The origins of art in Sardinia

Perfugas, Archaeological and Paleobotanic Museum, mother goddess with child. Photo by Marco Ceraglia IDV

It is not easy to provide a simple and unambiguous definition of the concept of “art”. Without dealing with this complex problem, let us limit ourselves to stating that with the term 'art' we can understand 'any form of human activity as proof or exaltation of his inventive talent and his expressive capacity'.
Whatever the definition adopted, it is however certain that the appearance of “artistic” products represents one of the most important stages in the evolutionary history of humanity.
Already in the Upper Paleolithic, man began to produce “art”, as evidenced (to name a few examples) by the very famous rock art depictions of the Lascaux cave, in Dordogne (France), or the artifacts in bone, ivory and wood (hardly preserved) sculpted or painted.
At the current state of our knowledge, in Sardinia we have no artistic evidence relating to the Upper Paleolithic.
On the other hand, it was in the Lower Neolithic period that the first certain evidence of the birth of an aspiration that we can legitimately define as 'aesthetic' appears. Particularly eloquent clues in this regard are the “cardial” decorations (i.e. obtained with the use of a shell called Cardium) that we find on the surfaces of the vascular shapes related to this period.
Even more significant are the Neolithic and Eneolithic “mother goddess” figurines and the Eneolithic “menhir statues”.

Update

2/7/2025 - 12:28