Storytelling Through Art

Long before people could write, they told stories with pictures. The cave paintings of Lascaux in southwestern France, found by four teenagers in 1940, are about 17,000 years old, and they are not random marks. Bulls, horses and deer are painted with care and skill, and some scenes may show hunts or rituals.

早在文字出现之前很久，人类就已经在用图像讲故事了。法国西南部的拉斯科洞窟由四名少年于1940年发现，洞中的壁画距今约1.7万年，绝不是随手乱涂的痕迹。公牛、马和鹿都画得细致而娴熟，有些场景表现的可能是狩猎或仪式。

Paintings can do something that words can't: they let you see a moment from centuries ago as if you were standing in the room. A painting shows how people dressed, what they valued, how they saw themselves and what their world looked like. If you learn to read paintings as historical sources, you get a view of the past that no written text can give you.

绘画能做到语言做不到的事：它让你看到几百年前的某个瞬间，仿佛你就站在那个房间里。一幅画告诉我们，人们当时穿什么、看重什么、如何看待自己，他们的世界又是什么样子。学会把绘画当作历史资料来解读，你就能从任何文字都无法提供的角度去看过去。

The Chauvet Cave in southern France holds some of the oldest paintings in Europe, made about 36,000 years ago. Its horses, lions, mammoths and rhinoceroses are drawn with real skill. The artists used shading and the natural shape of the rock to make the animals look solid, and they drew some legs and heads several times, as if the animals were moving. Even older cave art has been found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where a painted scene of human figures and a wild pig is at least 51,000 years old.

法国南部的肖维岩洞保存着欧洲最古老的一批壁画，绘制于大约3.6万年前。洞中的马、狮子、猛犸象和犀牛都画得相当高明。画家利用明暗和岩壁天然的起伏，让动物显得立体饱满；有些腿和头还画了好几遍，看上去像是在奔跑。在印度尼西亚的苏拉威西岛上，人们还发现了更古老的洞穴艺术：那里一幅描绘人形和野猪的场景，距今至少已有5.1万年。

Hand stencils are found in caves all over the world. People pressed a hand against the wall and blew paint around it, leaving its outline on the rock. Some on Sulawesi are around 40,000 years old, and the Cave of the Hands in Argentina has hundreds of them, some made about 9,000 years ago. No one knows exactly what they meant. Perhaps the message was the simplest one possible: I was here.

世界各地的洞穴里都能找到手印画。人们把手按在岩壁上，再往手的周围吹颜料，岩石上便留下了手的轮廓。苏拉威西岛上的一些手印距今约4万年；阿根廷的手洞里有数百个手印，其中一些大约画于9000年前。没有人确切知道它们的含义。也许它们要传达的就是最简单的一句话：我来过这里。

Ancient Egyptian art followed strict rules that changed very little in 3,000 years. A figure usually has its head and legs in profile, while the eye and the shoulders face the viewer. To modern eyes this looks strange, but Egyptian artists were not clumsy. They chose this style on purpose, because of what their art was for.

古埃及艺术遵循严格的规则，3000年间几乎没有什么变化。人物通常头部和双腿画成侧面，眼睛和双肩却朝向观者。在今天的我们看来，这有些奇怪，但古埃及画家并不笨拙。他们是有意选择这种风格的，原因在于他们的艺术有特定的用途。

An Egyptian painting was not meant to show what one person sees from one spot. It showed each part of the body in its clearest and most complete form, so that the whole person was recorded. A pharaoh was painted larger than the people around him because he was more important, not because the artist didn't understand proportions. The scenes on tomb walls had a practical job, too: Egyptians believed that the food, servants and pleasures painted there would serve the dead person in the afterlife. Art was meant to make things happen.

古埃及绘画并不想表现一个人站在某一点上看到的景象。它把身体的每个部分都画成最清楚、最完整的样子，好把整个人完整地记录下来。法老被画得比身边的人高大，是因为他地位更高，而不是因为画家不懂比例。墓室墙上的画面也有实际用途：古埃及人相信，画在那里的食物、仆人和种种享乐，会在来世侍奉死者。艺术的使命是让事情真正发生。

The European Renaissance, which lasted roughly from the 14th to the 16th century, changed what art was for. Medieval painting mostly served the Church. Its figures were flat and stylized, and their size and position showed religious importance, not how things really looked. Renaissance artists turned their attention to the human body, the natural world and the art of ancient Greece and Rome.

