The ears of the cattle and deer also follow a convention. They are not treated in any perspective, true or twisted. Instead they are a single black slash like a knife blade sticking out behind the horns or antlers. This convention is so maladroit that at first the slashes are hardly recognizable as ears. The artists who painted Lascaux were certainly skilled enough to have found a better way to show ears had they cared to, which obviously they did not. Instead they followed tradition.
Horses, too, all tend to have the same appearance—small head, thick neck, round body, and short, spindly legs. Norbert Aujoulat, a French archaeologist who has spent twenty years patiently studying Lascaux, has discovered that the artists followed the same sequence each time they painted a horse. They began with a thick black line that became the mane and face. Then they sketched a light outline of the back and belly either in red ochre or by engraving. Next they colored in the body, neck, and tail, using black, yellow, browns, or shades of red. Last, they sketched the hooves, legs, belly, and rump, as well as the back and tail, in black and shaded them in. The horses all look so much alike, regardless of their size, because the artists drew by faithfully following this sequence.
Modern researchers think that the span of activity in Lascaux was less than a thousand years, perhaps much less. Certainly the coherence in the style of the paintings means that all the art was created at roughly the same time. But events from that long ago appear roughly simultaneous to us even if they happened five hundred years apart. We can't tell whether the paintings were all done in a matter of months, which is quite possible, or over several years or several centuries. The paintings and the archaeological evidence give the strong impression that the time was short—weeks, months, or just a few years. But a strong impression is not a fact. When paintings overlap, as they often do, it's clear that the one beneath is older than the one on top. But whether it's older by a minute or by a century is impossible to know.
It is clear that these paintings were not the work of some solitary genius. They required the organized effort of a team that was charged with the job and was supported by the rest of the community as the work progressed. It's probable that one person would have directed or executed a group of paintings in one room of the cave and other people would have worked on different groups in other rooms. And while it's likely that a single master was the sole creator of certain figures, that grand master would have needed assistants working at the same time. Someone had to maintain and adjust the small lamps as they burned so that sufficient light fell on the portion of the wall being painted. The artists balanced themselves precariously on ledges or perhaps on short ladders or even scaffolding. The tree limbs for the ladders or scaffolding had to be dragged into the cave and then constructed. And while balancing on a ledge or even leaning out from a ladder, the artists would have needed someone to steady them to prevent a fall. Someone needed to mix the paints and someone needed to pass food around and someone had to go fetch whatever they forgot to bring in the first place or replenish whatever supplies ran low—extra red ochre for pigment, for example. It's irresistible to think of a master working with one or two young apprentices, much as artists with commissions for monumental paintings have always worked. And, in addition to the assistant painters, the master would have needed several other helpers who had the patience and strong backs to haul in the tree limbs, the lamps, and the food.
The entrance of the cave leads into the Hall of Bulls, the first and, at twenty yards long and seven yards wide, the largest room in the cave. The first painting in the cave is a vague and shadowy grace note before the great symphony of the Hall of Bulls begins. It is the head of a horse. The artist has completed only the first two steps in the process of painting the animal. Two curving rows of black splotches form the thick neck and tiny muzzle. A thin, faint red line makes just a hint of a backbone and the shape of the rock suggests the rest of the animal's body. The horse is facing the entrance and stands apart, separated from the next painting by several feet of white calcite. All the other horses in the room are in groups and face the interior of the cave.
This figure, to me at least, suggests a stallion standing at a distance from the herd watching for danger in the only direction from which it might appear. But its privileged position in the cave implies something more, particularly since there are far more horses painted in Lascaux than any other animal. Was it an insignia to show who claimed possession of the cave? Was it a sanctifying sign like a cross above the door of a cathedral? Or was it a warning to keep profane intruders at bay? And another question is just as perplexing and intriguing. What is the relation between this horse and a similar shadowy and incomplete horse, just a neck and small muzzle painted in black with a line to suggest the back, on the wall in the depths of the shaft?
The next figure, to the right of the horse, is significantly larger and more puzzling because it's a fantasy. Breuil inappropriately named it the Unicorn, even though it has two—not one—long, straight black rods sticking out of its skull like horns. The Unicorn tilts way forward, its belly sags, and it is spotted haphazardly with black dots, black circles, and a reddish stain. It makes no apparent sense and there is nothing exactly like it in any other cave. Maybe it was a creature in a local legend. Another theory contends that it was meant to be an extinct species of leopard whose features, known only by oral tradition, had been distorted by time. It is, however, possible to see the profile of a bearded man in the head of the Unicorn, and the rest of the figure resembles one of those comic costumes in a circus that conceal two men pretending to be a horse or a bull.
The remaining figures in the Hall of Bulls are painted with such realism that they are immediately recognizable. In addition to the horse at the entry and the Unicorn, there are thirty-four animals, including seventeen horses, eleven bulls, six stags, and one lonely bear painted inside the body of a bull. Despite this menagerie, four black bulls dominate everything. They are huge. One on the right wall is seventeen feet long—larger than life and by far the largest animal in all known cave art. The bulls have beautiful horns drawn in twisted perspective. One horn bends in a delicate bow while the other twists like a sensuous, elongated S. The bulls have soft, expressive muzzles. Their deep but placid eyes are mere black dots beneath a black arc. The lines of their backs and bellies curve seductively across the rock, giving a powerful feeling of volume and weight that is nevertheless delicately balanced on their thin, almost matchstick legs.
