Idols: The Power of Images - Annie Caubet, Skira

With Idols, Annie Caubet, archaeologist and Curator Emeritus of the Louvre, takes readers on an aesthetic journey across time and space. Caubet surveys the beginnings of human figurative imagery from 4000-2000 BCE, as the Neolithic Era's ambiguous three-dimensional figures developed and spread across the world, from the Iberian peninsula to the Indus Valley, from the gates of the Atlantic to the confines of the Far East. Caubet's book traces an artistic revolution that would shape the rest of human history, as the idol (from the Greek eidolon, or image) evolved to represent and express power, myth and belief in the human form. Idols climbs mountains, treks through steppes and deserts and braves oceans and seas to reveal networks of connections, a commonality of perception and contacts between remote lands at the dawn of anthropomorphic figurative culture.