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The Oldest Enigma of Humanity
The Key to the Mystery of the Paleolithic Cave Paintings
By Bertrand David, Jean-Jacques Lefrere, Molly Grogan Lynch Skyhorse Publishing
Copyright © 2013 Librarie Artheme Fayard
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62872-393-9
CHAPTER 1
Drawing has always been a passion of mine. When I was six or seven years old, I spent all my free time inventing elaborate stories that I illustrated carefully with colored markers. I took my cues for these from the adventures of Lucky Luke, an unlikely cowboy hero in a checkered shirt forever pursuing evildoers intent on harming a tribe of Indians. My family was greatly amused by my first sketches. Although I wasn't particularly talented, their enthusiasm, forced as it was, spurred me on. Evenings and vacations, right up to adolescence, I could always be found with my No. 2 pencils, my erasers, and my colored pens. Eventually, like many an aspiring illustrator, I had to acknowledge, with no little disappointment, that an inseparable gulf yawned between my efforts and the talent of the famed comic strip authors I so admired. Nevertheless, fortune did smile on me once, when I had the opportunity to meet one of the greatest of these, André Chéret, who responded patiently to my questions during an interview I recorded. This was in 1975, and his character, Rahan, known as the "son of a savage era," was the hero of boys my age. The illustrations were realistic, executed with great flourish, and the stories told of the most thrilling adventures of this Cro-Magnon man, who was also a stunning example of the finest moral and physical qualities and who never surrendered to his adversaries, neither the hostile environment nor the hordes of disgracefully organized tribes, which were often under the sway of sorcerers with the most obscurantist ideas. They always lost. Sometimes, by some magical time-bending, Rahan crossed paths with a Jurassic dinosaur; evidently, the scenario's author, Roger Lécureux was not averse to taking liberties with prehistoric history. This detracted nothing from Rahan's appeal for his audience, who also came to appreciate through his exploits something of the harshness of life for the first generations of humanity.
In all honesty, however, my interview left me with a lingering despair, as it brought me face to face with the virtuosity of which only exceptional illustrators are capable; with just a few, quick strokes of India ink from his sable brush, he could bring to life an impeccably proportioned, perfectly muscled Rahan, who acknowledged our awed gaze with a short wave of his hand from across the freshly killed tiger at his feet. Chéret modestly assured me that his mastery was no accident: he himself had toiled daily at his drawing for twenty years and I should go back to the basics — everything could be learned with time and patience. Emboldened by this frank lesson, I continued to draw for years. All the same, one day, my admiration for comic strip illustrators was stopped short by a totally new idea: the real geniuses of drawing filled the pages of any art history encyclopedia. And so it was, with the discovery of the drawings of Delacroix, thanks to a gift I received on my fifteenth birthday, that a new passion began for me. The sensitivity, the evocative power of his sketches, confirmed for me what I had already suspected: there are as many ways of drawing as there are illustrators — even for those who render their subjects realistically — and that any sketch with an ounce of imagination always reflects the personality of its artist.
Big, fat volumes on art history soon replaced the comic books on my shelves, and I put together a little painting museum of my own invention by cutting out all the art photos I could find in magazines. This was long before Google Images, and it may be hard today to fathom the joy I felt discovering a Rembrandt I had never before seen in a Catholic magazine I had swiped from my aunt. I gravitated towards monographs that spanned the entire career of a single artist, including his earliest works. I probably wanted to convince myself that even the greatest talents had to struggle for years at their craft, making gradual progress before coming fully into possession of their art. I remember two youthful self-portraits in particular: one — mostly unsuccessful — painted by Géricault moved me, while the the perfection of another, done by Ingrès when he was only twenty years old, left me stupefied (I learned later that he had entirely reworked the portrait when he was in his seventies). I moved on to the biographies of famous artists, which I read one after the other, only to learn yet again that, with the notable exception of Picasso and Dürer perhaps, the rest had sweated at their drawing tables for many long years before developing both mastery and style. I read, too, that, during the Italian Renaissance, a student was required to sketch for seven years before ever picking up a paintbrush, "never abandoning his study of drawing for even a Sunday or a holiday." Aspiring painters sometimes became apprentices at the age of twelve: plenty of time to become a recognized master at the age of twenty, as Raphaël did.
