Now if you can't understand what a picture is unless you've seen one before. How on earth do you come up with the idea of creating one in the first place? So how did our ancient ancestors come to real...
They are made up of dots and lines or abstract shapes and patterns. Nothing in the natural world of the prehistoric artist would have looked like this, or this. And, very often, these patterns are rep...
Henri Breuil was a French priest, but he was also the foremost expert on cave art for much of the 20th century. He believed, perhaps not surprisingly, that the paintings were about hunting. Prehistori...
And then came an even more exciting find, in a cave called Lascaux, a gallery of pictures of breathtaking beauty. As more and more paintings came to light, they revealed prehistoric artists had painte...
Now de Sautuola had come to the cave to excavate the floor, to poke around for prehistoric relics, such as bones and tools, it was Maria who made the discovery for which Altamira became famous. "Papa,...
What if we go back 2,000 years? This is the image of a horse from classical antiquity. It was made to decorate a Roman household, about one hundred years before Christ. And clearly the artists here ha...
There's something we do hundreds of times a day without even noticing it. It's an ability that we utterly depend on in our lives, and we take it for granted. Just watch. We see some lines and can give...
Images dominate our lives. They tell us how to behave, what to think and even how to feel. They mold and define us. But why do these images, the pictures, symbols and the art we see around us every da...
Augustus had used images to manipulate people into believing one thing when in fact the very opposite was true. So he discovered how to use art to tell a political lie. It was a technique that would b...
The images are of Augustus accepting the surrender of Rome's sworn enemy, the Parthian s. It was his greatest triumph and the gods are shown looking on with approval. The message is clear: Augustus wa...
