Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
now extinct—mammoths (the engravings at Grotte de Rouffignac), woolly rhinoceroses
(at Grotte de Font-de-Gaume), and wild oxen.
Besidesanimals,you'llseegeometricandabstractdesigns,suchascircles,squiggles,
and hash marks. There's scarcely a
Homo sapiens
in sight (except the famous “fallen
hunter” at Lascaux), but there are human handprints traced on the wall by blowing paint
throughahollowbonetubearoundthehand.Thehunter-gathererspaintedtheanimalsthey
hunted, but none of the plants they gathered.
Style:
The animals stand in profile, with unnaturally big bodies and small limbs and
heads. Black, red, and yellow dominate (with some white, brown, and violet). The thick
black outlines are often wavy, suggesting the animal in motion. Except for a few friezes
showing a conga line of animals running across the cave wall, there is no apparent order
or composition. Some paintings are simply superimposed atop others. The artists clearly
had mastered the animals' anatomy, but they chose to simplify the outlines and distort the
heads and limbs for effect, always painting in the distinct Magdalenian style.
Many of the cave paintings are on a Sistine Chapel-size scale. The “canvas” was
huge: Lascaux's main caverns are more than a football field long; Grotte de Font-de-
Gaume is 430 feet long; and Grotte de Rouffignac meanders six miles deep. The figures
are monumental (bulls at Lascaux are 16 feet high). All are painted high up on walls and
ceilings, like the woolly rhinoceros of Grotte de Font-de-Gaume.
Techniques:
Besides painting the animals, these early artists also engraved them on
thewall bylaboriously scratching outlines intotherockwith aflint blade, manyfollowing
the rock's natural contour. A typical animal might be made using several techniques—an
engraved outline that follows the natural contour, reinforced with thick outline paint, then
colored in.
Thepaintsweremixedfromnaturalpigmentsdissolvedincavewaterandoil(animal
or vegetable). At Lascaux, archaeologists have found more than 150 different minerals on
handtomixpaints.Evenbasicblackmightbeamixofmanganesedioxide,groundquartz,
and a calcium phosphate that had to be made by heating bone to 700 degrees Fahrenheit,
then grinding it.
No paintbrushes have been found, so artists probably used a sponge-like material
made from animal skin and fat. They may have used moss or hair, or maybe even finger-
painted withglobsofpurepigment. Oncethey'ddrawntheoutlines, theyfilled everything
inwithspraypaint—eitherspitoutfromthemouthorblownthroughtubesmadeofhollow
bone.
Imagine the engineering problems of painting one of these caves, and you can appre-
ciate how sophisticated these “primitive” people were. First, you'd have to haul all your
materials into a cold, pitch-black, hard-to-access place. Assistants erected scaffolding to
