ART OF WRITING

PITTURA

A new masterpiece, another tool of the art of writing collection that tells about Painting and the art that takes form representing a subject or expressing the fantasy through lines, colors, shapes, values and tones on a surface.

The procedures that allow to set colored elements or pigments on a surface, depending on the man or artists’ project, have gone through variations and different preferences.

How painting was born? Why man has felt the need to express himself and his thoughts through images and colors since the antiquity?

Maybe because “Painting” according to Pablo Picasso “is only another way to keep a diary”.

Our tribute to Painting comes from the first signs left by man and leads us until the birth of the ideograms and cuneiform writing, signs and figurative shapes that gave birth to the alphabet.

Our journey starts with the Upper Paleolithic and takes us into a cave located in a village, in the north of Spain, a few kilometers from Santander. It is here that in 1879 cave paintings have been found and thanks to subsequent analysis of dating, it results that they date back of 35.000 years. Additional recent studies have also confirmed that these cave paintings are the result of collective works completed over thousands of years.

The UNESCO heritage Altamira Cave has been defined by the French archaeologist Joseph Déchelette “the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory” for the artistic-historical importance of the wall painting that it is possible to admire. 

Made in charcoal and red ocher, the Altamira cave paintings, show the first chiaroscuro effects obtained by diluting the colors themselves. The images shown, mainly wild mammals and human hands, are concrete examples of real pictographic writing, understandable by anyone and precursor of language. The image of an animal or its graphic representation is based on a universal language that can reach any observer.

Our symbolic journey continues further south, into the mountain massif of Tassili n’Ajjer within the Sahara Desert. Right here they have been identified so far around 15.000 among paintings and rock engravings dating 10.000 and 9.000 years ago. They represent cattle herds, big wild animals and mainly human activities such as hunting and dancing that refer to the Neolithic era, when the climate of the region was more humid, and savannah was all over instead of the desert.

Once again, the images speak a universal language representing an event: the killing of a prey, how many hunters took part in an expedition or which animals had been caught.

The man’s need to communicate evolves together with the evolution of his own intellectual capacities and throughout time.

The cave painting, now too didactic, leaves the scene to the communication of cognitive concepts. We are at the origin of the subsequent dissemination of ideas through sounds, we are at the origin of the alphabet. The ideographic writing, developed from the pictograms of the Ice Age, was born in China around the 2500 B.C.

The ideogram is nothing else but a very stylized sign that corresponds to a word.

The man’s need to communicate images and thoughts through a simpler writing appears much clearer among the Mesopotamian civilization and the Egyptians.

The drawings of Sumerian writing and the cuneiform writing on one side, the hieroglyphics and hieratic writing on the other, represent the conjunction ring between painting and writing and with no doubt they are the origin of all the writings through the first phonic alphabets symbols.