The Cave Painters

by Gregory Curtis

  The next day, Saturday, they all returned to the cave, but now their treasure was too big a secret to keep. They brought along four more boys and took them into the cave. On Sunday, just one week after Robot had initiated these momentous events by bounding off into a thicket, they took twenty more boys down. By now the news had spread throughout the town and countryside.

  Jacques Marsal, the boy who had first looked up and seen paintings on the ceiling of the cave, had a roguish, Huckleberry Finn charm. Ravidat had his constant cigarette, but Marsal, at fifteen, already smoked a pipe. He lived in Montignac, where his mother had a restaurant. In the midst of their rounds, the local gendarmes liked to stop in there, and the boy had gotten to know them. One of these officers liked digging around and once had found some Roman artifacts that he had taken to Leon Laval, the local schoolmaster. When the officer heard young Marsal telling his family about the treasure he had found, he told the boy, “You shouldn't keep this to yourself. You're too young. You don't understand what's important about the cave. You should tell M. Laval.”

  Marsal talked this idea over with Ravidat and the Coencas boys from Paris, and they all agreed it was the right thing to do. They went to see Laval on Monday, September 16. Marsal and Ravidat had been Laval's students. By now he was well into his sixties. Although in good health, he was short, stout, and no longer agile. Besides, he was a cautious man with no taste for adventure, and he remembered these two wiseacre former students all too well. When they told him about the cave, he thought they were playing a trick on him. Perhaps they wanted to get revenge for their school days by fooling him into hiking up the hill and sliding into some hole.

  Laval tried to ward the boys off by telling them that they had probably seen only natural rock formations that looked like animals. When the boys persisted, Laval asked Georges Estreguil, another former student, who was nineteen and more trustworthy, to visit the cave and bring him sketches of what he saw. The drawings overcame Laval's skepticism and caution. The next day, Wednesday, September 18, he trudged up the hill, steeling himself for the descent into the hole.

  When he arrived, he didn't like what he saw. The hole was so tiny and covered with brambles besides! Even though many people had gotten into the cave and back out through that very hole, the boys set to work with shovel and axe to widen it still more and to carve out a few rude steps for their former instructor. Laval tentatively began the descent, but some brambles scratched his face. When he touched the scratches with his hand and it came away bloody, he lost his nerve and backed away.

  A rustic farmwoman more than seventy years old was standing nearby. “Well,” she said, “if you don't want to go down there, let me by. I'll go have a look.” She disappeared into the hole. Her nonchalance fortified Laval, who later said he didn't want “to seem more cowardly than a woman.” He followed her down the hole, accompanied by Ravidat, Marsal, and several other boys from the town.

  Laval had to crawl among wet stalactites and, prim as always, he found their touch very disagreeable. At last he was able to stand up in the first chamber. The boys, who had come down after him, gathered around. When Laval looked up and saw the paintings, he was so overcome that just two words escaped from his lips: “Oh, shit!”

  He was astonished that the paintings appeared so fresh and that in the flickering light from their lanterns the animals seemed to dance in a wild circle all around them. He went from gallery to gallery, and everywhere the unexpected brilliance of what he saw intensified his enthusiasm. Later he said the experience made him “literally mad.”

  Once out of the cave, Laval insisted that the boys tell him how they had found such a glorious marvel. Ravidat compressed the two first visits into one and embellished the story a little. He said he had simply followed after Robot, who had fallen down into the cave. These minor alterations made a better story, so much so that over time Robot's fall became accepted as the truth behind the discovery.

  By now Ravidat and Marsal had pitched tents near the entrance, where they lived round the clock. They acted as self-appointed gatekeepers and guides to the cave. And to all these early visitors the two boys repeated the same story about the dog. Since Robot was living in the tent with Ravidat, the boys could introduce the now famous dog to the admiring crowds. In fact, Ravidat remained a guide until the cave was closed to the public in April 1963, and he repeated the story year after year.

