Art Motives and Methods of Babylonian-Assyrian Painting

Art Motives and Methods of Babylonian-Assyrian Painting
Building, craving and painting were practiced among the coastwise nations, but upon no such extensive scale as in either Egypt or Assyria.

The mere fact that they were people of the sea rather than of the land precluded extensive or concentrated development.

Politically Phoenicia was distributed in a similar manner.

Such art as was produced showed the religious and decorative motives and in its spiritless materialistic make-up the commercial motive.

It was at the best a hybrid mongrel art, borrowed from many sources and distributed to many points of the compass.

At one time it had a strong Assyrian cast, at another an Egyptian cast and after Greece arose it accepted a retroactive influence from there.

Future research may disclose that it was also susceptible to influences from Cretan and Hittite art.

Conclusions as to any of this early Mediterranean art cannot as yet be accepted with certainty.
It is impossible to characterize the Phoenician type and even the Cypriote type, though more pronounced, varies so with the different influences that it has no very striking individuality.

Technically both the Phoenician and Cypriote were fair workmen in bronze and stone, and doubtless taught many technical methods to the early Greeks besides making known to them those deities afterward adopted under the names of Aphrodite, Adonis and Heracles and familiarizing them with the art forms of Egypt and Assyria.

As for painting, there was undoubtedly figured decoration upon walls of stone and plaster, but there is not enough left to us from all the small nations like Phoenician, Judea, Cyprus, and the Kingdom of Asia minor, put together to patch up a disjointed history.

The first lands to meet the spoiler, their very ruins have perished.

All that there is of painting comes to us is broken potteries and color traces on statuary and sarcophagi.

The remains of the sculpture and architecture are of course better preserved.

None of this intermediate art holds much rank by virtue of its inherent worth.

It is its influence upon the West – the ideas, subjects, and methods it imparted to the the Greeks – that gives it value in art history.
Art Motives and Methods of Babylonian-Assyrian Painting

Korean Religious Painting

Korean Religious Painting
One of the most significant Buddhist traditions which developed in Korea was that of religious painting, the so-called t’aenghwa (hanging painting), comprising both painted icons in the form of hanging scrolls of framed pictures as well as actual wall paintings.

It is not known when Buddha votive paintings and the methods for making them were first known on the Peninsula, however it seems likely that they were introduced more or less simultaneously with Buddhist teachings and practices during the late 4th to early century.

Unfortunately no Korean Buddhist paintings from such an early period are extant today and consequently our knowledge about their possible origin and incipient developments remains purely hypothetical.

There is, however, some indication that the early Korean t’aenghwa tradition followed Central Asian and Chinese norms relatively closely with regard to iconographic models and the use of stencils.

Comparison with metal engravings of guardian spirits as well as Buddhist rock carvings from 7th century Silla and figure in the T’ang wall paintings from Tun-huang would seem to lend some degree of credibility to this.

Despite the possibility that the Korean t’aenghwa tradition may date back as early as the 4th - 5th centuries, the oldest surviving paintings are not older than the first half of the 13th century, i.e., late middle Koryo dynasty.

Today the great majority of the extant Koryo t’aenghwa is preserved in Japanese collection, most notably the treasure house of Chion-in, the famous Pure Land Temple in Kyoto, which holds a significant number of very fine paintings.

Other Koryo and early Yi t’aenghwa are scattered all over Japan with at least one important private collection in Kyusu.

A smaller quality of paintings can be found throughout the world, with museums in Berlin, Cologne Boston and Cleveland owning some of the best.
Korean Religious Painting

Paleolithic Cave Painting

Paleolithic Cave Painting
The caves id Altamira, Pech-Merle, Lascaux and other sites in prehistoric Europe are a few hundred to several thousand feet long.

They are often choked, sometimes almost impassably by deposits such as stalactites and stalagmites.

Far inside these caverns, well removed from the cave mouths early humans often choice for inhabitation, painters sometimes made pictures on the walls.

Examples of Paleolithic painting now have been found at more than 200 sites, but pre-historians still regard painted caves as rare occurrences, because images in them, even if they number in the hundreds were created over a period of some 10,000 to 20,000 years.

To illuminate the surfaces while working, the Paleolithic painters used stones lamps filled with marrow or fat, with a wick, perhaps, of moss.

For drawing, they used chunks of red and yellow ocher.

For painting, they ground these same ochers onto powders they mixed with water before applying.

The analyses of the pigments used show that Paleolithic painters employed many different minerals, attesting to a technical sophistication surprising at so early a date.

Large flat stones served as palletes. The painters made brushes from reeds, bristles, or twigs and may have used a blowpipe of reeds or hollow bones to spray pigments on out-of-reach surfaces.

Some caves have natural ledges on the rock walls upon which the painters could have stood in order to reach the upper surfaces of the naturally formed chambers and corridors.

On e Lascaux gallery has a holes in one of the walls that once probably anchored a scaffold made of saplings lashed together.

Despite the difficulty of making the tools and pigments, modern attempts at replicating the techniques of Paleolithic painting have demonstrated that skilled workers could cover large surfaces with images in less than a day.
Paleolithic Cave Painting