Breuil believed that art began with a desire for disguise, in particular disguise with masks. Cartailhac had expressed the same idea in their book on Altamira. These disguises weren't frivolous but grew from necessity. They helped with the hunt, since a man disguised as an animal could approach his prey more easily. That, according to Breuil, “convinced man that the mask or disguise itself possessed a ghostly magical power; its ceremonial use was also employed, not only in hunting, but in preparations or ceremonies supposed to exert a magical power over game.” Although Breuil doesn't say so explicitly, it's clear from this passage that for him religion in the form of ceremonies to exert power over game appeared only after art was established in the form of masks and disguises. Perhaps he did not say this explicitly because he did not want to offend his superiors in the church by emphasizing that he believed religion owes its existence to art.
Although masks came first, a mask is not a painting, and masks didn't lead directly to painting. Masks, Breuil thought, “must have very soon led to the making of dolls.” Instead painting came from noticing the resemblance between animals or humans and the lines made by fingers when they were scraped through clay or down the wet sides of cave walls. Such resemblances were at first accidental, but then were made on purpose. That, he contends, is the origin of art on the walls of caves. But why, Breuil wonders, “did wall Art, during this epoch, so rapidly take such an important place in human activity in Western Europe and perhaps Africa; and not everywhere, even in these regions? “ The answer is hunting. It was hunters and only hunters who invented and refined painting in caves: “At the base of such artistic creation there must be a profound knowledge of the appearance of animals, which only daily experience in the life of a big game hunter can give; if there is no big game hunting, there is no naturalistic wall art.”
In fact, Breuil has little but contempt for nonhunting peoples, even in the Stone Age: “The Cro-Magnon shell-fish eaters of the sea coasts usually lacked that basic psychology and experience: hunting periwinkles and snails did not create nor feed their artistic imagination, nor were they even clever workers.” Having put these poor souls in their place, he hurries to embrace his real heroes: “On the other hand, hunters of Rhinoceros, Mammoth, great Stags, Bulls, wild Horses, not to mention Bears and Lions, accumulated, during their dangerous lives, powerful and dynamic visual impressions, and it is they who created and developed the wall Art of our caverns … Everywhere it was big game hunters who produced beautiful naturalistic Art.”
It's possible to see in these lines the passion for the paintings that a lifetime of study had not begun to satisfy. Even a casual observer of the art in the caves notices that there is a uniformity to the paintings that is as striking as their power. This enthralls Breuil. “This is no longer the work of an individual,” he says, “but a collective, social affair, showing a true spiritual unity, I am inclined to say, an orthodoxy, suggesting some sort of institution registering the development of this Art by the selection and instruction of those mostly highly gifted.” Schools of art in the Stone Age! Breuil comes to this conclusion inevitably from his theories, but as I mentioned earlier, there is evidence that such schools did exist.
As Breuil continues, we can see the yearning for an ordered society of the man who, though he may not have had a parish, lived his whole life as a priest: “It was not individual fancy which produced the painted caves, but some such institution which directed, and, in each period, created uniformity of expression. If at the start, some gifted individuals were needed to lay the foundations of artistic expression, its development shows a control and exceptional common interest.”
But what was the purpose of the art? Was it simply for beauty's sake or was it not really aesthetic at all, nothing more than part of a ritual of hunting magic? Breuil thinks it was probably both: “Without the artistic temperament with its adoration of Beauty, no great Art could exist nor develop. But without a society considering the artist's work as of capital interest, the artist could not live nor found a school where his technical discoveries and his passion for Beauty could continue and be transmitted through Space and Time.” In this way, with the combination of artists of genius and a society that valued their creations, “all the west of Europe was conquered by this first illumination of Beauty.”
In this burst of vision, Breuil at last allowed himself to reveal the world he imagined as he lay on sharp rocks for hours patiently making careful copies of paintings in the caves. It was a world of a few people with real genius who were supported, even revered, by a society whose members came reverently into the caves to perform rituals for the hunt.
Breuil never earned an advanced degree, but he received many honors. Although his publications identified him only as “Member of the Institute, Honorary Professor College of France,” being a Member of the Institute is the highest honor for an academic in France. For the first half of the twentieth century he reigned as the Pope of Prehistory. He pronounced upon the authenticity of each new discovery and dictated how it was to be explored and studied. He published well over a thousand scholarly papers and many books and pamphlets.
Breuil's work had weaknesses and he made mistakes, which he would probably be reluctant to admit even if he were still alive. But he was involved very early in a handful of great discoveries, Les Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume being only two. More important, after absorbing every detail of contemporary knowledge about prehistory, and after poring over each new discovery as it was made, he was able to make order out of the chaos of facts. He constructed a chronology for the paintings in the caves and for the surrounding events in prehistory, and he created a logical and inclusive interpretation of prehistoric art that, if it has lost favor among scholars today, still cannot be absolutely disproved. Breuil began when the study of prehistory was in its infancy. He shaped it into something mature, something with form and substance that could become clearer with new discoveries rather than more clouded. He was the beginning, and without him we might still be looking for the place to start.
