Being Human VI: Art in the Upper Palaeolithic and the Hand Stencils from Spain.

 

One particularly iconic type of early art made by humans is the hand stencil. Often found in conjunction with cave paintings of animals, the interconnectedness of the two types is undoubted, therefore lending support to the belief that these ‘negatives’ of hand prints are art.

The animals found painted in caves such as those at Lascaux are often of unparalleled artistic merit, being uncannily, lifelike and some even evidencing techniques such as perspective. Alongside these exquisite images, sometimes called the Sistine Chapel of the Palaeolithic, are a number of hand stencils. While completely overshadowed by the plethora animal paintings they have, perhaps because of their association become recognised as art.

This brings me to a question that has been bothering me for some years. If they stood alone, without the beautifully drawn aurochs and bison would they be seen as art? Or perhaps would we view them as ancient graffiti, saying simply “I was here”?

Below are some examples from Spain.

 Hand stencils at the Fuente del Salín cave, from Ekainberri (2019).

 

Hand stencils from El Castillo cave, Cantabria, Spain. From Than (2014).

Hand stencils from La Garma cave, from Till (2012).

 False-colour image of hand prints from Maltravieso Cave, Spain. From Anon. (2018).

 

Hand stencil from Fuente del Trucho Cave, Aragorn, Spain. The cave contains 42 hand-stencils, only three of which are outlined in black. This one is most curious, as the ends of the digits are missing. Proposed reasons for this include a clenched fist, loss of the terminal parts of the digits due to frostbite or ritual mutilation. From the Parque Cultural del Rio Vero website (2022)

I do have an ulterior motive for using these, particular images. All the above sites featured in a recent publication by Fernández-Navarro, et al (2022).

Hand stencils are made by blowing pigments through a hollow reed or bone at a hand placed against the surface of the rock inside the cave. Fernández-Navarro, et al (2022), attempted to answer the question “Who created this art?” The results were extremely surprising.  The scientists created precise, 3D models and took morphometric measurements.

Taking into account that the hand stencils are slightly larger than the hand they outline, the researchers found that up 27 percent of the hand marks were not large enough to belong to adults or teenagers. They surmised, that they came from children between two and 12 years of age, with the majority of those likely made by three to 10-year-olds.

Example of morphometric measurements taken, picture by Verónica Fernández-Navarro in Cascone (2022). Original caption reads “Comparing hand measurement from a contemporary child and an ancient hand painting from a Spanish cave.”

Whilst the percentages of child hand stencils varied across the 5 caves, it was shown that ALL the caves had some child hand painters. See table below:

Table of the extrapolated ages of hand stencil painters, adapted from Fernández-Navarro et al (2022).

The phenomenon, therefore, seems entirely real!

Coming back to my original question of “Are hand stencils art or a graffito that say I was here?”, this evidence, to me seems to lend weight to the latter theory. If I was a parent in the Palaeolithic, intending to do a bit of symbolic painting, for my spiritual wellbeing say, I may well have distracted the kids with a bit of pigment blowing. Art – no. I rest my case.

References

Anon. (2018). Earliest cave art belonged to Neanderthals, not humans: Study. Arab News at: https://www.arabnews.com/node/1253156/offbeat

Cascone, S. (2022). A Study of Prehistoric Painting Has Come to a Startling Conclusion: Many Ancient Artists Were Tiny Children. Art News, at: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/children-worlds-first-artists-new-study-finds-quarter-prehistoric-spanish-hand-paintings-kids-13-2084734 accessed 15/04/2022.

Ekainberri (2019) Fuente El Salín: el significado oculto de las manos. At: https://www.ekainberri.eus/en/2019/01/23/fuente-el-salin-el-significado-oculto-de-las-manos/

Fernández-Navarro, V., Camarós, E. and Garate, D., 2022. Visualizing childhood in Upper Palaeolithic societies: Experimental and archaeological approach to artists’ age estimation through cave art hand stencils. Journal of Archaeological Science, 140, p.105574.

