Portable art (sometimes called mobiliary art) refers to the small examples of Prehistoric art that could be carried from place to place, typically made during the Upper Palaeolithic. It is one of the two main categories of Prehistoric art, the other being the immobile Parietal art.
Though the game hunted for food was a recurring subject within portable art, the over 10,000 pieces that have been discovered exhibit a great diversity in terms of scale, subject, use, date of creation, and media. Originally seen as less important than the cave paintings that also marked prehistoric art, portable art was thought to be merely preceding sketches or plans to be developed in later, larger parietal, or permanent, art. Over the years, however, the study of portable art has come into its own as archaeologists realize much information about prehistoric culture, livelihood, and societal structure can be gathered from these works or art.
Read more about Portable Art: Categories of Portable Art, Dating and Its Difficulty
Other articles related to "portable art, art":
... years in some cases, separating the creation of portable art and its subsequent analysis poses a great problem in dating the works ... bone, antler, or other material with which the art was created, not the date that the art itself was created ... early archaeologists gave when excavating the caves or other sites portable art were discovered in ...
Famous quotes containing the words art and/or portable:
““It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital.... I would call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident.””
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“In the quilts I had found good objects—hospitable, warm, with soft edges yet resistant, with boundaries yet suggesting a continuous safe expanse, a field that could be bundled, a bundle that could be unfurled, portable equipment, light, washable, long-lasting, colorful, versatile, functional and ornamental, private and universal, mine and thine.”
—Radka Donnell-Vogt, U.S. quiltmaker. As quoted in Lives and Works, by Lynn F. Miller and Sally S. Swenson (1981)