The bulls are in motion. Three of the four face the interior of the cave and they and the herd of horses all seem to be caught in a maelstrom that is sweeping them into the narrow cleft at the end of the room where the two walls appear to meet. One of the bulls on the left wall is facing in the opposite direction, as if he wanted to slow the frantic rush of the others. But his somber presence only intensifies the intoxicating flurry. The stags, which are the smallest of all the animals in the room, are turned this way and that in confusion, as animals swept along in a stampede would be.
There are ninety-four signs in addition to the animals. While less overtly dramatic, they augment the sense of swirling confusion. Some are simply single red or black dots or rows of dots. And there are lines—curved lines over dots, straight lines, broken lines. Some are thin, while others are bold and thick. They appear to have been placed at random. There is a long broken line inside one bull and there are several faint red lines inside another. Breuil, for one, thought these indicated spears or wounds, in keeping with his theory of hunting magic. But similar signs also appear isolated in a blank area of the wall, independent of any animal. Conceivably they could be spears that missed their mark, but the animals, especially the immense and powerful bulls, seem completely unfazed and unharmed.
The artist or artists who created these timeless paintings meant for their work to be seen from the center of the Hall of Bulls. Several of the figures are oddly elongated when seen directly from the front, but the proportions appear correct when the paintings are viewed from the center
. And the sheer size of the bulls means that the artists must have mapped the locations on the wall and marked the dimensions of each animal at least in rough outline. These paintings were not some spontaneous outpouring but a deliberate composition that followed a detailed plan.
Just as rooms in a church are dedicated to different purposes— some for large meetings, some for intimate rituals, and still others for private worship and meditation—it appears that each room in Lascaux had a special purpose of its own. The Hall of Bulls was certainly the most public space in the cave. Situated just inside the entrance, accessible even to the old and infirm, it was also large enough to accommodate fifty or more people. In those days, when people were few, that could be an entire community. The people stood in the middle of the chamber, perhaps hearing chants or songs or drums, watching as the wavering light of lamps and torches made the paintings appear to move. Scenes of some great national epic involving bulls, horses, stags, and a single, lonely bear would have surrounded them. The animals were the characters in that epic, and the signs somehow marked the events and made them fall into place.
The left and right walls of the Hall of Bulls meet above a passageway that is hardly more than a slit. At ground level it is barely a yard wide, but it expands into a semicircle near the top, so that it looks like a keyhole. The second bull on the left wall and the second bull on the right wall meet exactly above this passageway, another proof that the paintings in the Hall of Bulls were carefully planned. The passageway leads to a second room, called the Axial Gallery. It's slightly longer than the Hall of Bulls but only four to six feet wide and with a slightly lower ceiling. It proceeds for twenty-four yards before narrowing into a tiny, impassable hole. The cave painters marked this dead end with two signs. One is simply a large red dot; the other looks like a fishhook made of four unequal red lines.
If the Hall of Bulls, with its animals spilling across the sky, seems like a grand symphony performed under the direction of a fiery conductor, the Axial Gallery is more like a tiny basement jazz club with four or five hot quartets blazing away all at the same time. This narrow, inconvenient, uncomfortable space contains works at the pinnacle of Paleolithic art. Even their names are evocative—the Four Red Cows, the Cow with the Collar, and, of course, the Falling Cow. She was known as the Jumping Cow until a close study of the torsion in her hindquarters revealed that she couldn't be jumping at all. She is instead twisting as she falls. She is in the air over three black horses. Her long front legs are splayed apart while her back legs curl up under her belly and her body contorts in panic as she tries to find her balance in midair. It's a great painting—dramatic, dynamic, the splayed legs in perfect perspective, and the great, heavy beast convincingly portrayed as aloft in midair.
Of course there is more—the Great Black Bull, the Mountain Goats Face to Face, the Chinese Horses, the Frieze of Tiny Horses, and the magnificent Upside-Down Horse. This last is painted curving around a conical projection so that his hind legs are exactly opposite his front legs. He has pulled back his ears in terror and his nostrils are dilated as he appears to be either sucked down off the cone into some abyss or spewed up out of it. This horse painting has exactly the same dimensions as those of other horses near it, but because it is wrapped around the conical projection, there is no point where it's possible to see the whole figure at once, yet there is not a single mistake in the rendering of the horse ‘s anatomy.
In this room a brown ledge runs from the floor to five or six feet up the wall. The white calcite begins only after that, although it then covers the remainder of the wall and the ceiling, which is twelve to thirteen feet above the ground. How did the artists get close enough to the walls to paint them? Jacques Marsal, Ravidat's friend who entered the cave with him, claimed to have been the first to notice holes in the walls that were filled with compressed clay. These presumably once held tree limbs that were the base of what must have been elaborate scaffolding. The reindeer bones were found on the floor nearby. Presumably they were tossed aside by the artists sitting on the scaffolding. The floor was also covered with fossil pollen from grasses, which indicates that the painters must have made cushions of grass to sit on. That further implies that the scaffolding was indeed intricate, since the top layer had enough branches placed closely enough together to support what were probably sacks of hides filled with grass. Traces of carbon reveal that wood from juniper trees, probably shaved and twisted, served as the wicks in the prehistoric lamps.
