Fig. 20. Limestone statuette from Willendorf, Austria. Characteristic of Aurignacian treatment of the female figure: the face and limbs are abbreviated or only indicated; the parts concerned with reproduction are exaggerated.
In sculpture their first efforts were directed upon figurines. These mostly represent the human female. The head, hands, and feet are either absent or much abbreviated. In the body, those parts having to do with reproduction and fecundity are usually heavily exaggerated, but at the same time given with considerable skill ([Fig. 20]). It is likely that these statuettes served some religious cult. At any rate, the carvings in three dimensions often represent the human figure, whereas two-dimensional drawings, etchings, and paintings mostly represent animals and are much more successful than the human outlines. In the Magdalenian, miniature sculpture of animals was added to that of the human figure ([Fig. 21]).
Success in seizing the salient outline was the earliest characteristic of the paintings and drawings. The first Aurignacian engravings are invariably in profile and usually show only the two legs on the immediately visible side. In time the artists also learned to suggest typical positions and movements—the motion of a reindeer lowering its head to browse, the way an angry bull switches his tail or paws the ground, the curl of the end of an elephant’s trunk (Figs. [22], [24]). In the Magdalenian, all four legs are usually depicted, and the profile, although remaining most frequent, as it is most characteristic, is no longer the only aspect. There are occasional pictures of animals from before or behind, or of a reindeer with its head turned backward.
Fig. 21. Horse carved in mammoth ivory. From Lourdes, France. The spirited portrayal of the neck, ears, eyes, and mouth parts is characteristic of Magdalenian sculpture.
There are also some devices which look like the beginnings of attempts at composition. The effect of a row of reindeer is produced by drawing out the first few in some detail, and then suggesting the others by sketching in their horns ([Fig. 23]). Artists were no longer content, in the Magdalenian, always to do each animal as a solitary, static unit. They were trying, with some measure of success, to represent the animals as they moved in life and perhaps to combine several of them into one coherent picture or to suggest a setting.
By this time they had also acquired considerable ability in handling colors. The Aurignacian and Solutrean artists restricted themselves to monochrome effects. They engraved or painted outlines and sometimes accentuated these by filling them in with pigment. But the best of the later painters in the Magdalenian—those, for instance, who left their frescoes on the walls of the famous cave of Altamira in Spain—used three or four colors at once and blended these into transition tones.
Fig. 22. Engraving of a charging mammoth. On a fragment of ivory tusk found at La Madeleine, France. While the artist’s strokes were crude, he was able to depict the animal’s action with remarkable vigor. Note the roll of the eye, the flapping ears, the raised tail expressive of anger.