Art Is the Signature of Man

Art is, indeed, the signature of man, as Chesterton said, but much of what passes for 'art' in the modern world is fit only for brutes, such as Serrano's "Piss Christ" or Cattelan's "Comedian", a banana duct taped to a surface.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

The one thing that unites man with his most ancient of ancestors and which divides him from all other creatures is his status as a sub-creator, as the imago Dei, who uses his imagination to create in the image of the Creator Himself.

Art is the signature of man. —G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton begins his masterful outline of history, The Everlasting Man, with a chapter entitled “The Man in the Cave”. In doing so, he exposes the “progressive” presumption, rooted in chronological snobbery, which animates the work and philosophy of most modern historians. More specifically, he questions the lack of evidence for the belief that our ancient ancestor, the “cave man”, was in some sense an “ape man”, whose “chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about”. “I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea,” he writes, “and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports, it is founded.”

The problem was that people “have been interested in everything about the cave-man except what he did in the cave”. Suggesting with scientific audacity that historians should look at the evidence before letting their imaginations run riot, he questions the popular perception that our ancient ancestors were “more brutal than the brutes”. If we look in the actual cave in which the cave man allegedly lived, we do not find evidence of brutality:

What was found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory club notched with the number of women it had knocked on the head. The cave was not … filled with the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs.

On the contrary, if we are looking for real documentary evidence, rooted in scientifically verifiable reality, we find in the cave beautiful examples of art, “drawings or paintings of animals [that] were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist”. What we find, in fact, is the one thing that unites us with our most ancient of ancestors and which divides us from all other creatures. We find man as a sub-creator, as the imago Dei, who uses his imagination to create in the image of the Creator Himself. This mystical union and communion with our earliest ancestors should be a cause of joy and celebration because, as Chesterton says, “the brotherhood of man is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages than when it bridges only the chasm of class”.

Chesterton’s employment of reason and logic to question the presumptions of the chronological snobs is evident in his questioning of the presumption that our ancient ancestors lived in caves:

The pictures do not prove even that the cave-men lived in caves, any more than the discovery of a wine-cellar in Balham (long after that suburb had been destroyed by human or divine wrath) would prove that the Victorian middle classes lived entirely underground. The cave might have had a special purpose like the cellar.

Chesterton’s point is that the cave is the only thing that remains, whereas everything else has been lost to the ravages of time. Our ancient ancestors might have built themselves wooden houses in which to live; they might have worn elaborate and beautiful clothes, made from animal hides. There is no proof that they lived in caves or that they were naked in the cold. Isn’t it likely, in fact, that they did live in such manmade dwellings, resorting to the caves perhaps in times of particularly harsh weather? Isn’t it likely that their manmade dwellings were also places in which the artist made beautiful things? Perhaps the houses of our ancient ancestors were themselves beautiful things, with beautiful pictures on the walls. These have long since decayed. Only the cave and the paintings in the cave remain.

“In other words,” Chesterton concludes, “every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone…. This creature was truly different from all other creatures, because he was a creator as well as a creature.”

Commenting on this uniqueness, Chesterton remarked that “it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man…. Art is the signature of man.”

Towards the end of his musings in The Everlasting Man on the unity and uniqueness of man across the abyss of ages, Chesterton refers to humour as being another mark of man’s uniqueness: “Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter.” This being so, we will let the skull of the cave man have the last laugh, at the expense of the historians whose arrogance and ignorance have treated him with such prejudice, in the words of Chesterton’s poem, “The Skeleton”:

Chattering finch and water-fly

Are not merrier than I;

Here among the flowers I lie

Laughing everlastingly.

__________

The featured image is  “The school of painting” (1871), by Giacomo Favretto, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.