Artists and Patrons

Abstract

Human love of exercising creative skills is now known to have begun further back in the evolutionary chain than previously had been believed. The image- and symbol-making drives are recognized as having existed from the first emergence of what we know as “modern man.” Paintings and sculpture found in caves dating from the first ascendancy of Homo sapiens in late Paleolithic times reveal that the human concerns expressed in visual symbols were already established in man’s consciousness: birth, fertility, death, what occurs after death, and the ritualization of these events and ideas.