> Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, right panel of the diptych.
So many of these paintings portray human faces in near-photorealistic detail... and then the woman's chest looks like a piece of stretched-out vellum with two hemispheres glued onto it.
Is a divinity, so either is a stylized image of "perfection" (whatever it meant in their cultural context); or they tried deliberately to depict the most "non sexually exciting" image possible, while keeping the symbolic aspects
The two men have realistic skin tones, but the woman and baby look like they're carved out of marble or covered in chalk. I guess the latter reflect what the artist considered to be an aesthetic ideal and aren't intended to be true-to-life realistic.
Creating contrast between the ugly real world, with all its pain, suffering and grotesque details, and the spiritual world of gods where everybody is rewarded with an inner glow in their perfect skins. An universally employed narrative
You see something similar in Hindu iconography. Humans are painted brown, the colour of the earth. Gods like Rama, Krishna and Shiva are painted blue, the colour of the heavens.
The contrast tells us "the right side is obviously stylized, and this illustrates that the left side is rendered with realistic perspective".
Which means the rock is round and proves the authors incorrect because they overlook this obvious perspective to claim the rock is flat and axe-like to make their comparison. Their theory rests entirely on the rock in the painting being flat, which could only be true if the perspective was flat. The painter made sure we can see that is not the case.
The painter is telling us there is a narrative and a reality. They baby appears unconvinced and suspicious, as if he knows there is an alternate truth to the story. He appears to be pointing at rock. The baby is telling us he is not the subject, the rock is.
The rock is shown in realistic perspective, indicating depth. However, the authors presume that we are looking at the exact front of a flat object, such as an axe blade. The realistic perspective disqualifies that presumption. If the rock was flat and blade-like, the painter could have shown this explicitly by painting the rock at an angle, like the corner of the wall behind them men.
My (high school) art history taught me that this was a thing. Then they added breasts by sort of guessing.
You’d think that adding them in the armpit region would be obviously wrong, but at the same time, it’s better than any painting I’ll ever attempt in my lifetime.
The babies have all got much more natural looking chests.
It’s got a surreal feel with the colour palette and plastic feel.
It looks like the beginning of a paper titled “Historical argument for the existence of Breast Augmentation” much in the same vein of “Jesus is real because Judaea existed” or “Spiderman is real because New York is a real city”.
Hadn't noticed the blood dripping from the head of the taller man. It adds a brutal context to the scene, for sure. The dead people look alive, and the alive look like being recently pulled from the bottom of a fjord.
Kings and people in power often hoarded curious artifacts in special cabinets of "natural marvels". Painters included pets and personal objects in the pictures to please his powerful clients. Is possible that exactly the same stone could be found still lying somewhere in some palace or museum.
I think it looks like a worked core, because of the flat bottom which would be the striking platform (upside down). The flat striking platform is made first, and then flakes are struck from the edge working around the core. This doesn’t rule out the core being made into a tool itself but many are discarded.
This makes me think of that scene in Life of brian where they pick out stones for the stoning. I mean, how do archaeologists know that people weren't knapping stones for stonings?
I know the obvious answer is "the stratas and context".
What an odd thing to claim and publish, and the wikipedia article is already updated with these spurious "findings". That qualifies as suspicious. The actual position taken by these "archeologists" from their paper about a "modern social history of prehistoric handaxes" is quite a reach.
The rock does not look like the flat head of any axe, nor does a "prehistoric stone tool" bear any meaning whatsoever in the context of the image. In fact the rock resembles fragments of meteorite. Perhaps all the supposed "ancient handaxes" are really from a more recent meteoric event. That would be quite a thrust against prehistorical man narratives made up by archeologists.
Oh, people really called these supposed axes "thunderstones" before the advent of modern archeology claimed they are tools of prehistoric man. Yet these "researchers" claim a painting proves that 15th century people already thought the rocks were ancient handaxes despite contrary evidence, in other words that what archeologists made up was already well know; so it must be true after all, how convenient. But that is tautological: provide a theory based on a painting and claim the painting is evidence the theory is correct.
First let's breakdown what "modern social history of prehistoric handaxes" means, as virtually every word has a technical definition.
