In 2017, the actor, television presenter and former Monty Python member Michael Palin was invited by the National Gallery to discuss his favourite paintings in front of a live audience. The interview was recorded and uploaded to YouTube, and it’s well worth a look.
Just one thing, though: according to the description, Palin spoke of his top ten paintings. Less than a minute and a half into the video, he made it clear that he wasn’t going to do that at all. Instead, he nominated ten he “can not avoid when I’m going in the Gallery”, which isn’t quite the same thing.
I can see the problem. It’s vanishingly unlikely that anyone from the National Gallery will ever invite me to do anything, except perhaps leave the premises, but if they did ask me to nominate my ten favourite paintings I couldn’t do it either.
Any such list would have to include works by Vermeer and Hokusai and Basquiat and Pollock and Schjerfbeck and Munch and Ōi and Schiele and Magritte and Dalí and that’s ten already and I’ve hardly started and I haven’t even thought of any individual paintings yet and the whole thing is just impossible.
I did once spend some time thinking about it, though, and during that process I realised that there is a work of art which strikes me as being more profound than any other.
It’s not Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, pictured above. I just put that there because I didn’t want to give the game away before you started reading.
Nor, despite what I wrote three sentences ago, is it a single work of art. On the contrary, the same thing has been done by uncountable people over an immense period – perhaps as much as sixty thousand years, according to one study – in locations as widespread as Argentina, France and Sulawesi.
They are clearly very common, if you know where to look for them. Individually, they are trivial, and were probably made only for amusement. Here’s an example:
Ancient art in the Cueva de las Manos, Argentina. Photo copyright Mariano Cecowski,
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
As you can see, they are hand stencils. From what I’ve read, there doesn’t appear to be general agreement about how they were made, but one suggestion is that people put a handful of berries in their mouths, chewed them, put one hand against a cave wall and then blew out sharply, covering the hand in berry juice aerosol.
That sounds like fun, and you get to swallow the berries afterwards, which is nice. Then you take away your hand, and there’s your art.
One intriguing thing about stencils is that the image consists of what is not there. In a painting of a hand, the hand would be represented by the paint. In a stencil, the berry juice, or whatever is acting as the equivalent the paint, represents what is not there, and what is not there – the bare wall of the cave – represents what is there – the hand.
You can spend an enjoyable few minutes thinking philosophical thoughts about that, but it’s not what makes me think the hand stencils are so profound.
Many cave paintings are of people and animals, the former often hunting the latter. If art ‘says’ anything, those paintings say, “This is us. These are the things we see. This is how we live.”
The hand stencils do not say that. Instead, the oldest of them are not only the earliest examples of humans (or in extreme cases Neanderthals) on this planet but, as far as we may ever know, of life anywhere in the universe, saying, “This is me.”
There is a one-to-one relationship between artist and viewer. If you look at any of the stencils, you can not imagine the person who made it, any more than they could have imagined you. It is not possible, and would at no time ever have been possible, for you to meet. You don’t know what they looked like, they didn’t know what you would look like. There is almost no communication. And yes, of course this also applies to all the other cave artists.
But in this case, there’s a difference. You know the shape of their hand.
You know because they told you. They didn’t think they were telling you. They were probably just playing, and might have laughed with delight when they saw the mark they had made on the cave wall. As far as they were concerned, that was all there was to it. But they did tell you.
And in that tiny, almost insignificant but – I think – very moving way, they engaged with you across the millennia, from long before the time of the ancient Romans and Greeks and Egyptians, before science and possibly before religion, as no one else ever did. And that, to me, is not only profound, but wonderful.
Recent posts
Just Like You chapter 2: Luxal
Chips with vinegar
The forgotten king