Only an anthropology of beliefs can provide an understanding of the effectiveness of symbols that every culture attributes to images. But the ways that pictures operate are always based on their effects of presence. And their power resides in the multifarious relationships they entertain with everything they are not. That justifies the attention devoted to their apparition; in short, helps to explain the devotion they inspire.

If San paintings are agents able or expected to preserve the wholeness of their world, this is due to the vitality with which they are imbued. The ‘continuum of pictorial vitality’ refers to the internal web of relationships woven by paintings, to the life-instilling ramifications of their visibility. As I have tried to show throughout this book, their vitality – hence their visual effectiveness – ramifies in an organic way. Indeed, there are three types of relationships: those that impart a sense of space, those that impart body and those that impart meaning to a picture. Making these distinctions is a somewhat artificial exercise, given their highly subtle and permanent imbrication. Let us nevertheless attempt it: first of all comes the shelter itself, with a surrounding landscape that flows into the paintings, shaping the sometimes extraordinary architecture of the shelters, from which the paintings draw some of the their spirit. I must stress again the extent to which paintings are overwhelming apparitions that dwell in a landscape in a unique, organic unity with the world: there, inside the shelter, they touch the surface of the rock where, through contact and porousness, the life of the otherworld seeps into the pictures. Such is the simultaneously geographical and stimulating – plastic and plasmatic – space of the paintings. Then come the figures that impart body to the paintings, through the whole range of visual resources used to indicate presence and life: the modelling of animal bodies, the drawing of their markings and the depicting of animal or human poses, which, taken from life, convey the time passing through them.