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By Root 1000 0

as well as stresses and style changes internal to national art histories. Landscape art has been motivated by an exoticism, or a will to change and variety, and it has been in many ways conditioned religious or even political values. In the Middle Ages, Europe ans share our now normal city-dweller’s love of nature: the frigid, menacing Alpine forms in the sixteenth-century paintings of Albrecht Alt-dorfer, for instance, portray mountains as sinister; his dark forests seem ready to swallow anyone who strays too far from the village. In general, people everywhere who have been subject to the will of nature are less inclined to be charmed by its beauties. The rise of modern civilization tracks an increasing sense of nature as benign or as wondrous, and longer a threat. In fact, landscapes can seem so remote from ordinary that it becomes easy to imagine that our tastes in them are conventional as our tastes in cuisines or clothes. This is an understandable error, but it remains an error nonetheless.

The emotions felt by our distant ancestors toward advantageous landscapes are of little use to us today, since we are no longer nomadic hunters who survive off the land. Nevertheless, since we still have souls of those ancient nomads, these emotions can flood into modern minds with surprising and unexpected intensity. People who have spent their lives in cities can find themselves on a country road. Rounding bend, they are confronted with a turnoff that leads up a valley. Pastures copses of oaks dominate the foreground, while farther up the valley road winds and disappears into older forest. A stream lined with foliage follows the road for some distance and then is lost from view, though its route is indicated by groves of older trees. Far up the valley, bend in the road can be glimpsed. Beyond that, higher hills take bluish, hazy cast, blending imperceptibly into distant mountains flanked between their peaks by great cumulus clouds. Such scenes road leads. We are what we are today because our primordial ancestors followed paths and riverbanks over the horizon. At such moments confront remnants of our species’ ancient past.

CHAPTER 2

Art and Human Nature

I

Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto—“I am a man, and nothing human is alien to me.” This dictum of the Roman playwright Terence can stand as a motto for anyone who seeks human universals that underlie vast cacophony of cultural differences through history and across globe. Thus in the spirit of Terence, Steven Pinker concludes overview of the state of linguistics, The Language Instinct: “Knowing about the ubiquity of complex language across individuals and cultures the single mental design underlying them all, no speech seems foreign to me, even when I cannot understand a word. The banter among New Guinean highlanders in the film of their first contact with the rest the world, the motions of a sign language interpreter, the prattle little girls in a Tokyo playground—I imagine seeing through the rhythms the structures underneath, and sense that we all have the same minds.”

Pinker’s general claim about the universality of language and the linguistic capacities of the human mind is indisputable. Is there an analogous way to describe universality in art? Is it also true that, even though might not receive a pleasurable, or even immediately intelligible, experience from art of other cultures, still, beneath the vast surface variety, all human beings have essentially the same art?

All human cultures display some form of expressive making of a kind regarded as an art, does not have any close analogue in the West. The Sepik River people of New Guinea are passionate—almost obsessive— wood-carvers but stand in sharp contrast with their fellow New Guineans from the Highlands, who channel their energies into body decoration and the production of fighting shields, and who carve very little. The Dinka of East Africa have almost no visual art but possess highly developed poetry, along with a connoisseur’s fascination with shapes, colors, and patterns of the natural markings of