Displaying items by tag: cave art

Showing replicas of artworks instead of the real thing is usually anathema to an art museum, but the J. Paul Getty Trust on Tuesday showed why that rule has its exceptions.

The Getty Trust fleshed out details of its 2016 exhibition “Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road,” which will include complete, exact, walk-in replicas of three decorated caves that artists adorned with Buddhist-themed murals over 1,000 years starting in the 4th century.

Artwork in an Indonesian cave has been found to date back at least 40,000 years, making it the oldest sign yet of human creative art — likely pre-dating art from European caves.

The findings, published on 8 October in "Nature," undermine a Eurocentric view of the origins of human creativity and could prompt a ‘gold rush’ to find even older art on the route of human migration from Africa to the east.

The analysis hints at “just what a wealth of undiscovered information there is in Asia”, says Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK, who in 2013 identified what had been considered the world’s oldest cave art, in Europe, and had no involvement in the current project. “This paper will likely prompt a hunt.”

Drawings of mammoths, human footprints and other art carved on cave walls in southern France about 30,000 years ago have been inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list.

The U.N. cultural agency says that the Decorated Cave of Pont d'Arc contains the best preserved figurative drawings in the world.