French art: Craft Personified
Enter the French territory and sprays of love just touches the heart with a sense of tranquillity, failing to which the crafty art takes over to spread the emotions in a serene fashion. The French art resides on visual and plastic arts that includes architecture, woodwork, textiles and ceramics. France has a significant history when it comes to painting. It sketches ages back when it all started off with Pre-Romanesque art, Romanesque art and Gothic art.
Breaking the French paintings to three historically subjective segments, it takes us back to the ancient period of 10000 years ago when a large section of extant pre-historic art from the Chatelperronian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Gravettian, and Magdalenian cultures. This art includes cave paintings, such as the famous paintings at Pech Merle in the Lot in Languedoc which outlines back to 16,000 BC. Lascaux, located near the village of Montignac, in the Dordogne, dating back to the Cosquer Cave, the Chauvet Cave and the Trois-Frères cave; and portable art, such as animal carvings and great goddess statuettes called Venus figurines, such as the “Venus of Brassempouy” of 21,000 BC, discovered in the Landes, now in the museum at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye or the Venus of Lespugue at the Musée de l’Homme. Ornamental beads, bone pins, carvings, as well as flint and stone arrowheads also are among the prehistoric objects from the expanse of France. Moving on to the Celtic and Roman periods there developed a continental Iron Age Celtic art which was mainly associated with La Tène culture that thrived during the late Iron Age from 450 BC to the Roman conquest. Celtic art is predominantly ornamental. It averts straight lines and rarely uses symmetrical alignments in its artwork. It apparently involves a lot of complex symbolism.
Moving on to the medieval period of French art, significant changes started to appear in forms of Merovingian art, Carolingian art, Gothic art and Romanesque art. Merovingian art is the art and architecture of the Merovingian dynasty of the Franks that led to a lot of significant variations in the French art. Carolingian art originated in the period of Carolingian Renaissance. The Carolingian era is the first period of the medieval art movement known as Pre-Romanesque. Romanesque art was marked by a renewed interest in Roman construction techniques. Most Romanesque sculpture was integrated into church architecture, not only for aesthetic, but also for structural, purposes. Small-scale sculpture during the pre-Romanesque period was influenced by Byzantine and Early Christian sculpture.
The modern period of French art covers the canvas of visuals and plastic paintings. Roman wars gave a wide leverage to the French painters on which they brushed Oath of the Horatii. The early years of the twentieth century were dominated by experiments in colour and content.
The French art has always been admired by the eyes of the sensible. The versatility of paintings is much to be admired by the common man irrespective of his knowledge on arts. Long live the paintings of France, longer live the crafty splashes.