欧洲文艺复兴大约从14世纪持续到16世纪，它改变了艺术的用途。中世纪绘画主要为教会服务，人物扁平而程式化，大小和位置体现的是宗教地位，而不是事物真实的样子。文艺复兴时期的艺术家则把目光转向人体、自然以及古希腊和古罗马的艺术。

Leonardo da Vinci dissected human bodies to understand muscles and bones. Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512, and Raphael filled The School of Athens with lifelike figures of ancient thinkers. Renaissance art was also a tool of power. A portrait of a ruler or a rich merchant was carefully planned to show wealth, faith and the right to rule. The pose, the clothes, the objects and the background of such a portrait can tell you as much about 15th-century Italian politics as a written document.

列奥纳多·达·芬奇解剖人体，以了解肌肉和骨骼。米开朗基罗在1508年至1512年间绘制了西斯廷礼拜堂的天顶画，拉斐尔则在《雅典学院》中画满了栩栩如生的古代思想家。文艺复兴艺术同时也是一种权力工具。君主或富商的肖像都经过精心设计，用来展示财富、虔诚和统治的正当性。这类肖像中的姿势、服饰、器物和背景，能告诉你的15世纪意大利政治，不亚于一份文字档案。

Many famous paintings hide meanings that most viewers miss. Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1434), in the National Gallery in London, is full of symbols: a single candle burning in daylight, a small dog often read as a sign of loyalty, and a round mirror that reflects two more people in the doorway. Above the mirror, van Eyck wrote in Latin: "Jan van Eyck was here." A famous theory says the painting records a marriage, with the artist as a witness, but many experts now doubt it.

许多名画都隐藏着大多数观众注意不到的含义。扬·凡·艾克的《阿尔诺芬尼夫妇像》（1434年）现藏于伦敦国家美术馆，画中处处是象征：白天里点着的一支蜡烛，常被解读为忠诚象征的小狗，还有一面圆镜，映出门口另外两个人。凡·艾克在镜子上方用拉丁文写道：“扬·凡·艾克曾在此。”一种著名的理论认为，这幅画记录了一场婚礼，画家本人就是证人，但如今许多专家对此表示怀疑。

Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656), in the Prado Museum in Madrid, plays a clever game with the viewer. Velázquez painted himself at work on a huge canvas, next to the young princess Margarita and her maids of honor. A mirror on the back wall shows King Philip IV and Queen Mariana, who seem to be standing exactly where we stand. The painting leaves it unclear who is really being painted and who is watching, and critics have argued about it for more than 350 years.

迭戈·委拉斯开兹的《宫娥》（1656年）现藏于马德里普拉多博物馆，它和观众玩了一场巧妙的游戏。委拉斯开兹把自己画进画中，他站在一幅巨大的画布前作画，身旁是年幼的玛格丽特公主和她的侍女们。后墙上的一面镜子映出国王腓力四世和王后玛丽安娜，他们似乎正站在我们所站的位置上。画中究竟谁在被画、谁在观看，始终没有定论，评论家们已经争论了350多年。

Artists have often used their work to criticize power and to record cruelty. Between 1810 and 1820, Francisco Goya made a series of more than 80 prints called The Disasters of War about the fighting that followed Napoleon's invasion of Spain. They show executions, hunger and mutilated bodies, and they make no one a hero. The series was so harsh that it was not published until 1863, 35 years after Goya's death, and it is still hard to look at today.

艺术家常常用作品来批判权力、记录暴行。1810年至1820年间，弗朗西斯科·戈雅创作了80多幅版画，组成《战争的灾难》系列，描绘拿破仑入侵西班牙之后的战事。画中有处决、饥饿和残缺的尸体，没有把任何人塑造成英雄。这组作品太过残酷，直到1863年才出版，那时戈雅已去世35年。即使在今天，这些画面仍让人不忍直视。

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in 1937, after German and Italian planes supporting Franco bombed the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Its broken, screaming figures show the terror of an attack on ordinary people. The painting traveled to exhibitions in Europe and the United States and made the bombing known around the world. Picasso did not want it to go to Spain until democracy returned, so it stayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 1981. Today it hangs in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

