Lascaux Cave: History, Art, Painters | Early European History And Religion

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LASCAUX CAVE

Lascaux horse

Lascaux Caves is one of the world's most famous prehistoric caves. Consisting of one great chamber and two passageways, it is located near Sarlat on a hillside in Montignac, in the Dordogne region of southwest France. The 17,000-year-old painting are rendered with great skill, incorporating the contours of the caves and displaying some of the first known use of perspective, a technique that was not rediscovered until the Golden Age of Greece, as well as shadowing, highlighting, stenciling, and Pointillism. The artists used powdered colors, brushes and stumping clothes and spit pigment out of their mouth. Based on the hand prints left in the caves, the artists including males and females of all ages and even babies. After Picasso visited the cave in the 1950s was he reportedly emerged and exclaimed: "We have invented nothing." Miró once said, "Painting has been in a state of decadence since the age of caves."

There are over 2,000 images of horses, cows, cats, birds, and human hunters. They seem as vivid today as when they were painted more than 17,000 years ago. The cave is closed to the public, but a replica is open for visitors. Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “ Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of southwestern France was...discovered by serendipity: In September 1940, four teenage boys and their dog stumbled across it while searching for rumored buried treasure in the forest. The 650-foot-long subterranean complex contains 900 of the finest examples of prehistoric paintings and engravings ever seen. [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2015]

The cave was discovered during the Nazi occupation of France. The four boys were given flashlights by their schoolmaster who was told that caves in the areas might contain prehistoric paintings. After finding the paintings by climbing through a hole revealed by a fallen tree, with their dog Robot, the boys swore one another to secrecy. Later they informed their schoolmaster, who had to squeeze into a narrow passage to see the cave. Later still a 24 hour guard was placed at the entrance. One of the four boys worked for many years as a guide to the caves.

Art in Lascaux Cave

Lascaux Megaloceros

On its website the International Committee for Preservation of Lascaux notes: “The art of Lascaux is a legacy belonging to all mankind." The cave “redefined what was previously known about our creative development of human beings and our ability to construct image from abstract thought." There are and additional 25 caves and a 150 rock shelters in the Lauscaux region that contain prehistoric paintings and engravings.

Laura Anne Tedesco wrote for The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “The painted walls of the interconnected series of caves in Lascaux in southwestern France are among the most impressive and well-known artistic creations of Paleolithic humans. Although there is one human image (painted representations of humans are very rare in Paleolithic art; sculpted human forms are more common), most of the paintings depict animals found in the surrounding landscape, such as horses, bison, mammoths, ibex, aurochs, deer, lions, bears, and wolves. The depicted animals comprise both species that would have been hunted and eaten (such as deer and bison) as well as those that were feared predators (such as lions, bears, and wolves). [Source: Laura Anne Tedesco, Independent Scholar. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org, October 2000 \^/]

“No vegetation or illustration of the environment is portrayed around the animals, who are represented in profile and often standing in an alert and energetic stance. Their vitality is achieved by the broad, rhythmic outlines around areas of soft color. The animals are typically shown in a twisted perspective, with the heads depicted in profile but the pair of horns or antlers rendered frontally visible. (In contrast, a strictly optical profile would show only one horn or antler.) The intended result may have been to imbue the images with more visual power and magical properties. The combination of profile and frontal perspectives is an artistic idiom also observed in ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian art.” \^/

Images in Lascaux Cave

a scene in Lascaux IV

Lascaux caves contains over 600 paintings, 1,500 engravings and numerous geometric figures and strange dots placed mostly on cave's ceiling. Animal figures include red deer stags swimming across a lake, shaggy horses running in a line, four huge bulls — three time life size — as well as wild goats, enormous hunch-backed cattle and two-horned woolly rhinoceroses.

There are 60 horses. One is 10 feet long and has a mysterious branched symbol near the front legs. In the Rotunda there is a procession of animals with two long-horned wild cattle. Some figures are 17 feet long. Two bisons dancing butt to butt are each four feet long. Molly Moore wrote in the Washington Post, “the creatures seem to move over the walls’ uneven surfaces...horses galloping amid cattle, ibex leaping through space."