Parque Cultural del Rio Vero (2022). Paleolithic Art (40,000 B.C.E. – 10,000 B.C.E.). At https://parqueculturalriovero.com/en/cave-art/river-vero-cave-art/paleolithic-art accessed 15/04/2022

Than, K. (2014). World's Oldest Cave Art Found — Made by Neanderthals? National Geographic online at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/120614-neanderthal-cave-paintings-spain-science-pike accessed 15/04/2022

Till, J. et al (2012). Songs of the Caves. Acoustics and Prehistoric Art in Spanish Caves. At: https://songsofthecaves.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_0048.jpg accessed 15/04/2022

 

The Murky Story of Caligula’s Mosaic

In recent years, in addition to the pieces recovered from Michael Steinhardt (see here and here and here), the Manhattan DA’s office has seized and returned quite a number of looted ancient art, including a mosaic from a ship owned by the Roman Emperor Caligula. The New York Times first reported the raid. The text below, from McKinley (2017), details the story:

“The ceremonial ships that the Roman Emperor Caligula built to host decadent festivities on Lake Nemi were ornate floating palaces, with pink marble columns and brightly colored mosaic floors. Adorned with gold and gems and bronze friezes of animals, they were the sites of mega-parties that sometimes lasted days, according to historical accounts.

Caligula’s Mosaic originally recovered from the pleasure barge of the eponymous emperor on Lake Nemi in Italy. Picture credit McKinley (2017).

Two views of the Nemi ships under excavation. Sources unknown.

But for much of the past five decades, a four-by-four piece of mosaic flooring from one of the ships has been sitting in a somewhat more prosaic setting, the Park Avenue apartment of an antiques dealer, where it was used as a coffee table, often to hold a vase of flowers and, occasionally, someone’s drinking glass.

Now investigators for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office are trying to sort out the journey of the 2,000-year-old piece of Roman history that was once dredged from the lake outside Rome and somehow ended up in a private home in New York City. Last month, prosecutors seized the mosaic, saying they had evidence it had been taken from an Italian museum before World War II. On Thursday evening, the piece was returned to the Italian government at a ceremony, along with two other recently recovered antiquities.

“These items may be beautiful, storied, and immensely valuable to collectors,” the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said in a statement, “but willfully disregarding the provenance of an item is effectively offering tacit approval of a harmful practice that is, fundamentally, criminal.”

The antiques dealer, Helen Fioratti, said she and her husband, Nereo Fioratti, a journalist, had bought the mosaic in good faith in the late 1960s from a member of an aristocratic family. The sale was brokered, she said, by an Italian police official famed for his success in recovering artwork looted by the Nazis.

“It was an innocent purchase,” Ms. Fioratti said in an interview. “It was our favorite thing and we had it for 45 years.”

Ms. Fioratti, who owns L’Antiquaire and the Connoisseur, a noted gallery for antiques from Europe on East 73rd Street, said she did not intend to fight the seizure because of the expense and time it would take. Still, she said she believes she has a legitimate claim to ownership. “They ought to give me the legion of honor for not fighting it,” she said.

No charges had been filed against her on Thursday, though the search warrant said investigators were looking for evidence to support a charge of possession of stolen property.

The square piece of marble flooring — which features a complex geometric pattern made of pieces of green and red porphyry, serpentine and molded glass — dates back to Caligula’s reign, 37-41 A.D., and came from one of three enormous ships that he had built at Lake Nemi, a circular volcanic lake where there was once a temple to Diana, the goddess of the hunt.

Scholars have debated for years whether the barges were purely pleasure craft or might have been floating temples to the goddess. What is certain is they amounted to a haven for the emperor.

“They functioned as artificial floating islands, where the emperor could retreat, being completely separated from the world,” Francesco De Angelis, a professor of art history and archaeology, at Columbia University, said in an email.

