The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  The stable wetland-farming communities of the world of Shinto offered a horizontal perspective on the universe. The Shinto divinities came not from the heavens but from beyond the horizon. The primary form of Shinto worship was not prayers sent upward to the heavens but food grown in the surrounding lands and offered on altars at the human level. While the inspiring vistas from a Greek temple are upward to the open sky, and the Gothic cathedral silhouettes its gargoyles and spires against the sky, the classical Japanese building offered a view from or through the building out to the surrounding landscape.

  Apart from the roof, the most interesting feature of a classic Japanese building is its horizontal plan. For interest and variety Western architects achieved their modular arrangements in the vertical, in the differing heights and diverse decoration of a building’s stories. But the Japanese architects achieved this in the horizontal. The famous Ninomaru Palace of Nijo Castle in Kyoto, built for shoguns who came to visit the capital, became a model that we can still see. There an appealing asymmetric arrangement of squares and rectangles attached at corners and edges unfolds as we move through the building or along its exterior. We enjoy a spectrum of visual surprises, far more suspenseful than what is offered by the vertical stacking of stories that can be encompassed at a glance outside a Western building. Incidentally, this same scheme multiplies the corner rooms with their broad horizontal vistas. The tatami (a straw floor mat about six by three feet), which became the standard Japanese measure of floor area, reinforced the geometric design and further emphasized the horizontal.

  The horizontal view, bringing together indoors and outdoors, minimizes the boundaries in between. The mingling of inner and outer space, achieved in the modern West only laboriously and expensively by the use of glass, comes naively in classic Japanese architecture. The approaching visitor can see through the building to the garden on the other side. And the occupant seated before the opened or half-opened fusuma and shoji (movable paper screens) encompasses the house-scape and landscape in a single sweep of the eye.

  The Japanese house, never complete in itself, was part of the landscape, and the garden was one with the house. When transplanted into the city, the Japanese house still called for its own miniaturized piece of landscape. The forest was sampled indoors by bonsai, the art of dwarfing trees. The classic Japanese garden had little in common with the Mughal gardens of India, the fountained landscapes of Rome, or the geometrical vistas of Versailles. Nor with the familiar informal Western gardens of colorfully patterned flowers in bloom. The Japanese garden was designed for all seasons, acquiescing in their changes and making the most of them.

  The great ancient capitals of the West—Athens with her Acropolis, Rome with her seven hills—used the profile against the sky for buildings on undulating terrain. The Parthenon or a Capitoline temple punctuated the high points. But, like Nara before it, Kyoto (Heian-kyo), on the Chinese model, was laid out as a flat rectangle (three and a half miles north to south, three miles east to west) divided by a great north-south highway, and was subdivided by parallel avenues into checkerboard units. This city-model of clarity was surrounded by mysterious mist-covered mountains on the horizon. The “borrowed view” in garden design was a way to incorporate distant forested hills, the horizontal view, into the design for the house and garden.

  Shinto, even when overlaid with Buddhist and Chinese elements, as in Ryoanji and other famous Zen temples, still speaks affinity with nature, reaching outward, not upward. The Japanese garden adds a whole new dimension to our Western view. It is not merely a product but a microcosm of nature. Mountains, oceans, islands, and waterfalls are all there in small horizontal compass. The kami can be as easily revered in a rock garden as on a mountainside. Rocks, a prominent foil to the fragility of growing trees and shrubs and mosses, affirm the unchanging. They are not an architect’s effort to defy the forces of time and nature, but another way of acquiescing. The Japanese garden renews what dies or goes dormant, and reveres what survives.

  In all these ways the Japanese declared a truce with the menaces of nature and of passing time. However belligerent were Shinto’s political teachings, for man’s relation to nature Shinto offered conquest by surrender. Their pact with nature was written in timbers of hinoki. Uncompromising Western architects in stone again and again boasted that though their lives might be short, their works would be eternal. The Japanese architects in wood could not be so deceived. At Ise they could see that if the life of art is short, life and the creators of art are eternal.

