But that is precisely what should never be forgotten. Breuil's great artistry is his strength and his treasured legacy to us. But it is also a bit dangerous. His paintings, his truly great works of art, copies though they may be, are works of art by Henri Breuil. They are infused with his vision and his understanding of the cave painting, and that vision and understanding deserve much careful consideration. But to understand cave art it's necessary to look at it in the caves. Breuil was painting Breuil's vision and not what a prehistoric artist had painted.
That difference is crucial. One example will show why. The paintings on the ceiling of Altamira are part of a composition or several compositions. There is a reason for these animals’ all appearing together, random as some of the images may appear to us. But Breuil paints individual images. They are well worth studying, but they are separated from their neighbors on the ceiling of the cave and thus can never carry the meaning they originally had.
When Breuil left Altamira that evening late in October 1902, he had accomplished the first great work of his life both as an artist and as a scientist. He was an artist of a particular kind and calling who nevertheless inspired other artists. When Pablo Picasso, then only twenty-five years old, saw Breuil's copies in La Caverne d'Altamira, he quickly went to see the cave for himself. As a scientist, with his work at Altamira completed, and with his early insistence that Les Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume were the work of prehistoric people, Breuil had vaulted from being an obscure seminarian into the first rank of French archaeologists.
But he had only begun. Three years later, in 1905, he was the star attraction at a scientific congress in Perigueux, a provincial capital not far from Font-de-Gaume and the other historic sites in the Vezere Valley. There he presented the second great work of his life: a complete revision of the accepted dating of prehistoric tools and art. He was ridiculed and his work was dismissed at first, much as his work at Les Combarelles had been. And, yet again, he persevered and triumphed. This massive revision of the accepted dating was not Breuil working as an artist. It was the work of an archaeologist, an anthropologist, a scholar, and a great one at that. But, like his paintings, his scholarly work was great in a particular, focused way.
As an artist Breuil was a brilliant copyist, and as a scholar he was essentially a brilliant describer and classifier. The huge philosophical questions that archaeology and anthropology lead toward—What does it mean to be human? for one—did not interest him or at least did not find a place in his work. Perhaps his religious beliefs provided the only answers he needed. But it is astonishing in science what power can derive from simply placing all the available evidence in its proper order. That begins, of course, with determining what the proper order really is, and that was Breuil's brilliant accomplishment. The paper he delivered at the 1905 conference was the first salvo in a fight that lasted four years and came to be known as the Battle of the Aurignacian.
Despite the importance of this battle, its details are extremely technical. They concern the shapes and sizes of stone tools that different cultures made at different times during the Stone Age. An “industry” is the archaeological term for the tools and other artifacts left behind by different prehistoric cultures. During the Stone Age, which itself is divided into lower, middle, and upper levels, there is a bewildering array of industries, which are themselves sometimes subdivided into ever smaller classifications. Long papers, lethally boring, fill the journals with debates over whether a certain minor industry is discrete or whether it is only a local variant of another industry. Despite their tedium, the debates continue because they could turn out to be important. Putting all the stone tools and the industries they represent into a proper chronology is immensely illuminating.
In the mid-nineteenth century the first archaeologists tried to make sense of the artifacts they were finding. How did these ancient remains relate to one another? Which were older, which were younger? Was there any way to organize them? Those early archaeological pioneers had deduced some rough dates from the geological levels where the tools were discovered. In simplest terms that meant the deeper, the older. Noticing also that different fossil bones appeared in different geological levels, they concluded that certain animals had become extinct one after the other. So in 1861 Edouard Lartet, a respected founder of French archaeology and the father of Louis Lartet, who would do the excavations at the Cro-Magnon site at Les Eyzies, devised a system of classification depending on which animal bones were found most often among the stone tools at different sites. This way he could assign certain kinds of tools to the Great Bear Age, which was the oldest. The Mammoth Age came next and had its distinctive tools. Then came the Reindeer Age and finally the Age of Aurochs. Today, this method of classification sounds quaint, like the creation of some hack poet of the mid-nineteenth century rather than the sober work of a leading scientist. But considering the evidence Lartet had to work with, it was actually inspired.
Inspired or poetic, it soon gave way to a system based on careful comparisons of the artifacts themselves, and this was the system that Breuil attacked. His assault was strictly scientific, but he may have felt some submerged personal satisfaction because the inventor of the system, Gabriel de Mortillet, despised all religion, but especially Catholicism. He was the political radical and evolutionist who had convinced Cartailhac that the paintings in Altamira were a trap created by Spanish priests.
De Mortillet believed in evolution with a zeal that sometimes seemed religious itself. To him evolution meant progress. As humans had evolved they had also improved, and their culture had improved by evolution as well. In particular their tools had become more and more sophisticated across the eons. De Mortillet named each industry according to the place where it was first discovered. Thus an early industry named the Mousterian, first found at a site named Le Moustier in France, evolved into the Solutrean, first found in La Soultre, and it in turn evolved into the Magdalen-ian, an industry first found at a site near Les Eyzies named La Madeleine. De Mortillet believed that the progress from one industry to another was direct and was clearly marked by steady improvement. “The Solutrean period,” he wrote, “would have first perfected stone work, then the Magdalenian period substituted for that largely bone work, and invented Fine Arts.” And that was that.