The strangest creature is a mythical beast with the hind quarters of a buffalo, the midsection of a pregnant horse, the front legs of cat and a strange head with two long straight horns. The only image of a human is a man with a bird mask with a large beak and a long, skinny erect penis. Thought to be a shaman of some sort, he is being charged by a bison with a spear in its stomach and its intestines hanging out. One can only speculate as to the meaning of recurring geometric symbols.

Laura Anne Tedesco wrote for The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “At Lascaux and Chauvet, another magnificently painted cave in France, images of animals are superimposed on top of earlier depictions, which suggests that the motivation for the paintings may have been in the act of portraying the animals rather than in the artistic effect of the final composition. However, their purpose remains obscure. Most of the paintings are located at a distance from the cave's entrance, and many of the chambers are not easily accessible. This placement, together with the enormous size and compelling grandeur of the paintings, suggests that the remote chambers may have served as sacred or ceremonial meeting places. [Source: Laura Anne Tedesco, Independent Scholar. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org, October 2000 \^/]

“In addition to the painted images, Lascaux is rich with engravings of animals as well as abstract designs. In the absence of natural light, these works could only have been created with the aid of torches and stone lamps filled with animal fat. \^/

Painters at Lascaux Cave

Lauscaux paln

The Lascaux paintings were made early modern humans, using animal fat lamps — made with a plant wick placed in hollow stone — to light the cave and scaffolding to reach the cave ceiling. The "paints" came from brown, reddish-brown, yellow, black and white minerals; and it appears they were mixed and heated to get the best shading. The painting themselves were made by rubbing these minerals along the rock. Red and black are the primary colors with red being made with crushed hematite (ocher) and the black made with charcoal made from the embers of Scotch pine.

Laura Anne Tedesco wrote for The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “The pigments used to paint Lascaux and other caves were derived from readily available minerals and include red, yellow, black, brown, and violet. No brushes have been found, so in all probability the broad black outlines were applied using mats of moss or hair, or even with chunks of raw color. The surfaces appear to have been covered by paint blown directly from the mouth or through a tube; color-stained, hollowed-out bones have been found in the caves. [Source: Laura Anne Tedesco, Independent Scholar. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org, October 2000]

The Aurignacian people is the name given to the early modern humans that created Europe's first art works. On their skill the German film director Werner Herzog said, We should never forget the dexterity of these people. They were capable of creating a flute. It is a high-tech procedure to carve a piece of mammoth ivory and split it in half without breaking it, hollow it out, and realign the halves. We have one indicator of how well their clothing was made. In a cave in the Pyrenees, there is a handprint of a child maybe four or five years old. The hand was apparently held by his mother or father, and ocher was spit against it to get the contours and you see part of the wrist and the contours of a sleeve. The sleeve is as precise as the cuffs of your shirt. The precision of the sleeve is stunning.

Destruction of Lascaux Cave

Lascaux Cave is located on the private land of the La Rochefoucauld family. After World War II they decided to open the caves to the public as a way to make money. They enlarged the entrance, built steps and replaced the original sediment with concrete flooring. Hordes of tourists showed up. The wear and tear of breathing, heat producing human beings was too much for the 17,000-year-old paintings, which were assaulted by growths of mold, fungus, microbes, black spots, bacteria and algae.

Lascaux Caves was closed in 1963 to all but those with best academic and press credentials after green mold started to appear. A beautifully-created replica of the two most famous rooms, called Lascaux II, was built a few hundred meters away from the original. But now so many people have visited the reconstruction it too needs restoration work. In the late 1990s a white fungus, Fusarium solani. Emerged . The invader either infiltrated the cave through a new ventilation system or during work during heavy rain to install it. The outbreak was tackled aggressively, including the use of fungicides and antibiotic compresses applied to the walls. In 2007, black spots of a different fungus, of the Ochroconis group, sparked the UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to threaten to place Lascaux on its "World Heritage in Danger" list. [Source: Laurent Banguet, AFP, June 26, 2011]