That is why it seemed to be the natural order of things, and not mere chance, that Breuil was living close by when a boy and a dog happened upon the most spectacular painted cave ever found.
CHAPTER 3
Noble Robot, An Inquiring Dog;
The Abbé's Sermons
on the Mount
O n a Sunday afternoon in early September four teenage boys went into the woods on the side of a hill. They were going to search for treasure. It was 1940. The hill the four boys climbed was just outside Montignac, a town in the Perigord region of central France, where the boys all lived. Although the Nazis had occupied Paris, the war had not reached the Perigord, but Montignac and the towns nearby were affected just the same. People went through the motions of life without really living. Time seemed suspended while they waited, powerless, to see what would happen next. For teenagers that meant there was nothing but long days of boredom and idleness. The four boys had decided to climb into the woods on the hill because they were desperate for something to do other than slouching back and forth along the streets of the village.
Then too, this hill had always had an air of danger, legend, and possibility. The road curved around the foot of the hill and passed by a deserted chateau on a small estate that belonged to the Comtesse de la Rochefoucauld-Montbel and her husband.
Through her mother she was a Labrousse de Lascaux, member of a family of local gentry that had acquired the property in the fifteenth century and built the chateau. A shout directed at the old building would produce a sound that was not really an echo but a long, eerie resonance that emanated, according to the inhabitants of Montignac, from a forgotten cavern beneath the house. The entrance to the cavern was now lost, covered over by an avalanche or a landslide, or perhaps concealed on purpose. The deserted house of an old and landed family, the mysterious cavern, and the lost entrance had given rise to the local legend that the secret cavern contained hidden treasure.
In addition to th
e resonating sound, there were other tantalizing reasons to believe in the existence of the cavern. As a young girl, the grandmother of M. Dezon, an elderly resident of Montignac whose family had lived in the area for generations, had known people who had lived through the Revolution and the great terror that followed after it. One of those survivors had told her that a priest named Labrousse had escaped from the terror by hiding in a cave in the hill named Lascaux. He had known about it because his family had had a chateau and an estate there also named Lascaux.
In the nineteenth century the hillside had been planted with grapevines, but they were killed by blight before they could produce. After that, the proprietor spread seeds for pine, juniper, oak, fir, and poplar and let the land go wild. In time the only people who went there were hikers, hunters, and the farmers who let their cattle graze among the brambles.
The hill's aura of mystery was intensified in the late 1870s. An early archaeologist named Reverdit poked around the hill and found a good number of stones with prehistoric carvings. In 1878 he even published a paper about his finds, “Stations et traces des temps prehistoriques dans le canton de Montignac-sur-Vezere.”
The existence of the cavern remained nothing more than a local legend until a powerful storm, in around 1920, blew down a fir tree. The tree's thick root system turned up the subsoil and partially exposed a deep hole. Farmers in the area, who were necessarily practical men and not so enamored of legend as teenage boys, warned one another about the cavity because it was a potential danger to their livestock. They filled it in with dirt, dumped garbage down the hole, and encouraged a thicket of brambles to grow there. Even with these precautions, a donkey fell into the hole and was never seen again.
As the boys set out on their hike, their dogs followed along. One, named Robot, was about to become famous. He belonged to Marcel Ravidat, who at seventeen was the oldest of the group by two years. Ravidat was their rakish, admired natural leader. He smoked cigarettes incessantly and no longer attended school. Instead he worked as an apprentice mechanic at the garage in Mon-tignac. He was good at this work, clever with his hands and with machinery. All his companions called him “le Bagnard,” which can be translated as “the convict” but really refers to a prisoner in a penal colony. Ravidat earned this nickname because his robust, blocky build made him resemble the French actor Harry Baur, who played Jean Valjean in a 1934 movie of Les Miserables. Le Bagnard was also very proud of his expertise in speaking the local patois. Even later in life, when he would occasionally be interviewed on French national television or radio, he preferred to answer questions in patois unless he was specifically requested to speak French.
The boys poked around the hillside until late in the afternoon without finding any treasure or cavern or even the slightest mystery to engage their teeming imaginations. As they at last turned toward home, Robot bounded off into a thicket and ignored Ravidat's calls to come back. What had the dog found in that thicket? It appeared to be nothing but brambles and undergrowth around some juniper trees, little pines and oaks, and a few rotting stumps.
The boys pushed their way in and found a large hole about three feet across and five feet deep. Robot was at the bottom, digging furiously. Ravidat crawled into the hole to see what Robot had discovered. It turned out to be a second hole only about six inches across. Holding Robot back, he dropped several rocks down this hole and was surprised to hear them roll on and on into the darkness. Each of the other three boys took his turn dropping rocks into the small hole and listening as they fell into the seemingly endless depths. This was suddenly no imaginary adventure. They had done it; thanks to Robot, they had found the entrance to the mysterious cavern.
But now it was late in the day, and besides, the boys didn't have the ropes, lights, and other equipment they would need to enter a cave. They descended the hill and went back home having made a solemn promise to explore this hole further as soon as they could.
