Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of ScienceAllen, Grant
Science
Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Allen, Grant
Science
And what did the old master himself look like? Well, painters have
always been fond of reproducing their own lineaments. Have we not the
familiar young Raffael, painted by himself, and the Rembrandt, and the
Titian, and the Rubens, and a hundred other self-drawn portraits, all
flattering and all famous? Even so primitive man has drawn himself many
times over, not indeed on this particular piece of reindeer horn, but on
several other media to be seen elsewhere, in the original or in good
copies. One of the best portraits is that discovered in the old cave at
Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Massenat, where a very early pre-Glacial man
is represented in the act of hunting an aurochs, at which he is casting
a flint-tipped javelin. In this, as in all other pictures of the same
epoch, I regret to say that the ancient hunter is represented in the
costume of Adam before the fall. Our old master's studies, in fact, are
all in the nude. Primitive man was evidently unacquainted as yet with
the use of clothing, though primitive woman, while still unclad, had
already learnt how to heighten her natural charms by the simple addition
of a necklace and bracelets. Indeed, though dresses were still wholly
unknown, rouge was even then extremely fashionable among French ladies,
and lumps of the ruddle with which primitive woman made herself
beautiful for ever are now to be discovered in the corner of the cave
where she had her little prehistoric boudoir. To return to our hunter,
however, who for aught we know to the contrary may be our old master
himself in person, he is a rather crouching and semi-erect savage, with
an arched back, recalling somewhat that of the gorilla, a round head,
long neck, pointed beard, and weak, shambling, ill-developed legs. I
fear we must admit that pre-Glacial man cut, on the whole, a very sorry
and awkward figure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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