The Ghosts of Pompeii

HOW ART BEGAN WITH HAND-PRINTS, ANIMALS AND LOTS OF BOOBS

The human race is roughly two hundred thousand years old, give or take a millennium, and it’s very hard to find solid archaeological evidence of our ancestors. Clothing rots, tools break, settlements are churned into the earth by ploughs and quarries.

One thing that is a lot easier to find, however, than a caveman’s comb or a pair of Neolithic shoes, is art. From the dawn of humanity, and probably many thousands of years before the arrival of homo sapiens, the creation of art has been one of the defining features of human and pre-human culture.

Even before the advent of complex language and social structures, our grunting forebears were crushing vegetables to make coloured dyes, fixing the dyes with chalk dust and animal blood, fashioning brushes and styluses, and decorating their world with pleasing images and shapes.

While some argue that displays of artistic prowess were driven by the desire to impress potential mates, most scientists agree that the urge to create beautiful art is an abstract thing, something unique to intelligent primates, something which marks us out as human. We mix our paints and make our mark, in the understanding that our grandchildren will see these marks and know that we were here.

The earliest artworks ever discovered date to well before the dawn of man, to around 700,000 BC, although there is a lot of disagreement about whether the Bhimbetka carvings and the Venus of Berekhat Ram are intentional works or coincidences of erosion.

The Venus of Tan-Tan, however, which was found in Morocco, is unambiguously a deliberately carved piece of stone, meticulously cut into the shape … of a naked woman. And there’s the Venus of Willendorf, a sandstone sculpture in the shape … of a naked woman. And the Venus of Lespugue, an incredibly ancient ivory sculpture … of a naked woman.

Even older than these is the Venus of Hohle Fels, which is made of ivory and could frankly be mistaken for a sculpture of some boobs which just happen to have a woman attached to them. While early figurative art, such as cave paintings and wall-carvings, tended to focus on animals, hunters, geometric patterns and hand-prints, the history of sculpture is almost entirely the history of people making naked ladies out of different materials, for reasons we can only guess at.

Over time, as techniques became more refined, prehistoric sculptors diversified into animal shapes and a significant quantity of penises. By the time of the Roman empire, for instance, a few hundred millennia of boob and vagina sculpture had evolved to a much broader spectrum of smut and body parts, and the vast majority of the artworks recovered from the preserved ruin of Pompeii feature copious amounts of amusingly shaped penises and terrifying erotic ornaments.

In fact, one of the most famous pieces from Pompeii is a small statue of the god Pan having it off with a goat, and it has to be seen to be believed. No Greek or Roman house was complete without a full complement of oil lamps which only look like sausages until you take a closer look.

Whatever the reasons, whether it’s an appreciation of beauty, a celebration of fertility, a way of memorializing women (whose lives tended to be short), or just a bit of a dirty giggle, naked bodies in all their forms have always been at the heart of art. If you don’t believe us, just pop down to any art gallery in the world, remove all the paintings with naked people in them, and see if you’ve got enough left to fill a single room.