  PART FOUR

  THE MAGIC

  OF

  IMAGES

  It is the great scope of the sculptor to heighten nature into heroic beauty; i.e., in plain English, to surpass his model.

  — BYRON (1821)

  17

  The Awe of Images

  MAN’S earliest grand structures rise proudly and conspicuously, megaliths on the Salisbury plains, pyramids on the deserts of Giza, zigurrats on the Mesopotamian flats. But his earliest images of living creatures lie hidden in the dark cave recesses of Altamira, Lascaux, and Les Trois Frères. While man boasted defiance of time and the elements in his arts of architecture, he seemed reticent, hesitant, and even fearful to imitate the Creator with images. The image of a moving animal, stag or bull or bison, had some of the awesome mystery of life itself. His surviving creations show that Palaeolithic (Stone Age) man had a delightful and energetic power as image maker. We do not know precisely why he made these earliest surviving fixed images. We brashly assume that he must have had a reason. But where he made them tells us something.

  Deep in the circuitous stalactite-blocked, waterlogged caves, the most impressive of these first wall drawings, paintings, and carvings were not discovered until the late nineteenth century. Palaeolithic men secreted their handiwork from the weather and from the passersby. The spectacular works of prehistoric man were uncovered not by the diligence of scholars or the courage of explorers but by the restless nosiness of boys and dogs.

  A nobleman hunting on his estate in Santander Province in northern Spain in 1868 lost his dog pursuing a fox in the bushes. He heard barking as if from a great distance, and going in search he found the narrow opening into which his dog had fallen. Squeezing down, he entered the caves of Altamira, which were destined to revise our view of man the artist, and even our notion of the history of art. But it took some time for their meanings to be discovered.

  Seven years later a local landowner, Marcelino de Sautuola, began exploring the caves. His interest piqued by the impressive collection of prehistoric stone implements, engraved bones, and statuettes he had seen at the Paris Exposition, he began digging in the Altamira caves and found traces of ancient human occupancy. One day in the summer of 1879, his little daughter Maria, who was with him, wandered off to one of the low-ceilinged chambers, into which light was filtering. In excitement she came back and exclaimed the “Eureka!” of prehistoric art: “¡Papá, mira toros pintados!” (Look at the painted bulls!). Crouching, he followed her into the low chamber and shone his lamp on the uneven rock of the ceiling. There he was astonished by vivid paintings of one great bison, then another and another. He recognized a long-extinct animal known to have lived in that region in Palaeolithic times. The style was similar to that of numerous small sculptures of reindeer antlers and engravings on stone found in the Palaeolithic caves in France. De Sautuola jumped to the conclusion that these paintings too were the work of Palaeolithic man. Though an amateur, he published his argument to a world of doubting scholars.

  On de Sautuola’s side was the fact that some of the paintings were covered with a stalagmitic layer, and that the existence of the cave had been unknown to the neighborhood until 1868. But the experts, led by Émile Cartailhac, professor of prehistory at Toulouse and the dean of French archaeology, declared the paintings to be fakes. The Altamira caves showed no paintings of reindeers, which was surprising if these were really made in the so-called Reindeer Age, the last phase of the Old Stone
Age. They saw none of the calcite which would have been deposited over the thousands of years, and paint in the cracks of the walls suggested the use of a brush—another anachronism. And where was the smoke from the torches of prehistoric times? They firmly concluded that the paintings had been made after de Sautuola’s first discovery of the cave in 1875. Skeptics even accused him of hiring a French artist friend to paint the Altamira ceiling. By the time of his death in 1888 de Sautuola was still not vindicated. The Altamira paintings remained in disrepute.

