From this period, we have a bone sculpted into the profile of a cat (from the Pyrenees-Atlantiques Department in southwestern France) and a cave painting discovered in Gabillou (in the Dordogne Department in southwestern France) apparently representing the head of a cat.
Egypt has yielded the first abundant iconography.Apart from sacred images, the cat appears on so-called "ostraca", or small pieces of pottery that Egyptians used like notebooks to record their thoughts, notes, and drawings.This media was used to create caricatures of cats, who were often drawn in human attitudes leading flocks of geese or serving mice. Some consider these pieces of pottery to be the origin of animal fables.The Egyptians saw nature as mystical. Cats were often represented on amulets, objects which were both mystical and aesthetic.
"The cat under the chair"
This theme long remained the archetype for bas-relief (with sexual connotations when the chair belonged to a woman).A papyrus dating from 3200 B.C. from the Book of the Dead describes a cat killing Apopis, the dragon-snake of darkness and enemy to the sun god (Ra). Generally, the cat is represented holding Apopis with one foreleg and brandishing in the other the knife with which he will cut off his victims head. This scene symbolizes the sun obliterating the night and allowing the solar cycle to begin anew.During the New Kingdom (1560-1080 B.C.), painters used cats as a theme in royal tombs. The British Museum has one example: the tomb of Nebamum, where a cat is used like a pointer dog in bird hunting. Another example, found in the Valley of the Kings on the tomb of the scribe Nakht, shows a cat crouching under a table eating fish.In the late second millennium B.C., in the city of Bubastis, the main deity was Bastet, the goddess of fertility and protector of families and crops. After being depicted as a lion woman, she became a cat woman or simply a cat (like other leonine goddesses who were intermittently depicted as cats: Pakhet, Nout, etc.). Once a symbol of the sun, the cat became a symbol of the moon and therefore governed femininity.
Among the few representations of cats in the Greco-Roman world are a famous mosaic from Pompeii showing a cat seizing a duck and a bas-relief from the 5th century B.C. showing a cat confronting a dog.In terms of sculpture, the Greek funerary stele exhibited at the Athens Museum of Archaeology shows two young Greeks amused by a dog antipathy toward a cat.A stele from the Gallo-Roman era found in Alise-Sainte-Reine in France Cote d'Or Department shows a young man holding a cat. The Bordeaux Museum has a tomb bearing the sculpture of a young girl, her cat, and a rooster.
Dating from the medieval era, the Saint-Pierre Cathedral has a choir stall featuring a cat catching a mouse.
Cats were rarely represented during the Middle Ages, due to their bad reputation. Some exceptions include Tibert, a cat in Le Roman de Renart, featured in the Strasbourg Cathedral; the sculpture of the rat-hunting cat of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois in Paris; and the painting of a domestic cat at its masters feet in Le Mois de fevrier from Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry by Pol de Limbourg.
Still, numerous (often later) pictorial representations bear witness to the link between cats and sorcery established by the Church. Examples include Hans Thoma's lithography La sorciere [The Witch] (1870), Hermann Vogel's wood engraving by the same name (1890), and Queverdo's Le depart pour le sabbat [Going to the Witches' Sabbath].
Before the 15th century, the cat was represented rarely and only anecdotally in paintings: The Sacrifice of Abraham by Benozzo Gozzoli (1468-1484), Esau Selling his Birthright to Jacob by Michel Corneille, and Luca Giordano.
Jan de Beer (1475-1518) included a cat in his Annunciation of the Virgin, but cats were virtually absent from sculpture.
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