Phenomenological remarks on the so-called 'Eidetic Imagery' of paleolithic depictive representations

Depictive inheritance from Upper Paleolithic Caves represents a fruitful field of inquiry not just to study the origins of art but even for it concerns the religiousness of prehistoric man. An amazing characteristic of such images, recorded into countless caves, is the so-called “eidetismus”, i.e. the recognition of the features of different animals – subjects matter of representations – within the morphology of walls and rock vaults of the caves, besides to their subsequent integration into the graphical, pictorial, plastic work of art. Going over the different explanatory hypotheses on art and religion of Prehistory, this paper advance the application of a singular analytical model, that one of radical phenomenology, showing then how the seeming oddness of “eidetismus” actually testify a peculiar modality of human consciousness: the “revealing attitude” of the mythical-religious mind.