Earliest Times To 1400
Vessels on the water have featured in art from the earliest times. The earliest known works are petroglyphs from 12,000 BCE showing reed boats in the Gobustan Petroglyph Reserve in modern Azerbaijan, which was then on the edge of the much larger Caspian Sea. Both men and gods are shown on river "barges" in Ancient Egyptian art; these boats were made of papyrus reed for most uses, but the vessels used by the pharaohs were of costly imported cedar wood, like the 43.6 m (143 ft) long and 5.9 m (19.5 ft) wide Khufu ship of c. 2,500. Nilotic landscapes in fresco in Egyptian tombs often show scenes of hunting birds from boats in the Nile delta, and grave goods include detailed models of boats and their crews for use in the afterlife.
Ships sometimes appear in Ancient Greek vase painting, especially when relevant in a narrative context, and also on coins and other contexts, though with little attempt at a seascape setting. As in Egyptian painting, the surface of the water may be indicated by a series of parallel wavy lines. Ancient Roman painting, presumably drawing on Greek traditions, very often shows landscape views from the land across a lake or bay with distant land on the horizon, as in the famous "Ulysses" paintings in the Vatican Museums. The water is usually calm, and objects that are submerged, or partly so, may be shown through the water. The large Nile mosaic of Palestrina (1st century BCE) is a version of such compositions, with a view intended to show all the course of the river.
From Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages marine subjects were shown when required for narrative purposes, but did not form a genre in the West, or in Asian ink painting traditions, where a river with a small boat or two was a standard component of scholar landscapes. Marine highlights in Medieval art include the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry showing the Norman Invasion of England. From the 12th century onwards, seals of ports often featured a "ship portrait". The ship functioned as an image of the church, as in Giotto's lost Navicella above the entrance to Old St Peter's in Rome, but such representations are of relatively little interest from the purely marine point of view.
-
Egyptian model boat, 12th dynasty, Amenemhet I
-
Nile mosaic of Palestrina (1st century BCE)
-
Norman ship of the invasion fleet, Bayeux Tapestry, 11th century
-
Shipwreck of Hugh de Boves by Matthew Paris, 13th century, English
Read more about this topic: Marine Painting
Famous quotes containing the words earliest times, earliest and/or times:
“From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (18741966)
“In mind, she was of a strong and vigorous turn, having from her earliest youth devoted herself with uncommon ardour to the study of the law; not wasting her speculations upon its eagle flights, which are rare, but tracing it attentively through all the slippery and eel-like crawlings in which it commonly pursues its way.”
—Charles Dickens (18121870)
“Why is it that we have enough memory to recollect the most minute circumstances of something that has happened to us, but not enough to remember how many times we have recounted them to the same person?”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (16131680)