That turned out to be four days later, on September 12, 1940, when there wasn't any work for Ravidat at the garage. He went to find his comrades, only to discover that two were working and the third was resting and felt too lazy that day to go. So Ravidat set out on his own, carrying a large knife that he had made himself and a crude lamp that he had rigged up by sticking a cotton wick on an oil pump from an automobile. But poor Robot! Ravidat had left him at home.
Along the way, le Bagnard encountered another group of friends, three of whom decided to tag along with him. They were Jacques Marsal, fifteen, who lived in Montignac; Georges Agnel, sixteen, a Parisian who was visiting his grandmother; and Simon Coencas, fifteen, another Parisian. Coencas was Jewish and his family had fled Paris to escape the Nazi occupation. These were the four who set off up the hill.
At the site it was obvious that they had to make the hole much wider before they could get through it. They set to work, taking turns digging with the only tool at hand—Ravidat's homemade knife. After more than an hour's hard labor, Ravidat was able to squeeze through headfirst and slither down on his chest about twenty feet. There he lit the jury-rigged lamp to see where he was. Cautiously, he took a step, only to slip on a pile of flint. The lamp went out as he tumbled into the darkness.
The next few seconds must have been terrifying, since Ravidat didn't know how far the shaft went before it reached bottom. But fortunately he soon landed on the floor of the cave, where, bruised and aching, he pulled himself to his feet. He relit the lamp, which he had had the presence of mind to hold on to, and looked around. He was in a moderately sized room in a cave. There wasn't really any great danger. He called up to his three companions and told them to be careful where they stepped but to come ahead and join him. Each of the three made it down without incident, though on the way they noticed the skeleton of a donkey.
In the feeble light from the lamp, which barely illuminated the darkness before them, the four boys began to inch forward. They kept the lamp near their knees, since they had to straddle low formations that ran along the floor. They covered about forty yards without seeing anything but the floor of the cave and their feet.
At that point the passage shrank to a narrow corridor. They stopped for a moment and Ravidat raised the lamp. Jacques Marsal thought to look up. Startled, he let out an involuntary cry and pointed. The other three boys lifted their eyes. Paintings of horses and bulls spilled across the walls of the narrow corridor. In the vague, wavering light of the lamp they seemed almost to be moving, bursting alive right out of the rock.
Then as now children in the Perigord learned about the prehistory of their area in school, so Ravidat and Marsal knew that, although this wasn't the treasure they had expected to find, it was something far greater. Casting the light here and there, Ravidat and the others saw painting after painting. The walls of the room they had just crossed with their eyes on their feet were covered with paintings. They became giddy, bouncing here and there in the cave and seeing paintings all around them. “A band of savages doing a war dance,” Ravidat said later, “couldn't have done better.” Marsal recalled simply, “We were completely crazy.”
Too soon, however, the lamp began to burn low and the four boys realized they had to return to the surface. They all swore not to tell a single person about their “treasure,” a code word they immediately began to use to refer to their discovery. They would return the next day and explore farther into the cave.
The next day was Friday, September 13, 1940. The boys managed to scrounge up better lights and some rope. They left Monti-gnac individually at intervals of ten minutes or so and took different paths out of town. They thought this elaborate ruse would prevent people in the town from becoming suspicious. Simon Coencas, apparently breaking the vow of silence, brought his brother Maurice along. So there were five boys who met at the entrance.
They widened the hole a little more and then slid down into the cave. They found a second hallway that ran off at an angle to the one they had discovered the day before. It too contained paintings, but the walls were mostly co
vered with engravings. The giddiness from the day before returned, until they found themselves at the edge of a hole that went straight down. They couldn't see the bottom.
The younger four boys didn't want to go down the hole because they were afraid they couldn't climb back out. The only rope they had was smooth and difficult to grip. That didn't worry Ravidat, who was confident of his strength. He worried instead that the boys couldn't support his 150 pounds as he descended. There was nothing to tie the rope around, nor anything for the boys to brace themselves against. But the lure of the unknown was too powerful. With the other boys all holding one end of the rope, Ravidat dropped over into the abyss. He had appeared calm and brave to the boys, but once over the edge he could feel his heart pounding in his chest. When he finally found the floor, he had dropped about sixteen feet.
He called up to his companions that he was all right and began to explore. The passage gave out after a few yards. Disappointed, Ravidat turned back and found himself directly in front of a painting that startled him. A human figure, the only one in the cave, seemed to be falling over backwards. It was a man with the head of a bird and hands with only four fingers. He had apparently been knocked over by a bison that was standing beside him. These two figures were spread out over six feet of the cave ‘s wall. Ravidat had just discovered what is now known as the Shaft Scene, one of the most powerful and mysterious paintings in all of prehistoric art.
He climbed back up the rope and told the others what he had seen. He had to lower them one by one into the hole and then pull each one back out. He noticed that his friends were pale, visibly affected by this strange painting.
The Cave Painters Page 8
