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
Famous quotes containing the words portable and/or art:
“Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans—the used things, warm with generations of human touch, ... essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“In truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)