1937年，西班牙内战期间，支持佛朗哥的德国和意大利飞机轰炸了巴斯克小镇格尔尼卡，巴勃罗·毕加索随后画下了《格尔尼卡》。画中破碎、尖叫的人物表现了普通百姓遭受袭击时的恐怖。这幅画曾在欧洲和美国展出，让全世界知道了这场轰炸。毕加索不希望它在民主恢复之前回到西班牙，因此它一直留在纽约现代艺术博物馆，直到1981年。如今，它陈列在马德里的索菲亚王后国家艺术中心。

The history of art is much wider than the European tradition that fills most textbooks. Chinese landscape painting, called shan shui ("mountain and water"), reached a high point between the 10th and 14th centuries, with works such as Fan Kuan's Travelers among Mountains and Streams from around 1000. These painters did not try to copy a real view. They wanted to capture the spirit, or qi, of a landscape, and they usually worked indoors, combining memories of many walks into one ideal scene.

艺术史远比大多数教科书中的欧洲传统宽广。中国的山水画在10世纪到14世纪间达到高峰，范宽约作于公元1000年的《溪山行旅图》就是这一时期的代表作。这些画家并不想照搬眼前的真实景色，而是要捕捉山水的精神，也就是“气”。他们通常在室内作画，把许多次游历的记忆融合成一幅理想的景致。

In Japan, ukiyo-e woodblock prints of the 17th to 19th centuries showed everyday life: kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, famous views and the pleasure districts of Edo, known as the "floating world." Their bold lines and flat colors influenced Van Gogh, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec. In Ghana, kente cloth is woven in bright geometric patterns, and many of the patterns have names that come from proverbs, historical events or famous people. Every culture has found its own way to tell stories with images.

在日本，17世纪至19世纪的浮世绘木版画描绘日常生活：歌舞伎演员、相扑力士、名胜风景，以及被称为“浮世”的江户游乐街区。浮世绘大胆的线条和平涂的色彩影响了梵高、莫奈和图卢兹-罗特列克。在加纳，肯特布用鲜艳的几何图案织成，许多图案的名字来自谚语、历史事件或名人。每种文化都找到了用图像讲故事的独特方式。

When photography became public in 1839, painters no longer had to record exactly how things looked. If a camera could do that, painting could show how things felt and what they meant. In the decades that followed, artists experimented more than ever before, and the idea of what art could be changed completely.

1839年摄影术公之于众之后，画家不必再精确记录事物的外貌。既然相机能做到这一点，绘画就可以去表现人的感受和事物的意义。在随后的几十年里，艺术家们进行了前所未有的大胆尝试，人们对艺术可能是什么的看法也彻底改变了。

Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889 at a mental hospital in Saint-Rémy in southern France. Its swirling sky is not what the night really looked like; it shows what the night felt like to him. Edvard Munch painted The Scream in 1893. He wrote that the idea came to him on an evening walk, when he felt a great scream passing through nature. So the figure is less a person screaming than a picture of fear itself. Works like these led the way to abstract art, in which color and shape express feelings without showing real objects at all.

文森特·梵高于1889年在法国南部圣雷米的一家精神病院里画下了《星月夜》。画中旋转的星空并不是夜空真实的样子，而是他心中对夜晚的感受。爱德华·蒙克在1893年画了《呐喊》。他写道，这个构思来自一次傍晚散步，当时他感到一声巨大的呐喊穿过了自然。所以，画中人与其说是一个在尖叫的人，不如说是恐惧本身的图像。这样的作品为抽象艺术开辟了道路。在抽象艺术中，色彩和形状可以表达情感，而完全不必描绘真实的物体。

From cave walls to museum galleries, painting is one of the oldest ways people have recorded their lives. Every painting was made by someone who wanted to say something, show something or keep something from being forgotten. When you look carefully at a painting, you meet the mind of a person from a very different world.

从洞穴岩壁到博物馆展厅，绘画是人类记录自己生活最古老的方式之一。每一幅画的作者，都想说些什么、展示些什么，或让某些东西不被遗忘。仔细观看一幅画，你就能与一个生活在截然不同世界里的人的心灵相遇。

Art history is more than a list of techniques and styles. It also tells us what people feared, worshipped, celebrated, mourned and fought for. A great painting is one person's vision and, at the same time, a record of its age. Seen this way, a visit to a museum is also a lesson in history.

艺术史不只是一份技法和风格的清单。它还告诉我们，人们曾经害怕什么、崇拜什么、庆祝什么、哀悼什么，又为什么而奋斗。一幅伟大的画作既是一个人的眼光，也是它所处时代的记录。这样看来，参观博物馆也是在上一堂历史课。