After Caligula was assassinated, the ships were sunk, and remained underwater for centuries, despite efforts by divers over the years to retrieve their treasures. Mussolini began draining the lake in 1929 and by 1932, two of the ships had been located and hauled ashore. In 1936, the Fascist government built a museum to display the artifacts, including the complete mosaic and a few other smaller fragments, according to experts. At the end of the war, however, partisans opposed to the government set fire to the museum, which had been used as a bomb shelter, damaging many of the artifacts.

Manhattan prosecutors believe the mosaic was taken from the museum before the fire, because it shows no sign of damage like the other fragments.

The mystery of the mosaic’s whereabouts did not begin to clear until 2013, when an Italian expert on ancient marbles, Dario Del Bufalo, published a monograph about the Roman’s emperor’s use of red porphyry, a blood-colored stone associated with power. To promote his book, Mr. Del Bufalo gave a talk in New York attended by many art historians and dealers. He said he showed the assembled experts a photo of the mosaic that had been taken at a gallery in Rome in the 1960s, a rare sighting of the stolen work.

Ms. Fioratti and her husband had never tried to hide the mosaic, and there were people in the audience who had seen it in their home, Mr. Del Bufalo said in an interview. Reports of its whereabouts in New York eventually reached the ears of the authorities, he said.

It is unclear why it took four years for the investigation to be completed. Earlier this year, Matthew Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney who has spearheaded Mr. Vance’s efforts to recover stolen antiquities, contacted Mr. Del Bufalo to gather evidence. A judge issued a search warrant to seize the piece on Sept. 18.

Mr. Del Bufalo said it matters little who sold the mosaic to Mr. Fioratti, who was a longtime correspondent for Il Tempo newspaper, because he or she could not have passed along good title to a stolen item.

For her part, Ms. Fioratti said she had no papers proving ownership and she could not remember what her husband had paid for the mosaic. She said he had learned about the piece from a friend, who told him the aristocratic family was looking for a buyer.

When the piece arrived at their Park Avenue home, they paid to have a marble frame attached to the square of flooring and then put it on a pedestal in their living room. Over the years, Ms. Fioratti said, curators who visited had told her they were interested in procuring it for their collections. “I could have made a fortune,” she said.”

References

McKinley, J. C. Jr. (2017) A Remnant From Caligula’s Ship, Once a Coffee Table, Heads Home. New York Times. At: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/arts/design/a-remnant-from-caligulas-ship-once-a-coffee-table-heads-home.html

Michael Steinhardt – Serial Stolen Antiquities Collector: the earliest chapter.

While researching the Neolithic Face Masks from Palestine (see here), I came across the rather unsavoury character Michael Steinhardt. Before his retirement, he was a Wall Street Hedge Fund manager, who amassed a $1.1 billion fortune by 2018.

He was also an international collector of antiquities and philanthropist, he has a gallery named after him at the MET in New York. Nothing wrong with that you might say. Well there wouldn’t be, if the antiquities Steinhardt bought and sold were legally obtained in their countries of origin.

However, it turns out that many of the estimated 1550 pieces he has acquired since the 1990’s are stolen!

The first case I could dig up goes back to 1995. In 1992, Steinhardt bought a Sicilian golden bowl made in 450 BC from art dealer Robert Haber for $1 million.

Sicilian libation bowl or phiale. Looted from Himera. Himera was one of the most important of the Greek settlements in Sicily. The Greeks established the city in 648 BC. However the expansion of Greek territory did not go uncontested. It saw two major battles, one in 480 and one in 409 BC, both against the Carthaginians. They won the first battle but lost the second and the city was destroyed. Many priceless objects were thus buried and recovered by local diggers to be sold on the World’s clandestine antiquities market. The gold phiale was one of the earliest objects recovered from Michael Steinhardt in 1995. Photo credit: Archaeology.org (1998)

Adapted from the Inf.news website (2022): “Although the purchase process looks legal, Steinhardt knows the hidden risks, because the golden bowl has never appeared on the formal market. Italy is one of the countries with the strictest protection of cultural relics in the world. In order to avoid being noticed by them, Steinhardt deliberately instructed his agent, Haber to complete the transaction in Lugano, Switzerland. Haber then flew from Zurich to Geneva and then to New York. In the customs declaration, he also said that it was a Swiss antique, not mentioning Italy. But this small 12-inch pure gold wine bowl made him love it more and more. He couldn't help exhibiting this bowl in a mansion in Manhattan, which attracted the attention of the government.

