The Birth of Abstraction: When Human Beings Transformed the World into Images

Approximately forty-five thousand years ago, deep within the darkness of nearly four hundred caves, Homo sapiens began to paint. Until then, this species had lived a nomadic existence, relying on the gathering of plants and hunting for its subsistence, while mastering the use of fire for cooking, illumination, and warmth. In Ice Age Europe, early humans had already developed distinctions between different types of animals according to their size and their relationship to human beings: they differentiated between animals that were hunted and those that were consumed, as well as between those they perceived as threatening and those that fled from them.

At a certain point, one of these early humans entered a cave and stood before its sinuous walls, a burning torch in his hand. The flickering flame cast dancing shadows across the uneven surfaces. Passing a finger over the damp limestone, the human being created lines. Before his eyes there was no horse, yet the image of a wild horse existed in his imagination. He took a piece of charcoal, coated his finger with a greasy substance, and began to trace curved and straight lines, thick and thin, black and red. Through an almost magical act of creation, he brought a horse into being, then another, as well as a bison, a lion, and a mammoth. These forms were precise, almost alive. A moment of extraordinary significance in human history had arrived: abstraction and art were born.

The act of painting appears to us as something self-evident, requiring no explanation. This was certainly not the case for a prehistoric human being who had never before seen a painting. We must therefore ask: how did the idea occur to Homo sapiens of translating a real creature, such as a horse, into a symbolic form through lines drawn on the wall of a dark cave, in such a way that the human eye could immediately recognize it? How did the idea arise of transforming the object itself—the........

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