Painting: Tales from the White Knight

The hunt is as old as art itself. The an -cient Assyrians celebrated the chase in bas-reliefs, the Chinese in stone drums, the Babylonians and Egyptians in frescoes. Millenniums before, cavemen at the foot of the French Pyrenees depicted a mammoth hunt on their cavern walls. The ingenious killing of beasts larger and more powerful was, after all, the central achievement in man's ascendancy over other forms of life. But the hunt seems early to have been less of a search for food than a heroic confrontation between man and beast, and...

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