Which are your favorite artists when it comes to pictures and reconstructions of humans, environment or wildlife in ancient times?
Here is one of mine: Swedish-Finnish artist Tom Björklund who paints ancient humans and their environment. He also paints prehistoric and contemporary wildlife.
Here are a couple of examples of his art:
From left to right, top to bottom:
-Stone age woman from Finland -Western Hunter gatherer girl from Denmark -Boy from pre-Columbian Caribbean -Neanderthal boy
J.F. Oliveras (even though he blocked me on Instagram lol), he tries to be as historically accurate as possible :
Philip II of Macedonia
Carthaginian officer and Libyan mercenary
Persian immortal
J.F. Oliveras Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
^^ Cool pics.
Another artist who also makes pictures of ancient warriors and others, is Peter Connolly. He is the author of books like Hannibal and the enemies of Rome and Greek armies.
Mycenaean warriors
Etruscan warriors
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
Angus McBride also has a lot of cool illustrations.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
^^ Indeed. I was about to post him, but you bet me to it. Pity he is not with us anymore.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Another picture by Angus McBride, used as cover for a book in the Osprey book series Men at Arms
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Giovanni Caselli is an Italian artist who made a lot of vivid paintings of ancient people and environment. He has also made pictures of mythological figures and Dinosaurs.
Here one can read about how the artist Gregory Manchess made the illustrations to National Geographics article The Black Pharaohs.
There are a couple of question marks though. Piankhy and Taharqa was not the same person as he writes. Also the skin the king wears do not look like a cheeta skin but more like leopard. One can also wonder did all kings and their soldiers during the 25th dynasty run around in leopard skins? Or is it mostly added to depict them as more "exotic" looking?
Spanish paleartist Mauricio Anton has made depictions of both prehistoric people and animals
Here is a reconstruction of Homo floresiensis from the island of Flores in Indonesia.
Here is a "group photo" of some of the hominins found at Sima de los Huesos at Atapuerca in Spain. The picture reflects the age and gender distribution found at the site
Heidelbergensis family found in the Sima de los Huesos (Atapuerca).
I don't agree with all of Joan Oliveras's reconstructions of ancient North Africans, but he cooked HARD with this New Kingdom Egyptian warrior today.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
In another thread I have mentioned Björn Landströms book Ships of the Pharaohs with many excellent pictures of ancient Egyptian ships and boats.
Landström did also write a couple of other books which are also a feast for the eye, among them The Quest for India and Columbus.
Here are a couple of pictures from The Quest for India:
Phoenician sailors repair their ship at Gibraltar
Roman ships wait in the port of Aden for the monsoon winds that will carry them across the Indian Ocean to the trading cities of India.
The monk Brendan and his crew spot a walrus during their voyage in the cold seas of the north
A hippo in West Africa as seen by the Portuguese captain Cadamosto in 1456
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
I know I closed my big art thread out of a concern that the pictures would take up precious bandwidth, but I have a couple of paintings of mine that I'd like to share with this community anyway.
This would be an Egyptian palace guardsman. You can tell he’s higher-ranking in the Egyptian military by virtue of his having more body armor than the majority of the common soldiers would have worn (which appears to have been none, due to the hot North African climate).
The subject of this acrylic painting is based on a nearly 300,000-year-old hominin skull found at the site of Broken Hill near the Zambian town of Kabwe. Paleoanthropologists have traditionally assigned this specimen to the species Homo heidelbergensis, the species believed to be the common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, but a paper in 2021 classified it as a late-surviving member of Homo bodoensis, the species immediately ancestral to modern humans after we split from the Neanderthal and Denisovan lineage. An old nickname for the Kabwe specimen is “Rhodesian Man” (since Zambia was under the thumb of British colonial rule as Northern Rhodesia at the time of the skull’s discovery), but what if it was a woman’s skull instead?
And here's a scene I did in Clip Studio Paint last night of Egyptians battling Kushites:
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
An exercise in alternate history this time... In an alternate timeline, Pharaoh Cleopatra of Kemet and Kentake Amanirenas of Kush lead a triumphant march into a newly conquered Rome. With their legions beaten, the citizens of the once proud republic can do nothing but prostrate themselves before their African overlords…or would that be overladies?
