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Mysterious rock depicted in 15th century painting is likely a Stone Age tool
- pavel_lishin 3y ago> Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, right panel of the diptych. So many of these paintings portray human faces in near-photorealistic detail... and then the woman's chest looks like a piece of stretched-out vellum with two hemispheres glued onto it.
- Steven420 3y agoLooks like a botched boob job
- itsthebiz 3y agoIt looks like the beginning of a paper titled “Historical argument for the existence of Breast Augmentation” much in the same vein of “Jesus is real because Judaea existed” or “Spiderman is real because New York is a real city”.
- kirubakaran 3y agoPerhaps it was the artist, not the subject, that was the virgin
- mcpackieh 3y agoThe two men have realistic skin tones, but the woman and baby look like they're carved out of marble or covered in chalk. I guess the latter reflect what the artist considered to be an aesthetic ideal and aren't intended to be true-to-life realistic.
- pvaldes 3y agoCreating contrast between the ugly real world, with all its pain, suffering and grotesque details, and the spiritual world of gods where everybody is rewarded with an inner glow in their perfect skins. An universally employed narrative
- unmole 3y agoYou see something similar in Hindu iconography. Humans are painted brown, the colour of the earth. Gods like Rama, Krishna and Shiva are painted blue, the colour of the heavens.
- NHQ 3y agoThe contrast tells us "the right side is obviously stylized, and this illustrates that the left side is rendered with realistic perspective". Which means the rock is round and proves the authors incorrect because they overlook this obvious perspective to claim the rock is flat and axe-like to make their comparison. Their theory rests entirely on the rock in the painting being flat, which could only be true if the perspective was flat. The painter made sure we can see that is not the case. The painter is telling us there is a narrative and a reality. They baby appears unconvinced and suspicious, as if he knows there is an alternate truth to the story. He appears to be pointing at rock. The baby is telling us he is not the subject, the rock is.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoIsn't the rock on the left, "realistic", side?
- NHQ 3y agoThe rock is shown in realistic perspective, indicating depth. However, the authors presume that we are looking at the exact front of a flat object, such as an axe blade. The realistic perspective disqualifies that presumption. If the rock was flat and blade-like, the painter could have shown this explicitly by painting the rock at an angle, like the corner of the wall behind them men.
- pvaldes 3y agoIs a divinity, so either is a stylized image of "perfection" (whatever it meant in their cultural context); or they tried deliberately to depict the most "non sexually exciting" image possible, while keeping the symbolic aspects
- oh_sigh 3y agothe artist might have been working with a male model
- lostlogin 3y agoMy (high school) art history taught me that this was a thing. Then they added breasts by sort of guessing. You’d think that adding them in the armpit region would be obviously wrong, but at the same time, it’s better than any painting I’ll ever attempt in my lifetime. The babies have all got much more natural looking chests. It’s got a surreal feel with the colour palette and plastic feel.
- analog31 3y agoThe mens' fingers are also unrealistically long. And I don't think the painter was unskilled.
- every 3y agoThis is early Northern Renaissance and still retains a number of Gothic themes and motifs. He nailed the vanishing point though...
- dvh 3y agoLooks like wood opal: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Opal-44685.jpg/440px-Opal-44685.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Op...
- AlotOfReading 3y agoMost likely chert, a very common lithic material that can look very similar.
- dieselgate 3y agoAt the very least I think it's cool they provide the artifact comparison figure
- INTPenis 3y agoThis makes me think of that scene in Life of brian where they pick out stones for the stoning. I mean, how do archaeologists know that people weren't knapping stones for stonings? I know the obvious answer is "the stratas and context".
- Isamu 3y agoI think it looks like a worked core, because of the flat bottom which would be the striking platform (upside down). The flat striking platform is made first, and then flakes are struck from the edge working around the core. This doesn’t rule out the core being made into a tool itself but many are discarded.
- NHQ 3y agoWhat an odd thing to claim and publish, and the wikipedia article is already updated with these spurious "findings". That qualifies as suspicious. The actual position taken by these "archeologists" from their paper about a "modern social history of prehistoric handaxes" is quite a reach. The rock does not look like the flat head of any axe, nor does a "prehistoric stone tool" bear any meaning whatsoever in the context of the image. In fact the rock resembles fragments of meteorite. Perhaps all the supposed "ancient handaxes" are really from a more recent meteoric event. That would be quite a thrust against prehistorical man narratives made up by archeologists. Oh, people really called these supposed axes "thunderstones" before the advent of modern archeology claimed they are tools of prehistoric man. Yet these "researchers" claim a painting proves that 15th century people already thought the rocks were ancient handaxes despite contrary evidence, in other words that what archeologists made up was already well know; so it must be true after all, how convenient. But that is tautological: provide a theory based on a painting and claim the painting is evidence the theory is correct.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoOh boy, you're missing quite a lot here. First let's breakdown what "modern social history of prehistoric handaxes" means, as virtually every word has a technical definition. "Modern" - from the modern period, i.e. 1500s onwards "Social history" - a specific type of historical analysis focusing on essentially what a common man would have thought and known about. This is a very rough reduction of what the term actually encompasses. "Prehistoric" - old stuff "Handaxes" - a specific category of lithic (i.e. stone) tools that are typically symmetrical bifaces, distinct from modern axes. Also, most rocks can be confused for meteorites and vice versa. "Looking like a meteorite" means nothing. The rock shown does look quite a bit like a chert core though. I'd be surprised if it was actually a handaxe because they're almost always symmetric and tapering, which the painting doesn't show, but I don't care enough to read the paper.
- NHQ 3y agoI know what words mean, what is your point? The authors claim that modern 15th century people already knew the "pre-historic" narrative about rocks being axes. They are shoe-horning this theory into the painting by claiming the painter and 15th century people already thought these rocks were ancient handaxes, and thats why it features so importantly in the mysterious painting. That seems a rather hoaxy claim to me: The archeological narrative must be correct if people already knew it to be true! The authors state in their abstract this is their goal, to push back the evidence of such a "social history", to a time before archeologists made up the narrative about hand-axes. The authors are literally attempting to incept the archeological claim to a prior age of modern history. Is that what you mean, because that is definitely and literally the motive of this research. Edit, also the rock in the painting is not a "biface". That part of the painting has obvious depth and perspective (shadows, walls, angles). The rock in the painting is ROUND.
- ada1981 3y agoPerhaps because the hand axe and holy book it rest upon are both, useful but outdated tools of man.
- pvaldes 3y agoHadn't noticed the blood dripping from the head of the taller man. It adds a brutal context to the scene, for sure. The dead people look alive, and the alive look like being recently pulled from the bottom of a fjord. Kings and people in power often hoarded curious artifacts in special cabinets of "natural marvels". Painters included pets and personal objects in the pictures to please his powerful clients. Is possible that exactly the same stone could be found still lying somewhere in some palace or museum.