My reading led me to yet more books, so that I became familiar with a large swath of Western painting and its history. As much as I was amazed by the great leap forward made in the sixteenth century, with the discovery of perspective, I was frustrated by the dearth of surviving paintings from Antiquity, whose artists, if Pliny the Elder is to be believed, were more famous than even athletes and generals. There was only one chapter in my weighty Art History in Two Volumes, published by the Encyclopedia Quillet, that did not enchant me, and this was the chapter on prehistoric cave paintings. Most explanations that accompanied the requisite photographs of the bulls at Lascaux dwelled on their beauty and elegance, but said little more. Somehow, subconsciously, these images bothered me; despite their artistry and fame, they seemed to me somehow cold and unreal, as if a fog separated them from me, or as if I couldn't see them as they were meant to be seen. Only recently did I begin to understand why.
CHAPTER 2
I have now been drawing and painting for more than thirty years. Following studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Rennes and ten more years as a graphic artist, I work semi-professionally as a painter and illustrator. Many of my leisure hours have been devoted to studying the history of painting and drawing. I also draw somewhat fantastical comic strips on subjects having to do with archeology, so I spend much time researching a variety of subjects. While searching for new ideas for these stories, I came back to the prehistoric paintings in the caves at Lascaux and Altamira, still as mysterious on one side of the Franco-Spanish border as they are on the other. One possible response, which I had never taken the time to investigate, had come to me several years earlier while I was tucking my son into bed. This was in 2004, and my future heir was eight years old. I was about to kiss him goodnight, and we were confiding a few last words to each other before turning off the light. I happened to glance around at the mess in his room and I looked for a moment at the opposite wall. A far-fetched idea crossed my mind: what if that was the solution? Impossible, I thought. Too simple. I turned off the light and didn't think of it again.
At the most, I had perhaps discovered an idea for a comic strip. I still was as much in the dark as before regarding prehistoric painting, even though the relatively recent discovery of the caves at Chauvet and Cosquer had given rise to a number of articles and fascinating documentaries, as well as the publication of some magnificently illustrated coffee table books, the kind one pages through slowly on Christmas Day, places carefully on a shelf, and never reads again. So it was that I picked up once again these venerable books, some of which were rather scientific. They soon had me marveling again over the work of these prodigious artists: the beauty and refinement of the drawings and paintings, their grasp of realism, the pureness and the assuredness of the line. I noticed as well that the science devoted to parietal art did not stretch very far back. At one time, in fact, the authenticity of these paintings had been cast into doubt.
CHAPTER 3
In the summer of 1879, a Spaniard named Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola was exploring a cave that had been discovered recently on his land in Santillana del Mar, near Santander in Cantabria. His daughter, Maria, who was along that day, spied the bulls painted on the high ceiling: "Papa, mira, toros pintados!" The following year, Sanz de Sautuola published his discovery, which called into question much of what was known about prehistory. The scientific community appeared skeptical, even contemptuous of his conclusions, refusing to allow that such realistic paintings as were found in the Altamira caves could be so old. Their vividness and their perfect state of conservation argued for more recent, perhaps medieval, origins. That prehistoric man, those primitives, could have produced images as beautiful as these seemed highly improbable. Specialists like Gabriel de Mortillet and Emile Cartailhac smelled a fraud. As the controversy faded, the incident was soon forgotten.
It would take almost twenty years for the authenticity of that prehistoric art to be recognized internationally by academics and scholars. More discoveries revealed yet more drawings, at the caves known as La Mouthe (1895), Font de Gaume, and Combarelles (1901), in the Dordogne in southwest France. Some of these drawings were veiled by a thin film of calcite, a sure sign of considerable age. With so many similar images in sites far removed from one other, any accusations of fraud no longer held water. One of the staunchest opponents of Altamira's veracity, Emile Cartailhac, published a thundering article in the journal L'Anthropologie, titled "The Altamira Cave: Confessions of a Skeptic." The article's reverberations would be felt around the world, bestowing official status at last on prehistoric cave art.
Still more discoveries followed, in Spain (La Clothilde, in Cantabria, 1906) and in France: Niaux (1906), Tuc d'Audoubert (1912), and Les Trois-Frères (1914), all located in the mountainous Ariège region of southwest France. The Lascaux site in France's Périgord département would be uncovered considerably later in 1940. Destined to become the most famous of all the caves, as both an enduring symbol and a high temple of prehistory, it was inscribed on the French National Register of Historic Monuments only days after its discovery. Still more caves and paintings were found, often by pure chance, by people with no interest at all in archeology or prehistory. The boom in speleology, post- World War II, was largely responsible for this. One of the most extraordinary discoveries of all happened in 1991: the Cosquer cave at Cap Morgiou, near Marseille, which can only be reached through a 175-meter-long tunnel that lies 40 meters below the surface of the Mediterranean. The rise in sea levels occurring over the last millennia explains its hidden entrance, which makes Cosquer the only site of parietal art that lies underwater.