The paintings in the Axial Gallery are the most intricate and delicate in the cave. The whiteness of the calcite here, particularly on the roof, allowed a much wider palette than usual, including reds, shades of brown, and highlights of yellow. There are 190 paintings in all, counting both animals and signs, and each of them, whether it's the Chinese Horses or the Falling Cow, appears as part of a larger composition that dominates its section of wall. All this seems to be the work of several artists who, as they were sitting on the scaffolding, would have needed assistants to pass them paints, or anything else they needed. The gallery is so narrow, particularly at ground level, that it would have been impossible for more than two or three people to work at a time. Later, when the paintings were completed, any group larger than two or three would have had to come in and go out walking in single file. Perhaps entry to the Axial Gallery was reserved for certain people on certain occasions. Or perhaps everyone entered and exited in order, as dictated by some elaborate choreography. In one painting there is even a small clue that such a procession might have taken place. The Upside-Down Horse is near the end of the chamber. If you walk past it toward the final few feet of the passage, the horse becomes animated and seems to revolve around the partial pillar as the different parts of its body come into view and then disappear. Why go through the difficulty of making a painting like that unless participants would see the horse ‘s movement as they filed by?
Lascaux was closed to the public in 1963 because contamination brought in on visitors’ shoes had given rise to algae that threatened the paintings. In 1984 a replica of the Hall of Bulls and Axial Gallery opened. It's situated about two hundred yards down the hill from the entrance to the real cave, which is now surrounded by a heavy chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The reproduction of the paintings and of the cave walls in Lascaux II is precise, and each day well-schooled guides who speak a variety of languages conduct groups of tourists through the replica. The tours attract about a half-million people a year and often sell out, especially at the height of the summer season. Both an artistic and a popular success, Lascaux II is a perfect compromise between public demand to see the paintings and the absolute necessity of preserving them.
But there are two great flaws, neither of which can be corrected. One is that Lascaux II is not a cave. It's not apparent how important this distinction is until you have visited a real cave with real paintings. Caves are usually vibrant systems busy forming themselves. Water seeps through walls or drips from the ceiling, very slowly creating new formations. The atmosphere is damp and chilly and the floor is slick when the base is rock, or muddy when the base is clay. Either way, the footing can be treacherous, especially when the floor sinks at a dramatic angle or twists suddenly as a passage narrows. And it's easy to trip over nubs in the floor that are stalagmites in the making. Caves contain nooks, crevices, and passageways that lead … where? There is a sense of danger and of adventure. Absolute darkness surrounds the light you carry, and in a cave of any size getting lost would be inevitable without a guide. And caves are not mute. You hear sounds echoing up from the far depths. It's probably just drops of water amplified by the echoes, but how can you be sure? Here and there a solitary bat hangs in a cranny. Seeing the paintings in a real cave, even in one with regular tours for tourists, is more vivid and emotional— more daring, really, and certainly closer to the experience of the cave painters themselves—than seeing them in the unavoidably sterile atmosphere of a replica.
The second problem with Lascaux II is that it repre
sents only a third of the real cave. It's the correct third; that is, if one were going to duplicate just part of the cave, then the Hall of Bulls and the Axial Gallery would be the choice both of scholars and of the public. Still, because it's only part of the whole, Lascaux II gives a skewed impression of the real cave.
In the replica it appears that the Hall of Bulls leads only to the Axial Gallery, but in fact there is a second, less apparent opening. Its mouth is on the right wall of the Hall of Bulls just before the hindquarters of the great black bull. This opening leads to a fifty-five-foot-long tunnel called the Lateral Passage. It in turn leads to a fork. On the left, another long passage penetrates deep into the cave. The right fork is much shorter, but it leads to the Shaft and its enigmatic painting.
“The Lateral Passage” is an unfortunate name because it implies that the space was merely a connector between more important spaces. And in fact it has a rather functional appearance now, since a continual draft and a stream that runs occasionally have effaced almost all the paintings that once were there. But at the time the cave was in use, the walls here were covered just as thickly with paintings as the walls of the Hall of Bulls and the Axial Gallery. Plus, there are 300 to 350 engravings. (They are often faint and overlap besides, so an exact count is impossible.) Over half the engravings are of horses, 18 are of cattle, 17 of bison. There is also a smattering of crosses, grids, and other signs, along with an elk, a bear, and possibly a wolf. That is many more engravings than all the paintings in the Hall of Bulls and the Axial Gallery combined, even though those rooms have considerably more wall space available than does the Lateral Passage. And that isn't counting the paintings that the air and water have worn away. In all its glory, the Lateral Passage was probably the most densely decorated area of the cave.
The Cave Painters Page 10