De Mortillet's scheme had both the great virtue and the great weakness of simplicity. His nomenclature is still used today. And his chronological order of Mousterian to Solutrean to Magdalenian is accurate—accurate, that is, except for the inconvenient presence of the Aurignacian.
Aurignacian industries contain some tools made of bone. Solutrean tools are made from stone, usually flint. Since bone tools are advanced compared to stone tools, de Mortillet had no choice but to place the Aurignacian after the Solutrean. But that dating left him caught in an impossible contradiction because the Aurignacian contains some tools made of stone in addition to the ones made of bone, and the stone tools are clumsy and crude compared to the fine flint blades in the Solutrean industry. De Mortillet's theories could not account for the Aurignacian progression in bone and its regression in stone. He resolved this dilemma the only way he could. When he published his final classification scheme in 1872, he omitted the Aurignacian entirely. He pretended it didn't exist.
But, of course, it did exist. Breuil knew that de Mortillet's system did not fit the evidence. As he addressed the audience at the conference in 1905, reading from his “Essay on the Stratigraphy of Deposits in the Age of the Reindeer,” Breuil described the characteristics of Aurignacian artifacts with a sensual intensity: “Bone tips in ovoid or diamond-shaped contours, sometimes cracked at the bottom, sometimes … without this crack, many pointy bones, diverse smoothing instruments, sometimes awls made of reindeer cannon bone, crude pins, ivory pearls, sticks and ribs decorated in hunting motifs, or in diverse elementary traits.” He could cite Aurignacian finds all across Belgium and France. And the Aurignacian industries were always located above the Mousterian and below the Solutrean, so ch
ronologically the Aurignacian had to be between them. In fact, Breuil insisted, the existence of the Aurignacian between the Mousterian and the Solutrean was “one of the most certain facts” known about the Stone Age.
This was a direct affront to de Mortillet, but it was only a gentle jab compared to what Breuil had in store. He intended to thrust a stake into the very heart of de Mortillet's work—his belief that evolution was identical with progress. Breuil wrote, “If the clarity of a simplistic system has didactic advantages”—he is insinuating that Mortillet's system was little more than a teaching tool—”it is incapable of distinguishing, among the diversity of facts, those which will give rise to more objective and more adequate views of what's real.” In other words, the system is useless because it is too simple to get to the truth. Prehistoric people in Europe didn't evolve in a “perfectly uniform and smooth” way from one epoch to the next, according to Breuil. Nor did they live in isolation: “The evolution of Western peoples is not as simple as has been thought; outside influences must undoubtedly have modified its course many times.” Breuil was suggesting a radical change in thinking about early people, one with a more complicated chronology, with influences shifting back and forth, with forces from the outside interrupting again and again. It rejected the orthodox view of continual improvement over time, but it had the advantage of fitting with the facts.
In the years following this initial massive attack, de Mortillet's system collapsed and Breuil was able to refine his thinking as he continued to study, describe, and classify prehistoric artifacts. He came to believe that Western Europe of the Stone Age saw a number of migrations from the east and south by people who brought the Aurignacian industry with them. Similarly, the Solutrean industry did not evolve independently but arrived with another migration from the east, while the Magdalenian appeared after still other migrations from the northeast. In broad outline, this theory is the one accepted by most prehistorians today, and Breuil was the one who created it.
Breuil had loyal friends and devoted acolytes, but toward most people he was quick-tempered, impatient, and not very likable. He lived for many years in a third-floor apartment in Paris on avenue de la Motte-Picquet, right above a Metro stop. It was littered with limp, half-smoked butts of the cigarettes he chain-smoked. People in the neighborhood referred to him as le vieux pretre rogue, the arrogant old priest. When a friend told him that, Breuil cackled with pleasure. He took his meals with an English expatriate who had become his best friend. He never learned to drive a car, although when he was younger he had ridden horses well. Since his work sometimes took him to dangerous places, and since he often worked in isolation, he carried a pistol and learned to be a passable shot. While in Africa, where he spent many years, he carried a long spear instead of a pistol. He claimed that with it he could keep even a lion at bay.
All his life, solitude pleased him more than company. Frail and small as a child, he was bullied in school and in fact wasn't much of a student. One of his teachers said that instead of paying attention in class, he sat musing “like a little old man.” But he appears to have known instinctively what qualities he would need during his life. Quite deliberately he taught himself to endure both fear and time alone, as he describes in this account of his trips home from boarding school when he was perhaps ten or eleven: “The long Station Road running between interminable high walls and feebly lit by a few miserable street lamps echoed to my footsteps in a most alarming way. I was afraid; and I was ashamed of being afraid. So, to overcome my fears, I made it a habit to take a quite dark and very lonely shortcut that led up the Chatelier, a wooded walk, planted with great elms whose tall branches stood out against the sparkling night sky. In this way I taught myself to master my terrors and prepared myself for other and much greater solitudes which I was, later on, to endure for long periods at a time.”
