On Realist Art 1: Stone Age to Mesopotamia

Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com

Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Journal Founding: August 2, 2012

Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year

Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed

Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access

Fees: None (Free)

Volume Numbering: 12

Issue Numbering: 3

Section: E

Theme Type: Idea

Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”

Theme Part: 31

Formal Sub-Theme: Realist Art.

Individual Publication Date: July 8, 2024

Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2024

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Word Count: 5,366

Image Credits: None.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*

Abstract

Lance Richlin is an award-winning Classical Realist painter and sculptor based out of Los Angeles, California. His full resume is here. Richlin discusses: realism; colours; outline and the shading; transition from the Stone Age; symmetrical portrayals of human figures in ancient Egypt and surrounding cultures.

Keywords: Stone Age art, realism definition, Lascaux cave paintings, Venus of Willendorf, Neanderthal art, Sumerian civilization, Mesopotamian wall reliefs, Egyptian sculptures, Nefertiti portrait, Egyptian art techniques.

On Realist Art 1: Stone Age to Mesopotamia

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This will be a multi-part series on realism. We’re going to be doing this chronologically. We will start with the earliest indications of realism, going back to the origin of human art in cave paintings, basically in the Stone Age. So, what characterizes realism so you can extend it back to the Stone Age?

Lance Richlin: Well, let me define the term immediately. When discussing realism, we’re talking about mimesis, i.e., making things look like other things. I like to put it this way: God created humans, but humans create art, and it’s our way of creating things, of creating symbols for what we see. Now, I say define terms because I want to clarify that a realism movement emerged in the 19th century. Their idea of realism depicted modern life in the 19th century, i.e., people working in factories and carrying out their daily activities in the cities, as opposed to idealistic depictions of Roman gods’ legends or religious art. Do you see what I’m saying? So, there’s realism, where it’s more of a choice of subject matter as opposed to fantasy, but the realism that I’m referring to is humanity learning to depict what it sees.

There’s a second reason I want to make this distinction: when I was in art school, all of my teachers were abstract artists, and they all hated realism. So, out of sheer cruelty, whenever I complained that I wasn’t learning realism, they always asked me, “Well, what do you mean by realism?” I could strangle them for this. I would say, “Well, you know, like the old masters,” and then they would bring up these strange examples where an artist had lengthened a leg or put a highlight on an area that wouldn’t normally get a highlight, and if you look through our history there are a lot of what we call accurate representations that have slight artistic changes or mistakes. Then the abstract artist teacher would say, “See! That’s not realism”. So, rather than fall into some weird trap like that, humanity is learning to create things that look like things, and there are a variety of purposes for this, which is a separate issue.

The first would be to tell a story, but some archaeologists will say that it was a religious purpose or training, for example, when you look at the Stone Age. Realism began obviously in the Stone Age; the cave paintings of Lascaux are the most famous wall paintings that Cro-Magnons, the first homo sapiens, did. The archaeologist debated the purpose of these paintings. So, the paintings I’m referring to are images of hunts; they would have animals that they depicted on the walls. I should add this here before I forget that they also started to sculpt. So, there’s a famous sculpture they call the Venus of Willendorf because all depictions of human females were called Venuses; it’s an archaeological term, but these early hominids would create on the walls and in stone they would carve depictions of what they saw.

The Venus of Willendorf is a really fat, orb-like woman, kind of a nondescript head; it’s hard to see that it’s a human head, but it’s a representation of a woman. It’s got, I think, several breasts or something like that, but in the beginning, they were either creating the images to tell a story or as part of a ritual. We’ll never know why they were doing it, and by the way, we used to believe that we separated from the Neanderthal — by Homo sapiens’s ability to create wall art. But in 2018, they found Neanderthal wall art.  And they have found carved ornaments. So, they did know how to carve elaborate things that were of some use. In the famous Neanderthal cave, which is very representative, among the highest concentration of Neanderthals we’ve ever found,  in southern Spain. They have some caves, the last Neanderthal outpost. The art is rudimentary but like Homo Sapiens’ simpler work. Line drawings, outlines of a hand.

 The interesting thing is that the Neanderthals survived till the very end in this cave in southern Spain, which was the last outpost they had because it was the easiest to live there. There were abundant fish near the cave, and it was nice weather, so it was harder to die out. So, that’s why they think that they survived the longest there. Also, we now know that humans bred with Neanderthals. So, they didn’t die out; we all have a little Neanderthal in us. Every race, by the way, not just Caucasians and Asians, which they originally thought like black people didn’t have any Neanderthal, but it turns out they do have a little bit, but the early people studying these things, geneticists, didn’t look in the right area. We now find that everybody has a little Neanderthal in them.