  By living in their tents and protecting the entrance, the two boys were actually performing a needed service. Within a week of the discovery as many as two hundred people a day were climbing the hill to see the cave. The city fathers of Montignac had erected a sign pointing toward the way out of town that read: “Lascaux Cave Two Kilometers.” Another sign was tacked to a skinny tree by the side of the road. The crowds did damage enough merely by trampling over the floor of the cave and destroying any footprints or other traces left by the artists who had painted the cave so long ago. But the presence and watchful eyes of Ravidat and Marsal prevented any outright pillaging or vandalism.

  Meanwhile, the schoolmaster Laval made a few ineffective attempts at an archaeological dig at the site. He did find three stones that had been hollowed out to make lamps. The boys also had picked up some worked flint and wood charcoal from the cave floor as souvenirs during their first visits. This leaching away of what might have been valuable evidence, as well as the continuing press of the crowds, made it clear that someone needed to take charge, someone who knew both how to protect the cave and how to begin a scientific study. Fortunately, the perfect person, the abbe Breuil, had recently taken refuge in Brive, only fifteen miles from Montignac.

  Breuil had fled the Nazi occupation of Paris and come to Brive to live in the home of his old friend from seminary, Jean Bouys-sonie, who was by now a respected prehistorian himself. Breuil learned about the discovery at Lascaux when his young cousin arrived in Brive with sketches he had made at the new cave. Breuil left for Montignac almost immediately, arriving on September 21, just nine days after Ravidat and his friends had first wriggled through the narrow opening and dropped down into the cave.

  The schoolmaster Laval met the great celebrity and, together with Ravidat and Marsal, led him down the passage to the cave. Breuil was now sixty-three. He was short and bald and had an immense round chest on top of spindly legs. He could not stand erect—the result, he said, of falling down a staircase as a child— and he walked with a decided forward bend and needed a cane. Nevertheless, he was still active and surprisingly agile, although at this moment his vision was obscured. A few weeks earlier a thorn had scratched his eye and the wound still had not healed completely. Nevertheless he was determined to see the cave. The photograph on the facing page shows him at the entrance, leaning on his cane. As was his custom while working underground, he is wearing a beret stuffed with newspapers to protect his head.

  Fortunately, the boys had widened the entrance yet again for him, though it was still not much bigger than a soldier's foxhole. Breuil found the steep slope “slippery and slimy,” but on the floor of the cave he immediately perceived artifacts from prehistoric times that the schoolmaster Laval, the boys, and all the townspeople had missed. Breuil saw “flakes of worked flint of poor quality, but Palaeolithic, some fragments of reindeer horns and many pieces of conifer charcoal [that were] the remains of the grotto's lighting system.”

  During the next three months, Breuil spent hours of intense study in the cave. He had dominated French prehistory for so long that news of his presence at Lascaux spread throughout the region around Montignac. People gathered on the hillside below the entrance and waited for him to emerge from the cave. With the help of brave Robot, the two boys Ravidat and Marsal kept them in order. Journalists from newspapers and from the national radio came as well and interviewed Breuil, the boys, and people from the village who were eager to talk. This discovery was a piece of good news for the French in the midst of the German occupation. “That was a charming and picturesque period,” Laval recalled. “L'abbe Breui
l gave real lectures in the open air to the pilgrims, who listened to him attentively and understood the importance of his work.” Laval called Breuil's impromptu lectures his “Sermons on the Mount.” The people climbed the hill to the cave and stood listening to Breuil despite the chill of darkening autumn afternoons.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Great Black Cow;

  How to Paint a Horse

  M arcel Ravidat assisted Breuil as he worked in the cave. “What little I've learned,” Ravidat said later, “he taught me. He was inexhaustible. It's hard to describe because he was a simple man but so learned. And he put you in your place. I remember holding a tracing for him for an hour. Not a word. Then, suddenly, ‘Hey, Ravidat, have a cigarette.’ He was a smoker. He was a marvelous man. At any rate, in these paintings and engravings he saw a cult.”

