In one of Italo Calvino’s fables, a single dinosaur survives the extinction of his kind. After a few centuries in hiding, he comes out to discover that the world has changed. The ‘New Ones’ who have taken over the planet are still terrified of dinosaurs; they tell each other terrifying stories about the time when the reptiles ruled the world, or secretly fantasise about being brutalised by them, but they don’t recognise the survivor for what he really is. They no longer know what a dinosaur looks like. The newcomer is given a name – the Ugly One – and invited into their society. Eventually, they find a heap of dinosaur bones in a melting glacier, and take their new comrade to gawp at it. ‘If one of them had looked from the skeleton to me,’ the Ugly One reflects, ‘he would have realised at once that we were identical. But nobody did this. Those bones, those claws, those murderous limbs spoke a language now become illegible.’
Do we know what a dinosaur looks like? Well, we think we do; we’ve all seen pictures. These pictures are called paleoart, and paleoart tends not to occupy a particularly high place in art history. Even now, it’s written off as kitsch and tat: all those exploding volcanoes in the background, those gaudy sunsets, those scenes of lizardy combat and gore. But I think it might be more important than it seems. Instead of simply reproducing the visible world, paleoartists had to make a representation of a thing that no human being had ever seen. In a sense, this was the first truly modern art. Or if they have any precedent, it’s in the medieval artists who lived before the prohibition on graven images wore off – who tried to represent, in codes and symbols, the image of God.
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