So, they survived, but getting back to the point.  We know several ways that the Stone Age artists created representations. The first is how it might have begun; we surmise that it might have begun because they did several things to make it easier to depict reality. The first was we had an image of a hand that was a wall print. So, in other words, a troglodyte put his hand up against the wall, and he drew around his fingers, and when he pulled his hand away, obviously, he had a perfect depiction of a hand that wouldn’t have been done any better today. So, we know that they did that; we also suspect that they copied images of their hands or different things that were cast by shadows from the fire they had inside the cave. So, they may have outlined shadows. They had charcoal and things that could make the colour. They had reds and blacks, and finally, we know that they used the shape of a cave to create animals. So, obviously, one of our sensitive ancestors looked at the side of a cave and saw a shape in it that reminded them of an animal, and then they may have just accentuated that.

We know they accentuated that because that’s in the cave paintings we find today. They accentuated that by adding colours and lines around it, and we have elaborate depictions of animals, herds of animals and descriptions of hunts. So, not only would they depict the animals, but they would sometimes depict humans chasing the animals with spears. The humans are not carefully rendered, and one of the odd things about it is that the animals are sometimes easily identifiable, and they even include shading, which is a leap. Most children can do an outline, and children’s drawings are very similar to cavemen’s. Children will start with a simple outline, but when you start adding shading, that’s pretty advanced, and it may be the result of seeing the natural crevices and ledges in the cave creating shadows from the light source, and they may have seen those shadows helping the realism of their piece. So, they learned that if there’s some shading here, it’ll make the animal look more real, so why not add some charcoal there and see if we can make the animal look more real? They have some fairly believable animals that are more realistic than young children’s.

And, of course, depending on the cave, the area of the cave, and the culture, very primitive people like Australia and Native Americans also created line figures and outlines around the world. It is a common practice to start with outlines and very low relief, meaning if you look at a coin, the depiction of Thomas Jefferson is low relief. So, you can see low reliefs worldwide, but the early man would carve animals heads out of stone, and we have them, and these are early. To get back to the humans, they were usually depicted as simple long rectangles with lines for legs and arms and maybe holding a spear or a line for a spear or maybe a bow shape. So, we know they had bows, but the humans are very rudimentary compared to the animals.

Do you want to interject any questions before I leave the Stone Age?

Jacobsen: Two things. When they’re doing the outline and using these reds and blacks, what are they using to get those colours?

Richlin: Well, I mean, if you have a campfire and you reach into it and you grab some burnt charcoal or wood, and then you rub it against a piece of paper, you’re going to get a line. So, it was easy for early men to figure out how to create lines on walls with burnt wood, stones, and mud. There are some colours that you can pull right out of the ground. There’s a colour called Raw Sienna, which originated in Sienna, Italy, and we still use it today. They call it Raw Sienna because it’s the colour of mud that is in Sienna, and when it is up, you have to clean it up, grind it into powder and add oil to it; you can paint in the colour Sienna. So, of course, this leads to the fact that almost all early man’s colours are earth tones for that very reason; they come right out of the earth. They had whites that came from various stones. Some chalks can be found in, well, there’s the White Cliffs of Dover; I believe there are natural chalks that are white. So, finding things you could use to make colours was easy.

The early man, the Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthal existed for thousands and thousands of years, and during that time, we know they passed on their information. They were very good about that, so we’re now finding they did some meticulous, elaborate processes. We know that they had to do things that took three or four steps where they had to take certain rocks, and they would have to melt them, and then they would have to treat them in various ways to get them to be harder or whatever their purpose was but it wasn’t as simple as taking a piece of flint and just carving with it into a piece of stone. They had a variety of things they made that required several steps, such as burning it, carving it, and distilling the water out of something. So, they had some very sophisticated processes that they had to remember and pass down to create all the little ornaments and objects that we have today that we found from them. Furthermore, God knows what they may have had that we don’t know anything about.

Jacobsen: Now, just a last point on the Stone Age, the outline and the shading, did those techniques emerge simultaneously or did one happen and then the other? Do we know?