  And that is what everyone who enters the cave sees as well. Lascaux was carefully chosen as the proper place for these elaborate paintings. Some pieces of charcoal left behind from burnt torches suggest that ancient people must have entered the cave and explored it sometime before the paintings were made. Those early explorers would have had to climb over mounds of rubble and push through whatever bushes and brambles grew there. Inside the cave, they had to keep their footing as best they could on the soft, slippery muck of clay and sand. Their visits were short enough that they didn't bring along any food. The traces of charcoal were all they left behind. But they explored the cave all the way to the distant point where the passages suddenly narrow and become impassable.

  At the very least, those charcoal remains from the first visit scattered through Lascaux prove that the people of the region knew of the cave and understood its layout and then, with that knowledge, chose to paint there. The cave was perfectly suited to their needs and intentions. The hill is the highest point in the area, and the cave is close to the summit. From there, like a cathedral built on a cliff above a village, the cave looks out over all the surrounding countryside. Below the hill a long plain extends into the distance and is neatly intersected by a slow bend in the Vezere River. Here, in prehistoric times, herds of horses, bison, reindeer, cattle, and all the rest of that era's teeming wildlife crossed back and forth during their seasonal migrations, pursued not only by humans but by wolves, leopards, lions, wolverines, and the rest of the vast menagerie of predators. The cave stood above all this great animal drama. As the humans crossed the plains or camped near the riverbank or stalked a young reindeer that had ventured rather too far from the herd, the hilltop with its cave was always in sight, a reminder of whatever power or protection derived from its paintings and rituals. It was a force, a constant presence in the life of the people who lived in the hills and across the valleys.

  The entrance to Lascaux has special qualities as well. The hole that Robot sniffed out was not the original entrance but the result of the collapse of a portion of the ceiling centuries after the cave and its paintings had been forgotten. The original entrance was nearby, only a short way below Robot's hole, and a rockslide or similar event had covered it as well. It faced to the northwest. That meant that both the setting sun and the sun during the summer solstice shone directly in. The entrance passage ran straight for about fifteen feet with only a gentle incline downward before it began a steep descent of about sixty-five feet to the bottom level. But the passage was so straight that a small patch of sky would still have been visible even there, far inside the cave. That, together with the orientation of the opening, meant that both in the evening and during the summer solstice sunlight penetrated surprisingly far into the interior, perhaps almost to the beginning of the first grand chamber. It would have faintly illuminated the center of the passage while casting mysterious and provocative shadows along the walls, until finally the overhanging rock blocked the sun and darkness began.

  The first room past the entrance is what we now call the Hall of Bulls. It is sixty-two feet long and twenty-two feet wide. The walls curve gently inward and meet in a naturally domed ceiling almost twenty feet high. The walls are remarkably smooth and consistent. They are colored an earthy brown from the ground level to a height of about five feet. From there on they are covered by grainy calcite that is so vividly white it is almost translucent.

  The walls and ceiling are generally dry and there are no stalactites hanging anywhere to interrupt the view. That's because there is a layer of nonporous rock above the cave. Water could enter through a crevice near the entrance and trickle down into the Hall of Bulls, where it collected in large basins across the floor. A hole shaped like a funnel in the floor at the end of the chamber allowed the overflow from the basins to drain into the lower, inaccessible levels of the cave. Shortly after the discovery, Breuil had the basins in the Hall of Bulls pierced and many thousand gallons of water rushed through the room and down the funnel. Still, as caves go, Lascaux was rather dry.

  So here was a cave on a hill that commanded the surrounding countryside. It opened in a direction that received the evening sun, and the first room just beyond the sunlight's reach was long and spacious. The white calcite covering the smooth, dry walls gleamed as brightly as any bare canvas stretched across an artist's frame.

