Elizabeth Bell, age 14, of Grand Forks, N.D., for her question:
HAS MAN BEEN PAINTING PICTURES A LONG TIME?
Painting is a branch of the visual arts in which color is applied to various surfaces to create a representational or abstract picture or design. Mankind has been painting pictures for a long, long time. The earliest known Western paintings were executed deep within caves of southern Europe during the Paleolithic period, some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
The paintings still preserved on the walls of caves in Spain and southern France portray with amazing accuracy bison, horses and deer. The drawings were painted in bright colors composed of various minerals ground into powders and mixed with animal fat, egg whites, plant juices, fish glue or even blood and applied with brushes made of twigs and reeds.
The early cave paintings are believed to have been part of a magic ritual to assure successful hunting.
Then, more than 5,000 years ago, Egyptians began painting the walls of pharaohs' tombs with mythological representations and scenes of everyday activities such as hunting, fishing, farming or banqueting.
The Minoans, ancestors of the Greeks, created lively, realistic paintings on the walls of their palaces in Crete and also on pottery. This was back about 1500 B.C.
Except for a few fragments, Greek wall paintings and panels have not survived, but we do know that the early Greeks did lots of painting. They specialized in naturalistic representations of mythological scenes.
The ancient Romans decorated their villas with mosaic floors and exquisite wall frescoes portraying rituals, myths, landscapes, still life and scenes of daily activities. Using the technique known as aerial perspective, in which colors and outlines of more distant objects are softened and blurred to achieve spatial effects, Romanartists created the illusion of reality in their paintings.
Surviving Early Christian painting dates from the 3rd and 4th Centuries and consists of fresco paintings in the Roman catacombs and mosaics on the walls of churches.
The art of the Middle Ages can be categorized according to its distinctive stylistic traits. Anglo Irish art, which flourished from the 7th to the 9th Century in monasteries in various parts of the British Isles, was largely an art of intricate calligraphic designs.
During the early Gothic period, as cathedral structure gave more emphasis to windows, stained glass occupied a more prominent role in the arts than did painting. However, many paintings from this period also survived.
A mingling of the artistic traditions of northern Europe and Italyook place at the beginning of the 15th Century and is known as the Internal Gothic style. Among the many characteristics that define painting in this style is an attention to realistic detail that shows the artists acute observation of human beings and of nature.