for modern art,these examples might seem obvious, even trivial. virtually everyone prosesses the necessary contexture frame to understand the contemporary art of their own particular culture. when viewing ancient art, however most of us fail to realize how very different the artist's life was from our own, and we end up seeing through the wrong set of eyes. take, for instance, a very simple visual figure: the straight line. through common in today's man-made world, straight lines are rare in nature, so their meaning would be much different to say a cave painter, whose only common experiences with them might be in tree trunks and the flat line of the horizontal.