The Thinker Of Cernavoda: A Neolithic Masterpiece
Auguste Rodin once said that “Art is contemplation.”
In his famous sculpture The Thinker, Rodin combined the two with powerful results. The statue is of a nude male, hunched on a stall, his elbows on his knees and head in hand, in the act of contemplation, something visible in every sinew of the bronze figure’s muscular body.
7000 years earlier, an unknown artist in modern day Romania created a terracotta figure, striking for both its style and subject. Known as The Thinker of Cernavoda due to it’s resemblance to Rodin’s masterpiece, the figure is of a pensive man with a long neck, head in his hands and his elbows on his knees. It is just as striking as Rodin’s, and powerfully conveys the act of introspection.
Unlike other pieces of the period, his face is deeply expressive; his nose is in relief, a slit represents his mouth and his eyes are concave and formed from triangular impressions. It is profoundly human and familiar; the face of a daydreaming student or a writer at his desk.
The Thinker of Cernavoda is one of the oldest sculptures depicting human introspection and cognition.
Interestingly, The Thinker was not alone, but found with a companion piece known as the Sitting Woman; it is a ceramic sculpture of a recumbent female, both hands gently resting on one knee, who also looks deep in thought. Her resting position is extremely uncommon for art of the period. Some have suggested she has injured her knee, and holds it in pain, although I do not favour this interpretation. Like her male companion, she too looks contemplative.
Beyond their anthropological interest, they are undeniably beautiful, and wouldn’t look out of place in a modern home. The faces are like those from a Picasso painting, and the bodies, though strangely proportioned, add to the expressiveness of the models.
These pieces are a powerful aberration from contemporaneous artwork. Usually, pre-literate art depicts hunting and fertility; female Venus’s are often shown as faceless with exaggerated buttocks and breasts. In stark contrast, these figures exude life and emotion.
The ceramic figures were discovered in 1956 near the town of Cernavoda. They were in a large cemetery of the Hamangria people, an early farming society that lived in modern day Romania and Bulgaria in about 5000 BCE. This culture would bury their dead in special locations known as necropolises, often with funerary goods like pots, seashells, gold and figurines such as The Thinker.
The Thinker and his pair were discovered in a necropolis comprised of around 400 graves. Was the artist who made them buried there? Were the subjects of his sculptures? What was the artist trying to say? We simply cannot know.
Some archaeologists have speculated that the figure may well be linked to meditation about life and death, especially considering it was found in a cemetery. It is not an unreasonable assumption, and one can imagine the unknown artisan pondering his own mortality and wishing to capture this enduring element of the human condition.
Whatever the artist intended when he sat down to sculpt these figures, his humanity shines through his work and speaks to us down the ages. The Hamangria culture left us no written records, but these pieces say more than words.
