Lascaux’s Prehistoric Cave Paintings
As Europe begins to reopen to travelers, it’s more exciting than ever to think about the cultural treasures that await. For me, one of the great joys of travel is meeting great art and architecture in person – which I’ve collected in a book. Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces. Here’s an old favorite:
Caveman Cave in Lascaux is surprising in how it is fashionably decorated. The walls are painted with animals — bears, wolves, oxen, horses, deer and cats — and even some animals that are now extinct, such as the woolly mammoth. Hardly any Homo sapiens are seen, but there are traces of a human hand.
All this was done about 20,000 years ago in the Stone Age, in what is now southwestern France. It is four times older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt, before the advent of writing, metallurgy and agriculture. The caves were painted not by light, bushy Neanderthals, but by fully formed Homo sapiens known as Cro-Magnons.
These are not crude doodles with a charcoal-tipped stick. Cave paintings were sophisticated, expensive, and time-consuming engineering projects planned around 18,000 BCE by dedicated artists contributing to a unified and stable culture. First, they had to move all their materials to a cool, dark, hard-to-reach place. (They didn’t live in these deep limestone caves.) The “canvas” was huge — Lascaux’s main caves are longer than a football field, and some animals have been shown to be 16 feet tall. They set up scaffolding to reach the roofs and high walls. They ground the minerals with a mortar and pestle to mix the paint. They worked by the light of torches and oil lamps. They created the scene by arranging a large diagram of data with a connect-the-dots series of points. Then these Cro-Magnon Michelangelos, balancing on scaffolding, built their Stone Age Sistine Chapels.
The paintings are impressively realistic. Artists used wavy black outlines to suggest an animal in motion. They used different pigments to achieve a range of colors. For his paint “brushes” he used a type of sponge made from animal skin. In another technique, they’ll draw an outline, then fill it in with spray paint — blown through tubes made of hollow bone.
Imagine the first movie. Viewers will be transported deep into the cave, guided by flashlight, into a cold, resonant, and otherworldly chamber. In the dark, someone will light torches and lamps, and suddenly — alas! – The animals seemed to flicker to life, running around the cave like something out of a prehistoric movie.
Why did these Stone Age people – whose lives were probably harsh and uncertain – bother to create such outward luxuries as art? No one knows. Perhaps because, as hunters, they were magically painting animals to increase the supply of game. Or perhaps they thought that if they could “master” the animal by painting it, they could later master it in battle. Did they worship animals?
Or maybe the paintings are simply the result of a global human drive to create, and the caves were Europe’s first art galleries, bringing in the first tourists. Although the caves are closed to tourists today, the adjacent carefully crafted replica caves give visitors a wonderful Stone Age experience.
Today, visiting Lascaux II and IV, as these replica caves are called, allows you to share an experience with a caveman. You might feel a bond with these people… or be surprised at how different they were from us. Ultimately, this art remains the same as the human being – an enigma. And a wonder.