Richlin: I don’t think we know, but if you look at primitive art in Africa or in caves in Australia, there are places around the world where people are just learning to make depictions: Native Americans. It always starts with the outlines, but you can see the shading in the caves. So, if you were to go, there are rock drawings, I believe, in Utah where people have drawn on the cliffs, and they usually are just outlines, but you can see shading. As I say, the fire in the campfire may have created shadows. So, people could see shadows and automatically start to colour things to depict the shadows or to say this is a red or brown bison. Sometimes, it’s actual shading; sometimes, it’s colouring, which is different. For example, you can depict a brown bison without drawing shadows on the bison; you can say it’s brown, but interestingly, the carving of, say, an animal’s head or a stone woman that was taking place at roughly the same time and those are pretty solid depictions of animals in a lot of really early Stone Age cultures.

So, the ability to create something that looks like a human, I mean even Easter Island. I don’t believe that in Easter Island ever reached the Bronze Age, and those are unbelievable depictions of humans or humanoid creatures. It’s important to understand that you can carve something and make it look somewhat sophisticated. The reason I’m saying this is that, as I said in our earlier interview, it requires a lot more sophistication to create a two-dimensional image than a sculpture of something because you can pick up a rock on the beach and say that looks like a human head and if you’ve got a flint tool you can carve that make it look more like a human head and that’s how we think it started; you can see a nose on the side, you can see the fruit that looks a little bit more like a human than other fruit.

That was a no-brainer, but creating lines symbolic of humans is a little more complicated. So, it took a bit different brain power to create that, maybe not more brain power, but when you start making those lines, you will also start making hieroglyphics. You’re also going to start saying, “Well, I got to make a symbol for the sun; I got to make a symbol for rain…,” and then suddenly, you’re creating a language. So, the original writing, hieroglyphics, is very much connected to art because it’s like imagining if you had to draw a mommy and a daddy and you couldn’t write m-o-m-m-y and d-a-d-d-y. That’s where the original hieroglyphics came from, and we believe that almost all writing began with pictographs, meaning something that is a shorthand for a drawing of something. It was only later that people separated sketchy drawings from actual codes of writing ABCD, that kind of thing. Does this matter to you?

Jacobsen: It does. What is the transition from the Stone Age to the next developments in realism?

Richlin: So, the next developments were the Sumerians in Mesopotamia and the earliest great civilizations we know about. We’ve made discoveries in areas that are now Yugoslavia and Turkey, where there were even earlier civilizations. The Sumerians are a good place to start because they represent very early transitions in art. The earliest depictions of art would have been wall carvings. We don’t have any paintings that have survived. We know that the wall carvings were painted. The Egyptians certainly painted the wall reliefs. They found flecks of paint on early three-dimensional sculptures, where they depicted animals and people. I’m starting with the Sumerians because they made early representations of humans. We have three-dimensional sculptures by them of humans. They look comical because they’ve got huge eyes. I was going to say eyeballs. They’re still in a primitive stage where things weren’t in proportion. When you go over to the Mesopotamians, they had a whole lineage going from the Sumerians to the Babylonians to the Assyrians to the Babylonians again, to the Persians.

Each one of these civilizations–I left out the Hittites–defeated the Babylonians. The Hittites collapsed through civil war. But Babylon was overcome by Assyria, who was overcome, I believe, by a revolt of Babylonians, followed by the final, the Persians and the Medes in an alliance, took over the area. That was the history of Mesopotamia, meaning the area between the Nile and the Euphrates rivers, which is today in modern Iraq, extending into Turkey. That whole thousand or fifteen hundred-year civilization and series of civilizations ended with Alexander the Great, who conquered Persia. But all that to say, they had a very elaborate system of wall reliefs. When you talk about Mesopotamian art, you’re talking about things that began in a very primitive way with Sumerian large-eyed, squat figures carved out of stone, all the way up to the elaborate wall reliefs that we have today and three-dimensional sculptures in Persia. Maybe a few hundred, say 500 years, before BC, when that ended with Alexander the Great. So we’re talking about a long period, but by the time you get to the Persians, these are elaborate wall carvings of reliefs of their kings, mythology, and hunting. They painted them in all cultures, whether Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, or Persian.

