El arte en la época de Altamira / Sala de exposiciones Fundación Botín

The Teufelsbrücke slate

Teufelsbrücke, Thüringens, Germany

Slate
Length: 12.6 cms
Museum für Ur-und Frühgeschichte Thüringens,
Weimar
456/69

Both sides of this stone are covered with superimposed drawings that are difficult to separate out from a mass of marks perhaps resulting from the slate being wiped clean several times. On the convex side, two female silhouettes have a bent posture that might suggest they are dancing. They were drawn before three strange, headless, human-like figures with straight bodies, outstretched arms, long fingers and some sort of collar around their necks.

To their right the head of a mammoth facing left is more definitely engraved. The opposite side includes a bird, a horse and a lion’s head. The drawings are not realistic. The straight bodied figures could be ancestral or mythological beings, ghosts or shadows. Could this be a vision of a phantasmal world in which the relationships of all creatures are explored and the female figures are icons rather than sex symbols?