September 12, 1940 - 4 teens, following their dog down a hole near Lascaux France discover 17,000-year-old drawings now known as Lascaux Cave Paintings. Lost in the woods outside the small medieval town of Montignac in Aquitaine, the pup had fallen into a small cavern in the ground. The dog was rescued and a few days later the boys returned to the cave. As the cavalier beret-ed tough-guy of the group Marcel Ravidat lowered himself in to explore a bit further, his eyes feasted on one of the most spectacular cultural artifacts remaining from deeply prehistoric times. Dozens of colorful images of animals careened along the walls and overhead. Over the next several days the teenagers explored further, and reported back to their teacher. The teacher contacted legendary local cave art specialist the abbe Henri Breuil, who made extensive documentation of the images, and soon visitors from near and far were flocking to see these ancient pictures. Evidence of man-made holes in the walls indicates the ancient artists used scaffolding to reach some panels in Lascaux. Lascaux was not the first decorated cave to be discovered in France, nor is it the largest, oldest, or most decorated. But still, it has a character all its own which has continued to draw attention. Almost all known decorated caves feature a combination of painting, drawing, and engraving. They contain images of animals, enigmatic designs and patterns, the rare portrayal of a human being, and often handprints of those who visited there just after the most recent ice age. What Lascaux does offer uniquely in France is a colorfulness and apparent cohesion which implies the kind of coordinated vision and activity that many tend to associate only with “modern” human. Large aurochs, stags, and horses appear in similar styles and scale, superimposed over countless smaller images. Recent analysis has shown that the animals throughout the cave were painted in a consistent order: horses first, then aurochs, then stags. In “Lascaux: Movement, Space, and Time,” veteran cave explorer and innovative photographer Norbert Aujoulat points out that this is also the order in which those animals have their breeding seasons, in spring, summer, and fall respectively. We are currently unable to say however, whether the images were painted successively in a matter of hours, days, months, or years. Colors of the paintings are taken directly from the Earth itself: yellow and red ochre are in the soil of much of the region, and deep black manganese dioxide is plentiful inside and outside the caves. It was prepared by mixing it with liquid and applied by brush, pad, or spraying from the mouth or through a thin tube. Masking the edges with an unknown implement (possibly just a hand) allowed even the sprayed pigment to have sharply defined edges when desired. Several in-between shades were achieved through mixing, and they are all used to make animals stand out or tie together in various ways throughout the cave. Use in Lascaux of the spraying technique is not where it is given an edge though, but where the edge is allowed to fade out. While westerners often think that the illusion of depth in illustration was first developed in the Renaissance, a quick look at frescoes from Roman Pompeii destroys that notion. Images with a strong resemblance to the subject’s physical appearance have appeared at many times and in many places. Even in the world of rock art, engravings and paintings from Africa show that late-Pleistocene Europeans weren’t the only culture to develop this style. Still, it is fairly rare. More schematic representations are the norm throughout the world. The perspective in Lascaux was not achieved through use of converging lines and focal points, but by variation in clarity and size. Almost all of the animals are shown in profile position. This means either their left or right limbs are then further from the viewer. Instead of drawing four limbs straight down as a modern child might, the Lascaux artists left a faded-out gap between the strong, clear line o the body and the shape of the more distant limbs. The most elaborate use of this comes with the two crossed bison where hind limbs all overlap, but in a fairly clear way, thanks to this gap technique. In the complete darkness of a cave, an animal-fat candle moved along the wall would show each of these in succession, providing a highly evocative sense of the motion of one animal running along the wall and receding into the distance. Even if seen as a series of separate individuals, the alternation of visibility, size, and leg position still manages to describe a range of motion and not just a single snapshot.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 15:42:34 +0000
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