In 1995, the U.S. government discovered that the Golden Bowl was an antique that had been lost in Italy for centuries, and confiscated it. Steinhardt also went to court for the first time because of the purchase of cultural relics. His defense is the same as this year, saying that he “has no knowledge” and he really thought it was something from Switzerland. But the judge said that from his constant detours, he knew very well that this was an Italian antique, so he was not an "innocent and ignorant buyer."

The journey of the phiale from initial looting to Steinhardt’s New York home is a convoluted one. As McFadden (1997), explains: “the phiale was unearthed near Caltavuturo, Sicily, apparently in the late 1970's. After it was authenticated by experts, it went through the hands of several art and antiques collectors in the 1980's for sums as low as $20,000. In 1991, it was bought by William Veres, a Swiss art dealer, for $90,000. Further details of the early trafficking of the phiale are given by Archaeology.org (1998): “Somewhere between 1976 and 1980 golden phial (libation bowl) 4^th century B.C.E., decorated with acorns, beech nuts, bees, appeared in the collection of a certain Sicilian named Vincenzo Pappalardo. In 1980, Pappalardo traded it with Vincenzo Cammarata, a Sicilian numismatist and merchant, for works of art worth $ 20000 . In 1991, Cammarat exchanged it with a Hungarian émigré, numismatist and merchant William Veres for works of art worth $ 90000 .

Mc Fadden (1997) goes on “Mr. Veres called it to the attention of Mr. Haber, who went to Sicily to see it in November 1991. Later, Mr. Steinhardt, who had previously bought 20 to 30 art objects from Mr. Haber for $4 million to $6 million, agreed to buy it for more than $1 million, plus a commission to Mr. Haber of $162,364.

Court papers said Mr. Haber went to Zurich, travelled across the Alps and took possession of the phiale from Mr. Veres at Lugano. He then returned to New York through Switzerland, taking what the court called ''great effort to insure that the phiale was not exported directly from Italy.

Mr. Steinhardt, who took possession in January 1992, after the Metropolitan Museum of Art authenticated the platter as a virtual twin of the one it owned. The phiale, a 12-inch shallow libation bowl, is of hammered gold with intricately worked rows of acorns, beechnuts, bees and lotuses. On its edge is an inscription in a Doric dialect spoken in the Greek colonies of Sicily. Steinhardt, ostentatiously kept the phiale on display at his Manhattan apartment until Nov. 9, 1995, when customs agents with a warrant entered and seized it, touching off the court fight.”

Inf.news (2022) again: “The court sentenced Steinhardt to lose ownership of the Golden Bowl and returned it to the Italian government. But [the opportunity for further] punishment was gone, and Steinhardt still went his own way, buying a lot of cultural relics of suspicious origin from antique dealers, and then selling them.”

The phiale was returned it to Sicily in 2000 by the American authorities, why they didn’t investigate Steinhardt, further, at this point, remains a mystery.

References

Archaeology.org (1998). The Looting of Italy. The Golden Phiale Case. At: http://ancientrome.ru/archaeol/article.htm?a=24

Inf.news (2022). American billionaire resells stolen cultural relics, and is now forced to hand over 180 pieces worth 70 million US dollars. Inf.news at: https://inf.news/en/world/effcbacb30e88c92cd6b837d61e9f2fe.html

McFadden, R. D. (1997). Judge Rules Ancient Sicilian Golden Bowl Was Illegally Imported. New York Times. At: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/18/nyregion/judge-rules-ancient-sicilian-golden-bowl-was-illegally imported.html#:~:text=In%20an%20odyssey%20reminiscent%20of,a%20Federal%20judge%20has%20ruled.