How Art Made the World

by Nigel Spivey

  As a keen amateur archaeologist, de Sautuola had high hopes of what he might find at Altamira.The bones of strange animals might be scattered around; perhaps traces of fires kindled long ago.With any luck, and close investigation of the cave floor, some rudimentary tools or implements might also be retrieved.

  De Sautuola was not merely hunting for curiosities.When it came to publishing his discoveries at Altamira, he gravely noted that his ultimate motive for making the expedition with Maria was to ‘tear away the thick veil that separates us from the origins and customs of the ancient inhabitants of these mountains’. Once he and Maria were inside the cave, he crouched down and began to examine the ground by lantern light. It was cool and damp in the cave, but spacious too.While her father was poking andscraping at the floor, Maria wandered off to do some exploring of her own. It was not long before the darkness of Altamira echoed with a child’s wondrous cry.

  6 A detail of the cave paintings at Altamira, Spain, c.11,000 BC, which Maria and Marcelino de Sautuola discovered by chance.

  ‘Look, Papa – paintings of oxen!’

  So a young girl was the first modern human to set eyes upon the ‘gallery’ of prehistoric paintings for which Altamira would become renowned (Fig. 6).

  Being small, Maria had a better view of the cave’s low ceiling than her father. However, her recognition of the animals whose images were ranged over Altamira’s natural vault was not quite accurate.These were aurochs – a type of bison that had been extinct for thousands of years. Herds of them were depicted – standing, grazing, running, sleeping. And around these aurochs there were other four-legged beasts: horses, ibexes, boar. Gazing up at what his daughter had found, de Sautuola was almost speechless with excitement. He knew instinctively that this art was very old indeed; but it was more than instinct that told him so.The cave was littered with debris belonging to what would become known as the Stone Age – or, in archaeological parlance, the Upper Palaeolithic period (35,000–10,000 years ago). Moreover, de Sautuola could see similarities between the bison depicted here at Altamira and some bone carvings of animals lately discovered in caves in France.

  The gentleman-scholar lost no time in communicating the news. It created a sensation, understandable even to this day, although, for reasons of preservation, visitors are now admitted only to a replica of the cave. Gazing over Altamira’s rocky surfaces, the viewer soon appreciates that the word ‘painting’ is inadequate here.The uneven contours of the rock have been ingeniously incorporated to give the animals a bulky, almost three-dimensional presence. Big bovine shoulders loom up in the half-light: and, while the exact species of bison depicted is no longer to be seen, we cannot fail to be struck by the quality of close observation on display. How the animals stood while at pasture, how they collapsed when recumbent or wounded – the Altamira depictions are, as we should say, convincing.The colours, too, are memorable: predominantly red and black, but with shadings of form also picked out in brown, purple, yellow, pink and white. These strong organic pigments, derived from various oxides and carbons, play their part in giving the work a powerfully earthy depth and substance. All in all, it might be concluded that the paintings here are too good to be true.

  Sadly for de Sautuola, many of his contemporaries thought just that. After an initial accolade from the press, royal visits to the cave and so on, doubts regarding the authenticity of the art at Altamira began to be voiced. Nothing comparable to their scale and pictorial delicacy had been found at prehistoric sites then known to archaeological connoisseurs. One premature explanation of Altamira suggested that the paintings had been done during the Roman occupation of the Iberian peninsula.Within a year of de Sautuola’s announcement of the find, however, more poisonous rumours were circulating. An artist was seen going into the cave (de Sautuola had commissioned him to make copies of the ceiling): word went round that he was the one who had painted it in the first place. At home and abroad, de Sautuola found himself mocked as a dupe, or suspected of perpetrating a hoax. He died in 1888, a deeply disappointed and widely disbelieved man. His friends said he was brokenhearted by the whole affair.

  Young Maria would live to see her father’s honour thoroughly redeemed. But before we lament the scepticism that brought misery to a pioneer explorer of prehistoric art, let us admit our own primary reaction to what we see at Altamira, and at other great underground sites subsequently revealed in Spain and southern France – most notably the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet. ‘Amazing’; ‘incredible’; ‘astonishing’: we reach for the clichéd language of admiration, and for once it denotes a genuine mystery. No sample of early human handiwork is more perplexing than the large-scale cave paintings of Palaeolithic Europe.What follows here is an attempt to make sense of what the images might mean, and why they were painted on subterranean walls.A particular theory is pursued, and other theories rejected – but they are theories all the same. In the end, amazement may remain the proper response.What we can establish for certain, however, is that these paintings are not localized miracles. Altamira belongs to a wider process of human development, and it is all the more exciting for that.

  THE CREATIVE EXPLOSION

  Radiocarbon dating of the pigments used in the Altamira paintings has established that the cave investigated by Maria and Marcelino de Sautuola was decorated between 13,300 and 14,900 years ago.This more or less confirms the notional antiquity assigned to the images by de Sautuola back in 1879. But beyond the element of forgivable surprise, why were the learned contemporaries of de Sautuola so reluctant to believe him?

  The answer is that Altamira simply did not fit with prevailing scientific and popular views about the origin and development of the human species. Charles Darwin may have caused theological controversy in Victorian Britain with his theory of evolution by natural selection – a process often summarized as ‘the survival of the fittest’, though Darwin himself did not coin that phrase – but so far as it confirmed stereotypical Western attitudes to the prehistoric past, Darwin’s model was widely accepted. If evolution favoured the survival of the fittest, and humankind was set on an upward curve of progress in adapting to understand and control the world, then those humans left behind – especially those left behind many thousands of years ago – must be congenitally backward, ignorant and clumsy.