All of them created elaborate wall reliefs and painted them. When you talk about why they did them, they did them for every conceivable reason. However, Mesopotamia used wall reliefs as communication and elaborate sculptures of their gods and goddesses. I’ll tell you a funny story. They typically would create these giant monuments to their military victories. So, all of the early cultures depicted these tremendous battle scenes. Giant figures of basically the home team. Here’s our guys beating the sea people who are invaders or the people around us. What they would do, besides just being proud of them, is have ambassadors and envoys from the surrounding neighborhoods or areas stand in awe of their military victories before they would give them a conference, so they’d have to wait and look at that before they would talk to the king. So, by then, there were elaborate depictions of hunting and family life. At the same time, Egypt was progressing along the same lines. We know that they had elaborate interactions with one another. The first recorded major battle was the Battle of Kadesh between Egypt and the Hittites, and that’s depicted. Both sides, the Mesopotamians to the East and the Egyptians to the West were creating fully three-dimensional sculptures that were not attached to walls.

The Egyptians surpassed the Mesopotamians in depictions of human figures. They were doing gigantic five-story, tall humans; their depictions of their emperors were magnificent. Extremely, extremely carefully done; I saw something on the internet where someone said no human could have done these sculptures because they’re so perfectly balanced, meaning one ear perfectly represents the ear on the other side of the head. The corners of the mouth are perfectly horizontal. The corners of the eyes are perfectly horizontal. Perfect mirror images of the head’s other sides take much work. But humans can do it using the same tools you would use to balance a building. You could use those tools to make an eye the same size or an ear the same size and shape. We knew they could build a perfectly accurate architecture that wasn’t leaning. Not only that, but they were giants. The Egyptians were doing things carved out of giant stone and looked human.

It is very well depicted; besides these gigantic sculptures, several beautiful naturalistic depictions of humans exist. Naturalistic means looking like they’re from nature, which is what you would see. So they’re not symbolic; they’re not sculptures that are fancifully painted. Two examples would be the portrait of Nefertiti, the wife of Akhenaten, the pharaoh, the first monotheist in human history. She was beautifully painted and sculpted. It looks like a real woman, not idealized at all. There’s a famous sculpture of what they call a scribe because he’s sitting with writing and papyrus instruments. He’s painted the colour of an Egyptian. He’s got reddish-coloured skin and black hair. It looks like a real person. This is a three-dimensional sculpture. I’d like to weigh in on a controversial subject right now. For a long time, some African Americans were trying to claim that the Egyptians were black. We know what colour they were because they painted themselves. It’s only a mystery if you have no familiarity with Egyptian art. You can see what colour they were.

They painted figurines of different kinds, like little military models and little armies; some were black, whereas all the figures were black. They would have next to them figures where the people’s skin was sort of a reddish-brown with black hair and the black wigs we expect from Egyptian art. So, the sculptures are very naturalistic, meaning true to life, true to what your eye would see without much idealization of the faces. Some of them look like black people. Some of them look more like people from other equatorial cultures. What archaeologists and anthropologists have thought from the very beginning, and I see no reason to change, is that the Egyptians were mixed people. I’m sure they had much black blood. They were conquered by the Nubians, who were in present-day Ethiopia to the South of Egypt. So we know that they had black pharaohs for a while, and they were in constant warfare with the Libyans to the West, who were a North African people, and the black Africans to the South. They all intermarried. The sculptures sometimes have Africanized facial features or look slightly more like Arabs or Mediterranean people. But I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older that when I was younger, people would see a depiction of Nefertiti and say, “This is what an ancient Egyptian looked like.”

Now, I see these computer-generated images of what the real Nefertiti looked like based on that sculpture. They always make her look more like the typical African American. They’re lying. You can see exactly what she looks like. You don’t have to make her look more black. You don’t have to make her look like–I don’t know–Diana Ross or Aretha Franklin. She is what she is, which is a mixed person. A good way to describe it is if you had a black person who looked like LeBron James marry a white person or an Arab, the result would look like an Egyptian from ancient Egypt. Modern Egyptians are predominantly Arab because the Arabs swept through Egypt in the 700s AD, I believe. They occupied Egypt. So you’re not getting the ancient Egyptians, though I’m sure you’re getting much ancient Egyptian blood in modern Egyptians.

Jacobsen: So this transition then, and these enormous, five-story, symmetrical portrayals of human figures in ancient Egypt and surrounding cultures, how did that evolve if it did? Or where did it next and then transfer to as that civilization waned?

