By Bruce Bower
Welcome to Animation Domination, Stone Age style. By
about 30,000 years ago, Europeans were using cartoon-like techniques to give
observers the impression that lions and other wild beasts were charging across
cave walls, two French investigators find.
Ancient artists created
graphic stories in caves and illusions of moving animals on rotating bone disks,
say archaeologist Marc Azéma of the University of Toulouse–Le Mirail in France
and Florent Rivère, an independent artist based in Foix, France.
“Stone
Age artists intended to give life to their images,” Azéma says. “The majority of
cave drawings show animals in action.”
Flickering torches passed over
painted scenes would have heightened onlookers’ sense of seeing live-action
stories, the researchers suggest in the June Antiquity.
Azéma and Rivère
summarize their 20 years of research on Stone Age animation techniques, much of
it previously published in French, in the new paper. They also describe for the
first time examples of animation at two French caves, Chauvet and La Baume
Latrone.
“Movement and action are indeed represented in cave art in
different manners,” remarks archaeologist Jean Clottes, a rock-art specialist
who now serves as honorary conservator general of heritage for the French
Ministry of Culture. Clottes led a 1998 investigation of Chauvet’s
30,000-year-old cave paintings.
A 10-meter-long Chauvet painting
represents a hunting story, Azéma proposes. The story begins by showing several
lions, ears back and heads lowered, stalking prey. Mammoths and other animals
appear nearby. In a second section of the painting, a pride of 16 lions, some
drawn smaller than the rest to appear farther away, lunge toward fleeing bison.
Stone Age artists meant to depict animal movement in such scenes, Azéma
says. An eight-legged bison at Chauvet, for example, resulted from superimposing
two images of the creature in different stances to create the appearance of
running.
In France, 53 figures in 12 caves superimpose two or more images
to represent running, head tossing and tail shaking. At the famous Lascaux Cave,
20 painted animals display multiple heads, legs or tails.
A carving on an
animal bone from another Stone Age cave in France depicts three freeze-frame
images of a running lion, another way to represent motion.
Ancient
Europeans also invented a kind of animation toy, the researchers suggest. Sites
in France and Spain have yielded stone and bone disks, typically with center
holes, showing opposing images of sitting and standing animals.
In
experiments conducted since 2007, Rivère has reproduced these engraved disks and
looped strands of animal tendon through the center holes. By twisting these
strands, the disks rotate back and forth rapidly enough to make animals appear
to be sitting down and standing up.
That’s the principle behind the
thaumatrope, a device invented (or perhaps reinvented) in 1825. Two strings
attached to the ends of a disk or card with an image on each side — say, a vase
opposite a bouquet of flowers — were twirled between the fingers, so that the
rotating pictures appeared to combine into a single image, such as flowers in a
vase.
Thaumatrhttp://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/341206/description/Stone_Age_art_gets_animatedopes
are considered precursors of movie cameras and animation.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario