Teme iconografice, reprezentate în creaţia artistică preistorică

Abstract

The artistic creation of prehistoric human communities is very rich and varied in terms of representing the entire natural environment as a factor of opposition to humankind, its continuous attempts to master the environment and transform the basic means of subsistence for survival. Religious feeling was a consistent feature of human permanence. Through the religious feeling that we cannot understand in all its expressions, human communities developed artistic or cultural creations that can be framed in religious themes, as we find them repeating in various forms, but almost identical in the artistic execution and religious connotation. These religious themes, represented in prehistoric artistic creation, are the following: the substitution, the orant, the forbidden image, the feminine divinity, the masculine divinity and the hand representation. In terms of the spirituality of Paleolithic human communities, we consider that all artistic creation has religious connotations. Moreover, the researchers of this period no longer doubt the existence of the religious phenomenon, the individual and collective sacred among those human communities.

Keywords: iconographic themes; prehistoric religions; orant; forbidden image; substitution; feminine divinity; masculine divinity; artistic canons.