Richlin: The only flaw I would give to Egyptian art is that they still needed to learn to depict movement or relaxed gestures. So it is a big deal in early Egyptian art when there’s one foot, one leg moving forward. Now, in the wall paintings, they move the bodies around a lot. They would depict kings with their arms raised, about to strike an opponent. They would show them grabbing their enemies. The Egyptians, for example, would always depict their people as larger, possibly six times the size of the enemy, who are depicted as little figures. But in all of the early art, including Mesopotamian art, there would be limbs doing things, holding things, and sitting down, standing up. They were still stiff in both Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt because they tended not to bend their knees very much. Unless they were sitting down. But the figures were very static-looking. They weren’t caught in mid-gesture, mid-motion, or relaxed pose, sitting down symmetrically, or standing with one leg forward. They still have their arms attached to their sides.

They didn’t separate the arms from the stone, which is very difficult. If you were going to carve a stone, keeping the arms stuck at your sides is much easier than separating them and having them reach out. In Egyptian art, the sculptures were very stable. They followed the principle that Michelangelo later on developed. Michelangelo, even in the Renaissance, where the figures were extremely animated and true to life. He said nothing should break off if you roll it down a hill. So he liked the idea that the sculpture should look monumental, whereas if the arms, legs, and head were all twisting around, those body parts would look less monumental. They would look weaker but also more lively. So, the Egyptians were at a stage in human history when just having one leg forward was a big deal in their three-dimensional sculpture. All early cultures follow this.

There was a culture called Cycladic, which consisted of Mediterranean peoples who made very rudimentary figures with very primitive shapes, but the legs were stuck together. The arms are stuck together. Everything’s stuck into one form, into one shape. Nothing is sticking out. The same is true with Easter Island. Giant figures, but again, the arms and legs are next to the body. When I was a kid, as far as Easter Island goes, I would like to point out that We thought that they were all heads. Only recently, in my lifetime, in the past 20 or 30 years, did people dig them out and find out that they extended down and had bodies. It seems wild, but that was only recently. Of course, the arms and legs are stuck together. So, it is common for humans to learn how to separate the limbs. Also, early Egyptian art, and even later Egyptian art, even up to the time of Cleopatra, when Egyptian civilization ended and became Greco-Roman, still had somewhat idealized faces and perfect regularity.

There was a tendency to repeat the same face over and over again. Now, the Egyptians did have individualized faces. There’s a famous sculpture of a scribe, but there’s also a sculpture of an official, some bureaucrat, who had an Africanized face and was obese, this fellow. It looks like a person. You can tell that it’s a person. However, the sculptures and the figures of the pharaohs all tend to look the same, except, interestingly, the figures of Akhenaten and his wife and children, Nefertiti. They have elongated skulls. And they’re very long and thin figures. We think that was because of interbreeding. The Egyptians married their sisters, and so they had physical deformities. Akhenaten had very wide hips in the sculptures and wall paintings, depicted with a long neck, narrow shoulders, and elongated skulls. The Egyptians were doing a somewhat accurate representation of him. They weren’t idealizing him particularly. To the best of their ability, they were trying to create this as the way the man looked.

He was overthrown and murdered by Thutmose III, who returned to the traditional depiction of the Egyptian pharaohs. He had a very athletic build, with broad shoulders and a normal-shaped skull; I don’t know if we know what his skull looked like because all the wall paintings I can recall of Thutmose III have headgear on. They had different headgear. They had different helmets. There’s a war helmet that they had, which was shorter, more squat, and looked like it couldn’t get knocked off as easily. Then they had the long one that looked more like a top hat. It’s interesting. They wore the Upper Egyptian hat in early Egyptian clothing, which looked like a top hat without a brim. Then, they had a rounded one for Lower Egypt, which looks more like the top of a pawn in chess. Now, I’ll be honest. I don’t remember which one looked like which. I don’t remember which one was Upper Egypt or Lower Egypt. But in the beginning, Egypt was divided between the area closer to the Mediterranean and the area closer to Ethiopia, and the first leader who conquered the other side was Narmer, Pharaoh Narmer. He combined the two hats so that when you see the Egyptian hat, it’s like a top hat and has the sort of pawn shape from the chessboard; that’s the combination of Upper and Lower Egypt.