Breuil's father was the French equivalent of a district attorney in Clermont-de-POise, a town forty miles north of Paris. When Henri declared his intention to enter the seminary, his family may have been disappointed, but they considered it as good a choice as any for this strange, solitary little son. All his life Breuil was as secular as one can be while still remaining a priest. He never had a parish, never presided at a wedding or a funeral, never tried to convert anyone, and never had any position with the church or received any money from it. If asked about the relation between science and religion, he replied disingenuously: “The two things are separate and distinct. They run parallel. They do not touch.” For many years he was a close friend of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. They worked together in China studying early hominids and human evolution and were part of a surprisingly large group of Catholic clerics who were known as “priestly evolutionists.” Still, Breuil was always careful not to use his scientific studies to confront the church. He preferred not to attract the church's attention at all. That way he avoided the difficulties and the painful entanglements that came to plague Teilhard.
Breuil was a peculiar-looking man with a huge, long head and a prominent nose. He could be genial, approachable, and sometimes earthy. But he was also vindictive and he had the air of being certain of his own preeminence.
As Breuil traveled to remote places around the world, his frequent companion was a woman always referred to as Miss Mary E. Boyle. She was a plain, sturdy woman who wore plain, sturdy clothes often set off by a Chinese coolie hat. From middle age she used a cane, just as Breuil did, and her broad, square face, straight mouth, and thick eyebrows gave her a subtle resemblance to the priest. In all she devoted thirty-seven years of her life to his service. She translated many of his books and papers into English. She camped with him in the remote African wilds. And she sat in the caves holding lights. Breuil called her his “human candelabra.” It's unlikely there was anything physical about their relationship because, despite spending almost four decades together, there was apparently very little even personal between them. In an interview after Breuil's death, Miss Boyle said, “In the dark caves, in the camp, where we spent hours and hours, we hardly spoke. He moved my arm without a word, to light him … and he said that others yawned, sneezed, shuffled their feet, or talked, and that I was the only lighter he could really work with.” Breuil worked in complete absorption and Miss Boyle learned to become absorbed herself. “For one thing,” she said, “I liked the stillness, I liked the dark and I listened to drops of water falling from different heights and striking different notes and I wondered how much of the artist's pride, how much of his memories were still hidden in the unexplored galleries beneath our feet.” She seems to have been the last Victorian virgin, sitting absolutely still and listening to the sound of dripping water while the man she loved, perhaps without even knowing she loved him, ignored her completely except for moving her arm now and again without uttering a word. For her sake I hope—in fact, I believe—that her presence was a comfort to Breuil, as cold and cranky as he was. And I suppose I believe that for his sake as well.
With male associates he was just as demanding but more flamboyant. Entering a cave in France with an archaeologist from England, Breuil insisted that they undress and stripped quickly to his beret and boots. When his companion had done the same, Breuil plunged ahead, lighting the way with an acetylene torch. Soon they encountered an underground stream and were in icy water up to their waists. They had to struggle to stay upright as their feet slid on rocks. Suddenly Breuil announced, “We have to dive. This is the siphon.”
He dived headfirst and his light went out with a hiss. Eventually he resurfaced, snorting loudly, and shouted back for his friend to follow. The Englishman dived and discovered he had to go under a stalactite curtain below the surface of the water. He made it, but barely, and surfaced next to Breuil, who relit the lamp. Beaming, Breuil said, “The siphon. Something, isn't it?” But a short way beyond, they reached the reward for risking their lives by diving past the siphon. There was a small cave bear that a Stone Age artist had modeled from clay.
Articles and books came cas
cading out of Breuil practically all his life. They are usually heavy treading, since his tendency is always to revert to description, as if he were trying to re-create in words the kind of copies he made with his paints and pastels. Unfortunately, he was brilliant while making copies with a brush but an ordinary plodder with a pen. The culmination of his life ‘s work was Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art, which was published in 1952 and dutifully translated into English by Miss Mary E. Boyle. It contains Breuil's detailed descriptions of the major caves and rock shelters where he worked, including Altamira and Font-de-Gaume. These precise, unemotional descriptions purposely refrain from any speculation about meaning. Their intent and value is to be a scientific inventory of the important caves Breuil had studied. There are also numerous photographs and reproductions of Breuil's copies, although all in black and white. This is Breuil's distillation of his life ‘s work, and it seems, with one exception, peculiarly sterile when compared with the radiant beauty of the copies he made at Altamira at the beginning of his career. The one exception, however, is glorious. It is a short chapter near the beginning of the book called simply “Origin of Art.”
The Cave Painters Page 7