  Then, providentially, a series of spectacular discoveries across western and southwestern Europe brought fame to Altamira and credibility to Palaeolithic artists. In 1872 a French cave explorer, Émile Rivière (1835–1922), in Menton on the French Riviera had made the sensational find of a Palaeolithic human skeleton with ornamented headdress, thus providing evidence of burial rites much earlier than ever before imagined. He was summoned in 1895 to view a newly discovered cave, the Grotte de la Mouthe in the Dordogne. This cave, like that at Altamira, was found by accident, when a local farmer clearing a rock shelter for a toolshed broke through its wall. Boys of the neighborhood crawled a hundred yards into the cave, where they reported pictures of animals engraved on the walls and ceiling. On his arrival Rivière confirmed these pictures to be the work of prehistoric artists and found a decorated stone lamp that those artists could have used.

  In 1901, more caves were discovered in the Dordogne, at Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume, revealing a fantastic array of drawings, paintings, and engravings which also now began to be credited to Palaeolithic man. In 1902 the Association Française pour l’Avancement des Sciences convened a meeting in the Dordogne to view the paintings. With academic solemnity they decreed these to be Palaeolithic.

  The eminent Professor Cartailhac now took the young abbé Henri Breuil with him for another look at Altamira. In their enthusiasm they stayed there a month while Breuil laboriously copied the paintings. As rain fell in torrents outside, Breuil in the shallow caves lay on his back on straw-filled sacks with only candles for light. Though as a child he had enjoyed drawing butterflies, Breuil had no training as an artist. It is lucky for us that he was so talented and that he dared make his scrupulous drawings while the discovery was fresh. Breuil’s drawings are in many respects more accurate and more vivid than later color photographs. The irregular rock surface can distort the photographed image and makes engravings hard to decipher. Breuil’s admirable copies in color vividly shaped our visions of Palaeolithic art.

  Now Professor Cartailhac made his apologies not only to Palaeolithic man but to the maligned Marquis de Sautuola, long dead. “Mea Culpa d’un Sceptique” was the title of his article on Altamira (1902). He confessed himself “party to a mistake of twenty years’ standing, to an injustice which must be frankly admitted and put right.” Within these twenty years the learned world had completely revised its view of prehistoric man’s creative powers. Once Altamira was confirmed, the additional evidence of those powers appeared overwhelming. In 1912, fantastic sculptures of bison were found by three boys exploring the Volp River where it went underground between Enterre and le Tuc d’Audoubert in the Pyrenean foothills. There the spectacular drawings of Les Trois Frères caves in 1916 included the famous “sorcerer,” a man mysteriously cloaked in reindeer skin and wearing antlers.

  In 1940 at Lascaux in the Dordogne during the grim days of the Nazi occupation there was an uncanny reenactment of Altamira. Boys in the neighborhood had been alerted to possible cave discoveries in the limestone hills. Their former schoolmaster, who had become an archaeologist, had seen that they were equipped with flashlights. When the lead boy’s dog disappeared, the boy followed down a narrow descent into the circuitous passages of a long cave. There the boy’s flashlight revealed a spectacular procession of painted animals on the white limestone walls. An endless parade of horses, stags, bisons, and wild cattle. Four colossal bulls triple life-size collided on the dome of the ceiling. On one side stags appeared to be swimming across a lake; on the other side was a line of shaggy ponies. And then, too, wild goats, enormous humpbacked cattle, and a two-horned rhinoceros. Among them was the first Palaeolithic action picture, a man falling before the charge of a wounded bison. The boys had happened on a climactic exhibit of Palaeolithic art excelling anything found before. The boys swore one another to secrecy and placed a twenty-four-hour guard at the entrance to keep their find safe from souvenir hunters.

  They reported to their schoolmaster, who came quickly and risked a squeeze down the stalactite-encrusted entrance into the lengthy corridors. Convinced that these Lascaux caves were no figment of adolescent imagination, he telegraphed Breuil, who arrived in haste. After study, Breuil certified Lascaux as one of the Six Giants of Palaeolithic cave art and spent two months recording the finds. Who can say how many more Altamiras and Lascaux still lie waiting for nosy hunting dogs, alert five-year-old girls or adventurous teenage boys?

