From a carved mammoth tusk (c. 40,000 bce) to Duchamp's Fountain (1917), and Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (1505-10) to Louise Bourgeois's Maman (1999), a remarkable lexicon of astonishing imagery has imprinted itself onto cultural consciousness over the past 40,000 years -- a resilient visual vocabulary whose meaning has proved elastic and endlessly renewable from era to era. It is to these works that Kelly Grovier devotes himself in this radical...