Art, Artistic Styles, and Aesthetics
Art
While many of the pages on this website deal with particular kinds of art, this page is intended to describe the general contours of Scythian art styles/aesthetics as they are commonly understood.
Animal Style
Among the most well-known of these is the “animal-style” art frequent throughout Scythian burial goods and in the tattoos of the Pazyryk mummies.
The animal style reflects a stylized, sometimes fantastical, sense of animal life and activity: twisting, leaping ungulates; recumbent or running ungulates; stalking predators; and predators attacking their prey.
Creatures depicted may have ornate and intricately detailed antlers (sometimes with birds or flowers sprouting from them); they may have beaks despite otherwise appearing to be an elk or a deer; they may be portrayed with an array of unnatural colors in felt and leather.