The Egyptians were very accurate anatomically. I remember reading that if you look at the feet of the Egyptians, their toes are perfectly shaped. So, if you put the feet together, the toes are straight so that the big toes touch each other, which is how toes are. Unless they’ve been altered in some way, deformed by modern shoes. So there was a movement when I was a child of giving children shoes that didn’t narrow the foot to a point. If you look at most people’s feet today, the big toes don’t touch when they put their feet together, but the ancient Egyptians’ feet do. So, we know that they were looking at anatomy. The figures are extremely well-proportioned. These are handsome people. When they wanted their emperors to look attractive their pharaohs to look attractive, they looked attractive. They look like well-built people. The men are larger than the women. Taller, they have thin waists. The only thing is, we need to find out that they knew elaborate anatomy. For example, the anatomy is very simplified. You don’t see much separation of muscles and tendons. We know they had these things. They were athletic people.

So, you don’t see elaborate bumps and bulges for the ankles or the knees, but you do see good proportion. Another interesting thing is that even in ancient Egyptian art, the men, by tradition or law–we don’t know–are always depicted as darker than the females. Females have paler skin, and the men are depicted as having tans. We know that’s because the men are depicted as warriors and hunters. They are outdoor people compared to their women. It was a sign of wealth and sophistication if you could keep your female inside if she didn’t have to go outside to forage or join in migrations. So, I think they were quite proud of the fact that the women were more pale, which is another reason why nobody assumed that the Egyptians were black people because it’s obvious that their men could go out and get tan. Otherwise, why would you have a red-brown pharaoh next to his somewhat lighter female queen? Why would you have that if they didn’t have the kind of skin that would change colour with the sun? Now, again, even black people can get darker in the sun; I am in no way saying that the Egyptians were white. Like in the film The Ten Commandments, the Egyptians were sometimes depicted by white actors like Charlton Heston.

I’m not saying they looked like Vikings, and they had black blood. They weren’t as black as sub-Saharan Africans; even sub-Saharan Africans vary in shade. But the Egyptians were mixed. I live in a black area of Los Angeles.  I had a black girlfriend who told me that even blacks in the US come in five different shades. This is fun. She said she’s mahogany, but there is also black, yellowish, reddish, brownish. So that’s five. Mahogany combines all of them, meaning different parts of black people’s bodies are slightly different colours. People have been obsessed with this since the beginning of humanity. It reveals itself in ancient wall paintings. Now, we don’t know. We discovered recently through microscopic analysis that even the Greeks painted their three-dimensional sculptures. So, a lot of these sculptures that have survived Egyptians are painted.

And there’s no reason to believe that the outdoor sculptures weren’t painted as well. The wall paintings of the Assyrians and Persians have survived, too. They were painted as well. Even the pyramids were painted; we see them as sand-coloured, but they might have been. We found flecks of paint on them as well. So ancient Egypt wasn’t just sand-coloured architecture. It was painted in glorious colours. The other important thing to note is that ancient art also depicted combinations of mythological figures. For example, the Egyptian God Anubis has a wolf’s or jackal’s head. Horus had a hawk’s head on a human body. The ancient Assyrians and Mesopotamians of all types and nationalities would combine winged creatures with human creatures. The Assyrians were famous for putting wings on humans. Combinations of animals in several Mesopotamian cultures, combinations of animals with humans and other animals. So that indicates that art was used only partially to create what you see. It was also used to depict things that you would imagine as well. So this is good. This is an important distinction. Here is where you get a distinction in the word realism. Because obviously, humans don’t have animal heads. So here, art was used to depict the gods and combine mythology and human imagination. This is a good place to stop, don’t you?

Jacobsen: Yes, I agree. This is a good stopping point. We’ll continue from here next time.

Bibliography

None

Footnotes

None

Citations

American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. On Realist Art 1: Stone Age to Mesopotamia. July 2024; 12(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realism-1

American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, July 8). On Realist Art 1: Stone Age to Mesopotamia. In-Sight Publishing. 12(3).

Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. On Realist Art 1: Stone Age to Mesopotamia. In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 3, 2024.

Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “On Realist Art 1: Stone Age to Mesopotamia.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realism-1.

Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “On Realist Art 1: Stone Age to Mesopotamia.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 3 (July 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realism-1.

Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘On Realist Art 1: Stone Age to Mesopotamia’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realism-1>.

Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘On Realist Art 1: Stone Age to Mesopotamia’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realism-1>.

Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “On Realist Art 1: Stone Age to Mesopotamia.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 3, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realism-1.

Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. On Realist Art 1: Stone Age to Mesopotamia [Internet]. 2024 Jul; 12(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/realism-1.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Based on work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright © 2012-Present by Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing. Authorized use/duplication only with explicit permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen. Excerpts, links only with full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with specific direction to the original. All collaborators co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their purposes.