  This improbable drama of man the creator, set in the dark caverns of western Europe, is the product of some happy coincidences. Lascaux and these best works of Upper Palaeolithic art we can now date, not to the 40,000 B.C. of Abbé Breuil but to about 15,000 B.C. In the six decades after 1879 there was a Grand Opening of the Artworks of Palaeolithic Man that had lain unnoticed for millennia, and historians then stormed the citadel of prehistoric art speedily and serendipitously. To plumb the secrets of prehistoric cities was an arduous, incremental business of sifting sand, dusting artifacts, and collecting shards. Grand ancient structures, long since disappeared, leave only the traces of their foundations. The shape of Palaeolithic man’s dwelling-places can only be guessed. But the beauties of his pictures lie fully revealed once we have found and broken into the halls of stalagmitic caves, which seem to have been sealed for our sakes. While the beauties of Greek sculpture of their Great Age can be seen now only dimly reflected in accidental fragments or in inferior Roman copies, the paintings of Palaeolithic man fifteen millennia earlier still glowed in their aboriginal splendor for twentieth-century scholars.

  Lucky for us, too, that these Palaeolithic caves were not opened much earlier or piecemeal over the centuries. The surprising revelation of what man could create even before he could write, and before he was civilized, came accidentally within a few recent decades. If these caves had been opened gradually, they might never have survived in the bulk that impresses us with Palaeolithic man the creator. The ominous experience of Lascaux showed man’s capacity to disintegrate speedily the inheritance of millennia. Opened in 1940, it was so overrun by tourists and fungus that it had to be closed to the public in 1964. The New England Puritans had explained the Indians’ presence in America as God’s way of preserving the continent uncorrupted until their purified version of Christianity could take over. By what providence were the works of prehistoric man preserved until the discovery of prehistory itself provided an era into which they could be placed?

  Most remarkable was the burst of creative energy that had brought forth these paintings in the first place, a flowering of visual art among the Palaeolithic hunting peoples. Because it happened in prehistory, we are inclined to charge it to the “normal” development of cultures, and so rob it of its mystery and surprise. We are told to see here a predictable stage of cultural anthropology. Or was it an unaccountable efflorescence of Man the Creator—none the less unaccountable because the artists remain anonymous? Discovery of Altamira was momentous for our grasp of the history of the arts, showing us that man’s creations do not necessarily improve with his tools, or with the passage of time.

  Homo sapiens may be nearly half a million years old. But not until recent geologic time, the Upper Palaeolithic epoch just before ours, did man make figures of living beings that have survived. Before then he seems to have worked at the decorative arts, shaping his tools and axes to give them a more pleasing form. But now finally in the works left to us in three great centers—the caves of the Dordogne, the central French Pyrenees, and the Cantabrian mountains of nor
thwest Spain—man dares and succeeds in making images of the animals among whom he lives and from whom he makes his living. Why so suddenly, after so many hundreds of thousands of years, did man begin being a graphic artist? Perhaps the abundance of game in southwestern Europe in late Pleistocene times was an encouragement. Perhaps well-fed hunters now had the leisure to try their skill and imagination on the walls of their secure caves.

  Palaeolithic man of course carried the model of the human body everywhere he went. Man was the only omnipresent living figure in man’s presence. And yet the Palaeolithic cave artists painted and drew animals. Almost never did they draw a man or a woman. Their art is emphatically “zoomorphic,” depicting the wild animals from which man took his meat. He must have felt a community with the animals he hunted, with whom his own life was bound. Here, in the very act of trying to “represent”—to re-present—his quarry, the fearful powers all around him, he was awakened to another power in him, his power to create. Here in the secret passages of deep limestone caves, in the womb of the earth, he felt safe while he created. Was any of man’s other discoveries more shocking or mysterious?