All those sketches left behind –
endless series of repetitions: bunches of muscles, sinews,
knuckles, joints, the entire machinery
of driving-belts and levels with which
a horse moves,
and out of thousands of hair-thin little lines, the skin
almost invisibly gently disappearing into the paper
of ears and eyelids, nostrils,
skin of the soul –
he must have wanted to find out how a horse
is made and have realised
it can’t be done,
how the secret of a horse grew and grew
beneath his pencil.
Made the most splendid designs, studied them,
discarded them.
(I Cavalli di Leonardo, Rutger Kopland)This poetic reflection on drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci written by the Dutch
psychiatrist Rutger Kopland, introduces an idea that is immediately relevant to this
thesis: that of artistic intent and the nature of mythopoeic consciousness, across
time and culture. I n all the inhabited continents of the world there are prehistoric
paintings and incisions [ pictographs] on sheltered rock surfaces that mark the
evolution some 50,000 years ago, of a peculiarly creative mind (Mithen, 2003:3).
Some are in the open air on vertical rock surfaces, like the Bradshaws in Australia,
some, particularly in France, are in the entrances to caves. I n some cases the
pictographs may be found in subterranean caves created by people who penetrated
more than a kilometre underground to make deep, seemingly secreted, images
[ parietal art] on the walls and ceilings of caves (Lewis-Williams, 2002:28). The
images in the caves of Lascaux, Chauvet and Altimira include cave bears, cave lions,
rhinoceros, bison, owls, elk and horses; many are finely rendered. The images
sometimes show a use of intentional shading; an array of long rhinoceros horns
suggests either a multitude of rhinos in perspective, or one, in rapid motion. A horse
appears to emerge from the recesses of the cave wall, an intentional play of image
and cave wall shape. I n places there are panels of red dots which were made using
the palm of a hand and here we can imagine the hand and its pigment pressing up
against and around the cave wall, not merely making red dots, but also, perhaps,