Today, no fewer than 250 painted caves dating from the Palaeolithic Period, or Old Stone Age, have been recorded in Europe. The majority of these are located in southwest France or northern Spain, but a few more sites have been discovered in Italy and England.
In all the history of the study of these caves, two names must be mentioned. The first, and the most famous, is the Abbé Henri Breuil (1877–1961), otherwise known as the "Pope of Prehistory." Never a practicing priest, Breuil was appointed the first chair in Prehistory at the Collège de France, a position created specifically for him in 1929. The second name to remember is that of the anthropologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986), who was named to the same chair in 1969. After lengthy study of the wall paintings of the Upper Paleolithic Period, he developed a theory according to which this particular art form follows an "evolving trajectory, the longest ever recorded in art, from 30,000 BC to 8,000 BC." By comparing styles, Leroi- Gourhan theorized four stages of Paleolithic cave paintings, moving from a beginning phase of rough traces of lines to a final phase of complex, and above all, realistic, images in a gestational process spanning several millennia. This theory prevailed in the field for many decades before being overturned suddenly in 1994 by the discovery of Chauvet at Vallon-Pont d'Arc in the Ardèche canyons. Considered the oldest known cave of its kind in the world, it contains, paradoxically, the most realistic and the most accomplished paintings yet discovered. Chauvet suggests that when prehistoric man first set out to draw animals, he did it perfectly, right from the start, and continued to do so with the same mastery for millennia. The equivalent, in modern terms, would be to assert that from the year 200 AD to our twenty-first century, art has undergone no appreciable evolution.
The Chauvet cave demonstrates that beginning already in the Aurignacian age, which is the oldest tool culture of the Upper Paleolithic Period, prehistoric man was painting animals with perfect skill. In other words, cave art did not undergo a gradual evolution toward naturalism because naturalism was, in fact, the point at which it began. This contradicted entirely all the chronological theories already in place at the time, including those of Leroi-Gourhan and his followers, whose belief in a stylistic progression has now been definitively abandoned.
CHAPTER 4
I attempted to learn more by studying the texts I had to hand which treat the various studies undertaken of the caves, but my efforts left me feeling perplexed. All these books faithfully reproduced every item of data known and recorded, but none approached the question that all of these studies seemed to beg when looking at these paintings, some of which are more than twenty-thousand years old: what do they mean?
This line of interrogation, among many others, gradually surfaced as I continued my studies, but eluded my attempts to answer it. After a while, with a determination that would have made both Indiana Jones and Sherlock Holmes envious, I decided to draw up a list of all the questions I could think of. The first of these focused naturally on what the paintings meant and what function they might serve. Why paint animals, and why on the same wall, and why sometimes were these images large while other times they were small? Why were they in such remote places and so difficult to reach? Why were these particular species of animals drawn when they were not the animals that prehistoric man most often hunted? Why do the animals never appear ugly or frightening or ridiculous? Why were the paintings never disfigured in any way, over so many thousands of years? Why are humans almost never depicted, nor for that matter any kind of object at all, or flora, or landscape, or dwelling? Why also, when these artists certainly seemed to know how to paint, did they never paint anything but animals?
Another line of questioning, more technical this time, was raised by the strange style of the paintings, which resemble nothing else known in art. How were the artists trained? Why did they always choose to depict the animals in profile? Why are the paintings often superimposed and how were the artists able to execute them so flawlessly, one on top of the other? Why are there no poorly drawn images, while there are many unfinished ones? Why do most of the animals resemble each other so closely? Why is it that the artists never seemed to have any difficulty painting on the uneven surfaces of the caves? What explanation can there be for the fact that certain silhouettes are composed of pigment only, with no outline, yet are perfectly recognizable?
Some more general particularities confirmed — if such a thing was ever necessary — the complexity of the mystery to be resolved. Why, in a single cave, are there paintings from many periods that are far distant from each other? What explains the stylistic consistency of the paintings, over twenty-five thousand years? Why did the artists of the Upper Paleolithic Period never work in the rooms of the caves closest to the entrances, but always in those furthest removed from them? Why are there sometimes hand stencils in the same places? What is the meaning of the abstract engravings found on the cave walls? What function could such a long-lasting tradition have, and why did it end so suddenly, before any ancient text could make mention of it, like a legend lost forever to the mists of time? And how, in a long-ago age, did such a conceptual practice as painting begin?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Oldest Enigma of Humanity by Bertrand David, Jean-Jacques Lefrere, Molly Grogan Lynch. Copyright © 2013 Librarie Artheme Fayard. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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