Lascaux aurochs

Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “The cave’s undoing came after the French Ministry of Culture opened it to the public in 1948: Visitors by the thousands rushed in, destroying the fragile atmospheric equilibrium. A green slime of bacteria, fungi and algae formed on the walls; white-crystal deposits coated the frescoes. In 1963 alarmed officials sealed the cave and limited entry to scientists and other experts. But an irreversible cycle of decay had begun. Spreading fungus lesions—which cannot be removed without causing further damage—now cover many of the paintings. Moisture has washed away pigments and turned the white calcite walls a dull gray. In 2010, when then French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, toured the site on the 70th anniversary of its discovery, Laurence Léauté-Beasley, president of a committee that campaigns for the cave’s preservation, called the visit a “funeral service for Lascaux.” [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2015]

Jean Clottes told AFP Lascaux had been affected in ways no-one could have predicted 60 or so years ago. "The cave was completely disturbed. In 1947 alone, they dug out 600 cubic metres of sediment to make an entrance and concrete path and installed lighting for the public."Six hundred cubic metres (22,000 cubic feet) is the equivalent to about eight 12-metre (40 foot) shipping containers. "No prior study was done, and it completely changed the cave's micro-climate," sighed Clottes. "We altered its balance." In its untroubled state, the cave's microscopic flora had had thousands of years to reach a truce in the battle for habitat. But the introduction of new organisms may have upset the peace, enabling one species to dominate others, said Clottes. [Source: Laurent Banguet, AFP, June 26, 2011]

Efforts to Save Lascaux Cave

By the mid 2000s the situation had gotten so bad that an international team was brought in to try and save the paintings and only a few people were allowed in on only a few days a month. Marie-Anne Sire was named chief administrator of Lascaux Caves. A specialist in restoring medieval paintings in the exterior of churches, she presides over a 25-member team of biologists, conservationist, restorers, archaeologists and other specialists. She has a tough job of not only cleaning up the mess created by people entering the cave but also by efforts to fix the problem created by people entering the cave. [Source: Laurent Banguet, AFP, June 26, 2011]

For example a formaldehyde foot wash used for years to disinfect people entering the case filled the caves with fumes that ended up killing friendly organisms that might have prevented fungus from growing. A white fungus outbreak occurred after an air-conditioning system was installed that was designed to keep harmful microorganism from entering the cave. “It looked as though it had snowed," Sire told The New Yorker. Her team responded by pouring quick lime on the floor and putting antibiotic- and antifungal-soaked blankets on the wall. When the white microbes cleared, a team painstakingly photographed every painting under lights. When they finished black pots — perhaps generated with the help of the lights — appeared and began spreading fast. The spots have since been contained but there are lot of questions about what to do next.

famous Lascaux shaft scene of a bison and a of : a man with a bird head

Lascaux is protected by steel doors and security cameras.The state of the caves and the paintings has stirred a debate on whether Lascaux should be reserved only for scientists in the name of preservation or they should be opened to public with the risk of damage. In the mid-1990s Lascaux was openly briefly to tourist capable of plunking down $5,000 for the privilege of visiting the cave.

Laurent Banguet of AFP wrote: "Conservationists today focus on a multi-disciplinary approach, believing any single thrust has side effects in other fields.The cave is fitted with passive sensors to monitor air circulation, temperature and humidity but intervention is kept to a minimum. The fungus seems to be in retreat, for it is limited to a few greyish traces on the bare rock and on small areas of some paintings." "We are using compresses against it but not surgery," said Muriel Mauriac, an art historian appointed the cave's curator in April 2009.

Under scientific guidance, the human presence is limited to a total of 800 hours per year, including maintenance and academic research. Banguet of AFP wrote. Visitors to the cave don sterile white coveralls, a plastic hair cap, latex gloves and two pairs of slip-on shoe covers. Previously they had to dip footwear in a germ-killing bath, but this was deemed to be another source of destabilisation. Entrance is made through two airlocks, one of which is an "air curtain" designed to keep out external humidity yet not affect the natural draughts that circulate in the cave through fissures. The paintings themselves, viewed in the glimmer of an LED forehead lamp, are breath-taking. The strokes by unknown hands trigger a shock of how we humans today are linked to our distant forebears. After exactly 45 minutes, our visit is over. We are ushered out, the doors are sealed and the bison, horses and ibexes return once more to dark and silence. Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2024