Opening many textbooks of art history, one finds "prehistoric" images like the paleolithic cave paintings from Lascaux or Altamira standing for the history of pictorial art from its hypothetical inception about forty thousand years ago until about 10,000 B.C., that is, for the first half or three-quarters of the entire preserved duration of human image making. For instance, the substantive historical narrative in the latest edition of H.W. Janson's well-known History of Art is introduced by a painted bison from the Spanish Magdalenian cave of Altamira and a view of the so-called Axial Gallery at Lascaux (fig. 1), with