In the apocalyptic watercolors of John Martin, nightmarish beasts writhed and flailed in the antediluvian ooze. The French artist Édouard Riou depicted marine reptiles such as Plesiosaurus and Ichthyosaurus squaring off like warships on the high seas, perhaps reacting to the naval battles of the Napoleonic wars, according to Lescaze. As such, reconstructions often took on an allegorical cast. Europe was in tumult, with empires wrangling over colonial territory, and discoveries around biodiversity, extinction, and evolution were coming at a blinding pace. The first formal reconstructions of extinct animals appeared in the 1800s, around the time the first Mesozoic fossils came under scientific study. The oldest entries in the genre, in particular, illuminate how paleoart can reflect both political and aesthetic movements, Lescaze said. “How they might reflect the political events of that period, or events in that artist’s own personal biography, and other techniques that any art historian would bring to a work of fine art.” “I came at the artwork through a more cultural lens,” Lescaze told me. Lescaze doesn’t spend much time reflecting on the changing paleontological ideas that informed the drawings and paintings, though. Many of the animals presented in Paleoart may look odd to the modern eye: bloated, skeletal, or dragging their tails in the scientific fashion of the time. A lavishly reproduced gallery of 160 years of prehistory-themed art, the book includes a series of short contextual essays from its author, the journalist Zoë Lescaze. Depictions of extinct animals exist in the gap between the knowable and the unknowable, and two recent books, Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past and Dinosaur Art II: The Cutting Edge of Paleoart, probe the different ways creators have tried to bridge that divide.Īs The Atlantic’s Ross Andersen wrote in a piece about paleoart in 2015, “To contemplate a dinosaur is to slip from the present, to travel in time, deep into the past, to see the Earth as it was tens, if not hundreds, of millions of years ago.” Paleoart, published by Taschen this fall, is primarily focused on how this past appeared to artists starting in the 19th century, when the genre first took root. Old ideas can linger long after researchers have moved on, while some artists’ wild speculations are proved correct decades after the fact. Paleontological accuracy is a moving target, with the posture and life appearance of fossil species constantly reshuffled by new discoveries and scientific arguments. It’s an easy form to define but a tricky one to work in. Such works of paleoart-a genre that uses fossil evidence to reconstruct vanished worlds-directly shape the way humans imagine the distant past. It doesn’t quite matter that the renderings are now scientifically out of date they’re convincingly alive. There’s a dreamy quality to the images, impressionistic landscapes blending with vibrant animal figures. Knight in the late 1920s, each of the hall’s 28 murals presents an elegantly composed moment in time: armored squid tossed onto a desolate Ordovician beach, a duel between Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, saber-toothed cats snarling at flocks of giant vulture-like Teratornis. Originally painted by the famed wildlife artist Charles R. Many people visit the fossil hall at Chicago’s Field Museum for the dinosaurs but a certain kind of art lover goes for the murals.
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