  Lascaux is not only the most famous painted cave but also the most important to archaeology and to art. Many caves have certain beautiful paintings, and others, like Font-de-Gaume, Altamira, Niaux, and Chauvet, have a wealth of exquisite masterpieces. But none has the huge bold figures thundering across the ceiling like Lascaux does or the great variety or the great numbers or the immense, encompassing artistic vision that makes these paintings unsurpassed by any other art. It's often repeated that Picasso, following a private tour of the cave after World War II, emerged to say, “We have learned nothing in twelve thousand years.” Apparently, this visit never occurred, but the quote, whoever said it, retains its force, especially since modern dating techniques have shown that Lascaux is much older than was originally thought. It turns out we have learned nothing in 18,600 years.

  But in addition to the grand paintings there are hundreds of engravings at Lascaux, generally deeper in the cave, where walls are narrower and the space is cramped. There is also the enigmatic scene hidden in the deep shaft that Ravidat and his friends lowered themselves into by a rope. Other caves have either grand paintings or a profusion of engravings in difficult passageways, but Lascaux is one of the rare caves with both.

  Lascaux is not large, at least not the part of the cave where a human can penetrate. From the entrance to the most distant paintings is less than 90 yards, and the area available for painting or engraving is not quite 2,700 square feet. Within that space the ancient artists crammed 1,963 figures. Of these, 613 are so faint, deteriorated, or strange that it's impossible to tell what they are. Of the remainder that can be identified, only a single one depicts a human being, and it is located at the bottom of the shaft. Slightly fewer than half of the figures—915—are animals of some kind, but only 605 have been precisely identified. The rest are either effaced by time or only vaguely drawn or hidden within or behind other figures in a confusing melange.

  It's common for the walls of a cave to show one animal considerably more than others, and in Lascaux that animal is the horse. There are 364 images of horses, just over 60 percent of all positively identified animals in the cave. The next most common is the stag, with 90 renderings.

  The four huge, black bulls in the Hall of Bulls are among the most famous images from Lascaux. But cattle are only 4.6 percent of the animals, and bison are just 4.3 percent. There are also seven felines, one bird, one bear, and one rhinoceros, but no mammoths. Nor is there even a single reindeer. That omission is extremely curious and puzzling, since reindeer were by far the principal source of meat for the people who lived in the vicinity of the cave. In fact, we know from discarded bones discovered in the cave that the artists ate reindeer as they worked.

  One-fifth of the individual figures are neither animal nor human but are geometric signs. They appear everywhere in the cave. They a
re next to animals, they are inside animals, and they are on apparently random places on the wall. The signs have a variety of forms. There can be red and black dots two to three inches in diameter. Sometimes the dots are isolated, but more often they are arranged in a line. Other signs consist of straight lines arranged in a variety of related patterns. Often there are one or two or more short lines at oblique angles to a longer one without any of the lines actually touching. These and similar signs are repeated throughout the cave. Certain rooms contain rectangular grids. Sometimes these are blank but other times they are colored in and look like a section of a checkerboard or a color chart. There are rows of straight lines with barbs at the end like arrows, and, especially near paintings of cows, there are rectangular grids with only three sides. They look like the business end of a pitchfork. In various other caves the most common sign is the positive or negative imprint of human hands, but there are no hands at all in Lascaux.

  It is impossible to determine how many different artists worked at Lascaux. Certain paintings of animals appear to be by the same hand, but it's best to be careful about drawing conclusions from these similarities. Throughout the cave the paintings obey stylistic conventions in the way hooves, horns, and bodies were drawn. Paintings that look similar might be the work of different artists who were carefully following the conventions. Perhaps, contrary to our aesthetics, these artists did not want their work to appear individualistic or unique.

  Often the accepted forms require a technique the abbe Breuil was the first to describe. He called it “twisted perspective,” and it appears in practically every painting of cattle or deer. The legs are in profile but the hooves are shown full face from the bottom. It looks as if the animal had left tracks on the cave wall. Horns and antlers are also often in twisted perspective. In true perspective one horn would partially conceal the horn behind it. That is never the case at Lascaux, where the two horns appear parallel and complete. Generally they have a sensuous twist that makes them look like a lyre. We know twisted perspective is a convention because the painters used true perspective to great effect when they chose to.