PUBLIKATION KONRAD ROSS

HAND AND FOOT AND MASK
What would the image of the human species look like if we opened up our mental museum to encompass the complete archaeological archive?
In a series of essays on the artistic pictures humans have created since the advent of homo sapiens, the anthropologist and cultural historian
Constantin Rauer has attempted to answer this question. 1 The first historical observation is that art did not come easy. The earliest images
come from burial sites dating back some 195,000 years, and they focus on the positioning of the dead in graves and on burial gifts. But an
artistic explosion occurred at the dawn of the Upper Palaeolithic (40,000 BC) involving all classical artistic media: paintings, drawings,
engravings, and sculptures (stone, ivory, bones) from miniature to monumental format. Yet from the fifty thousand artworks Rauer estimates
we’ve collected from 38,000 BP to 12,000 BP, something’s missing: There’s not one single human face among them. Depictions of humans
make up only one tenth of one percent of the total, and they are dominated by the image of the human hand. The complete human
anatomy recurs most often in the guise of artistically (ritualistically) organized bones; but just when you think you’ve finally found a hominoid
physiognomy, you discover: you’re looking at a mask. At the dawn of the Neolithic revolution, the shift in artistic focus changes, from wild
animals to domesticates, yet still no sign of the portrait, the likeness of the proverbially unique individual. The paradox in this history, as
Constantin Rauer notes, lies in what humans alone among living creatures can do but did not do for the first 35 thousand years of art history:
“The man of the Late Palaeolithic era is the first hominid who knows he is no longer an animal.” And representational art is where this distinction
between man and other primates becomes most obvious. “When placed in front of a mirror, other primates are capable of recognizing that
it is they themselves in the mirror image—and not an image of another of their species. But if, just moments later, you show them a photo or
a film-clip made of their behaviour while in front of the mirror, taken from the other side of the mirror (hence exactly the same images they
had previously seen of themselves, although not immediately as they arose, but as representative images), the chimpanzees see and recognize
absolutely nothing!” So it is not alone the gift of language, but far more the gift of art that has allowed humans to become the object of
their own (self-)cognition. And thus the early human is an art-historical paradox: “He knows, thanks to his consciousness, his head, and his
facial expressions, that he is distinct from animals. And yet he doesn’t want to see himself: the direct reflection, the portrait or self-portrait,
is taboo.” 2
1 Constantin Rauer, “Kleine Kulturgeschichte des Menschenbildes: Ein Essay,” in: Image, vol. 14, June, 2011, pp. 19-27; Constantin Rauer, “Das Bild des Menschen von der Steinzeit
bis heute,” in Svenja Almann, Knut Berner, Andreas Grohmann (eds.), Menschenbild(n)er: Bilder oder Schöpfung, Münster, 2015, pp. 41-60;
Constantin Rauer, “Wandgeburten der Höhlenmalerei,” in: Das Altertum, 2017, Band 62 (4), 2017, pp. 271-310.
2 Constantin Rauer, “Das Bild des Menschen von der Steinzeit bis heute,” p. 55. See also Constantin Rauer, “Kleine Kulturgeschichte des Menschenbildes: Ein Essay,” p. 23.
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