Word: altamira
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...recalled that many cave decorations were magic symbols to help the painter with his hunting, and thus "today walls are painted so that the artist may eat," whereas "in prehistoric times walls were painted so that the community might eat." Nevertheless, said he: "The formal elegance of the Altamira bison; the grandeur of outline in the Norwegian rock engravings of bear, elk and whale; the cornucopian fecundity of Rhodesian animal landscapes; the kinetic fury of the East Spanish huntsmen; the spontaneous ease with which the South African draftsmen mastered the difficult silhouets of moving creatures: these are achievements which living...
...into Africa after the last glacial period, and on his first expedition to North Africa in 1912, Professor Frobenius opened up the richest continental deposit of cave paintings and engravings. It was already known that in Magdalenian times some artist had smeared iron oxide on a cavern wall at Altamira, in north Spain. Cunningly he had fashioned a lively bison, with a fine high hump, muscular forelegs, a head set well enough to do justice to contemporary Animal Artist John Raltenbury Skeaping (TIME, May 3). In Khotsa Cave, 5,000 mi. from Spain in Basutoland, South Africa, Anthropologist Frobenius found...
...Dawes & friends wandered last fortnight into the Dordogne section of southwestern France, to clamber about the rocks of the Vezere valley, penetrated dark caves and troglodytic dwellings. Traveling from there into northern Spain, the party went to Santander, to visit Altamira Cavern and study the famed Paleolithic frescoes painted with mineral oxides, the bison engravings cut into rock. Then Mr. Dawes visited the National Archeological Museum and the Museum of Natural History in Madrid. Headquarters of the expedition in Spain was in the southern province of Huelva...