"Modern" - from the modern period, i.e. 1500s onwards
"Social history" - a specific type of historical analysis focusing on essentially what a common man would have thought and known about. This is a very rough reduction of what the term actually encompasses.
"Prehistoric" - old stuff
"Handaxes" - a specific category of lithic (i.e. stone) tools that are typically symmetrical bifaces, distinct from modern axes.
Also, most rocks can be confused for meteorites and vice versa. "Looking like a meteorite" means nothing. The rock shown does look quite a bit like a chert core though. I'd be surprised if it was actually a handaxe because they're almost always symmetric and tapering, which the painting doesn't show, but I don't care enough to read the paper.
The authors claim that modern 15th century people already knew the "pre-historic" narrative about rocks being axes. They are shoe-horning this theory into the painting by claiming the painter and 15th century people already thought these rocks were ancient handaxes, and thats why it features so importantly in the mysterious painting. That seems a rather hoaxy claim to me: The archeological narrative must be correct if people already knew it to be true!
The authors state in their abstract this is their goal, to push back the evidence of such a "social history", to a time before archeologists made up the narrative about hand-axes. The authors are literally attempting to incept the archeological claim to a prior age of modern history. Is that what you mean, because that is definitely and literally the motive of this research.
Edit, also the rock in the painting is not a "biface". That part of the painting has obvious depth and perspective (shadows, walls, angles). The rock in the painting is ROUND.
> The authors claim that modern 15th century people already knew the "pre-historic" narrative about rocks being axes.
You're mistaken, the article does not say that 15th century people knew the rock was a hand axe. The article claims (correctly I think) that the painting depicts a hand axe but doesn't say the painter intended to depict an axe. The painter would have understood the rock to be a thunderstone and painted it accurately enough that today we can see that it was actually a handaxe.
You are wrong. Maybe you did not read the paper which the article is reporting.
From the paper abstract: "Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but it does push back the evidence for when handaxes became a prominent part of the ‘modern’ social and cultural world." Indicating they think the painter and his contemporary society had a "culture" of appreciation for the objects as axes.
> The authors claim that modern 15th century people already knew the "pre-historic" narrative about rocks being axes.
I read the paper. I found no such claim - please cite.
> The authors state in their abstract this is their goal, to push back the evidence of such a "social history", to a time before archeologists made up the narrative about hand-axes. The authors are literally attempting to incept the archeological claim to a prior age of modern history. Is that what you mean, because that is definitely and literally the motive of this research.
They literally do not do so.
They claim that the stones we call handaxes were considered a separate type of rock. Then they discuss various conceptualizations of that rock at the time. They claim that one person thought it was interesting that category of stone including handaxes bore a resemblence to arrowheads from the new world, but his work wasn't published until 1717 (long after that person's death).
You seem mad at archaelogists for claiming things like "these handaxes are old" in general, and specifically at these guys for pointing out historical descriptions of things that sound like handaxes, and paintings that look a lot like handaxes. They literally (using a dictionary definition of the word - in this case the factual definition) state in their paper:
"In the knowledge that works of art are not exact transcripts of reality, it would be difficult, if not impossible, conclusively to identify whether a handaxe is represented in this fifteenth-century painting. We can, however, potentially strengthen the inference that a handaxe is depicted through three artefact-based routes of inquiry."
I'm not sure what you're going on about, your claims seem false upon reading the paper.
Read the last sentence of their abstract: "Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but it does push back the evidence for when handaxes became a prominent part of the ‘modern’ social and cultural world."
That clearly Indicates the authors believe the painter and his contemporary society of modern 15th century peoples already had a culture of appreciation for the objects as pre-historic axes, that their so-called finding "pushes back the date" for this appreciation. That is literally their thesis and conclusion.
That argument is reductive. They are saying that the painting is evidence that early modern people believed axe-theory because the authors have identified the rock in the painting as an axe from axe-theory. Everything else is speculation. It is complete garbage with a motive to push archeological axe-theory for academic crumbs. It is a desperate attempt to scrape empirical evidence for imaginary archeologies.
So many of these paintings portray human faces in near-photorealistic detail... and then the woman's chest looks like a piece of stretched-out vellum with two hemispheres glued onto it.