Usually, the transition to polytheistic beliefs accompanied the disintegration of tribal structures and the formation of early statehood.

Each deity was assigned a certain sphere of control in nature and society, a pantheon (a collection of gods) and a hierarchy of gods were formed. Myths arise that explain the origin of the gods, their genealogy and relationships within the pantheon (theogony).

Polytheism involves a rather complex system of cult actions addressed to specific gods and the pantheon as a whole. This significantly increases the importance of the priesthood, professionally wielding knowledge of the ritual.

With the development of states, the gods are increasingly assigned the role of the highest sanction of the socio-political orders established by people. The organization of earthly power is reflected in the pantheon. Stands out, in particular, the cult of the main, supreme god. The rest lose their former position up to the transformation of their functions and properties into the quality of the only god. Monotheism arises.

It should be emphasized that the former orientations of consciousness towards magical and miraculous ways of solving human problems both with polytheism and monotheism are preserved. Most beliefs and rituals still enter people's lives through the "mechanisms" of mythological consciousness. However, in general, the role of myths, their share in the public consciousness is undergoing significant changes.

Social relations in society are changing, and the person himself is changing. Mastering nature, he develops such ways of satisfying his needs that do not need to be supplemented by a magical operation.

But the most fundamental change is that people begin to perceive the world around them in a different way. Little by little, it loses its mystery and inaccessibility. Mastering the world, a person treats it as an external force. To some extent, this was a confirmation of the growing opportunities, power and relative freedom of the human community from the natural elements.

However, having stood out from nature and made it the object of their activity, people have lost their former integrity of being. In place of the feeling of unity with the entire universe comes the realization of oneself as something different from nature and opposed to it.

The gap arises not only with nature. With a new type of social organization (neighborhood community, early class relations), the way of life that was cultivated from generation to generation and determined the content of primitive consciousness is becoming a thing of the past. The connection with the clan is broken. Life is individualized, there is a distinction of one's own "I" in the environment of other human beings.

What archaic mythological consciousness understood directly and "humanized" turns out to be something external to people. It is becoming increasingly difficult to take myth literally as the true content of the life process. It is no coincidence that the allegorical tradition is born and strengthens - the interpretation of the ancient myth as a shell convenient for transferring knowledge about nature, ethical, philosophical and other ideas.

Mythology itself is moving into a new quality. It loses its universality and ceases to be the dominant form of social consciousness. There is a gradual differentiation of the "spiritual" sphere. There is an accumulation and processing of natural scientific knowledge, a philosophical and artistic understanding of the world is developing, political and legal institutions are being formed. At the same time, the formation of such an orientation in beliefs and worship is observed, which delimits the areas of the worldly (natural and human) and the sacred. The idea of ​​a special, mystical connection between the earthly and the unearthly, understood as the supernatural, that is, religion, is affirmed.