  Already in 1651, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had fastidiously described the ‘ill condition’ of humans living in a pre-civilized ‘state of nature’. It was a situation, he declared, of ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. At the time when the paintings at Altamira were found, most people would have imagined the typical ‘caveman’ as some shaggy, low-browed creature, his ground-scraping knuckles clamped to a knotty club.This savage might have chased bison to fill his belly, but to represent the animal in delicate profile, with careful, sensitive hues – such fine aesthetic capacity was surely beyond belief?

  So went the logic of orthodox opinion. However, even the most tenacious upholders of this view were forced to reconsider as further painted caves came to light, especially in France. In 1901, for example, two major sites near Les Eyzies in the Périgord region – Les Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume – were confirmed as bona fide. The following year, a major shift in attitudes was signalled when Emile Cartailhac, one of the French experts who had dismissed Altamira as a prank, published a penitential essay, accepting that his doubts had been in error: the paintings at Altamira, and others like them, really did belong to ‘the dawn of time’. In the summer of 1902, Cartailhac joined other delegates from a scientific conference at Montauban in making a tour to inspect the several painted caves in the area. A consensus was declared: art indeed existed in prehistory, and the science of understanding it had only just begun.

  Discoveries of further caves proliferated throughout the twentieth century. France yielded not only examples of painted surfaces, but also relief figures, such as the ‘frieze’ of animals brought to light in 1909 at Cap Blan
c, again near Les Eyzies, and the two bison moulded in clay at the end of the deep cave at Tuc d’Audoubert in the Pyrenees.

  Most stories of modern discovery contain a ration of drama. Appropriately, perhaps, it was while searching for a lost dog that several schoolboys came across the splendid menagerie painted within the cave at Lascaux, near Montignac, in 1940 (Fig. 7). And while the finding (in 1994) of even more remarkable animal scenes in France’s Ardèche Gorge came about from deliberate underground exploration, the subsequent dispute over ownership of this site – named Chauvet Cave after the potholing enthusiast who first flashed a torch beam over it – is something of a legal soap opera.

  A pair of rhinoceroses lock horns for a fight; a natural event recorded with swift, confident brushstrokes.A set of feline profiles overlap, as if casually anticipating the draughtsman’s rules of depth and perspective by many millennia (Fig. 8). Astonishing?

  Indeed. But not absolutely incredible – because the paintings of Chauvet Cave, firmly dated to over 30,000 years ago, provide merely the most spectacular indicators to date of what some archaeologists refer to as a general ‘Creative Explosion’ occurring in the Upper Palaeolithic period (c. 40,000–10,000 years ago).The phenomenon is not confined either to France or to continental Europe. Essentially, it marks the ascendancy of a particular biological species, Homo sapiens, the ‘knowing human’ type that has come to dominate the Earth’s surface.

  A summary of the background to this arrival of anatomically modern humans may be found in a separate section of this book (see page). Here, it is enough to observe that paintings on cave walls belong to a catalogue of telltale relics left by the ingenious and creative Homo sapiens c. 40,000–30,000 years ago. Among these relics are the following:

  Flint tools, produced in such a way as to be exquisitely symmetrical. Such symmetry may have assisted their function (if, for example, axes were thrown as missiles); otherwise it exists to invest a functional object with aesthetic value.

  Perforated teeth and shells, collected for the sake of bodily ornament. Items of jewellery, such as the necklace of shells found at Mandu Mandu in Western Australia, are sure signs of personal embellishment; possibly also indicators of social status.

  Depositions of food and gifts along with burial of the dead. Excavated burials at the Cro-Magnon shelter near Les Eyzies and at the site of Dolni-Vestonice in the Czech Republic may not qualify structurally as tombs, but the presence of grave goods is suggestive of ritual, and some concept of an afterlife.

  Scratchings on bone and antler that seem intentional and ordered. Several examples of such markings from the site of Zhoukoudian, near Beijing in China, remain open to interpretation, while an ingenious case has been made for reading notches on the handle of a tool found at Ishango, in central equatorial Africa, as a notational system of tallies that marked time according to phases of the moon.

  7 Detail of the ‘Salon of the Bulls’ at Lascaux, near Montignac, France, c.18,000 BC.

  8 The masterfully depicted feline faces in the ‘Lion Panel’ of Chauvet Cave, France, c.32–30,000 BC.

  Certain aspects of this cultural ‘take-off’, such as vocal communication (singing included), dance, and painting done directly on to bodies, can never be known. Much small-scale or portable art may have vanished. And in many parts of the world there are markings on rocks that simply cannot be securely dated by archaeologists.These are reasons why, in any investigation of the origins of art, attention focuses upon the cave-paintings of Palaeolithic Europe. Accepting that they are the best-preserved and most visible signs of the global creative explosion, how do we start to explain their appearance?

  ART FOR ART’S SAKE?

  Pablo Picasso, arguably the most illustrious artist of the twentieth century, seems to have paid a visit to the newly discovered Lascaux cave in 1941. ‘We have learnt nothing!’ is reported as his awed, almost indignant comment, implying that the anonymous Stone Age draughtsmen of Lascaux had miraculously anticipated the representational aims and achievements of art within modern, ‘civilized’ society. Uncannily (as it must have seemed to him), the prominent animals at Lascaux were bulls – favoured subjects of Picasso, and indeed, featuring in one of his earliest paintings as a boy. Also, some of the animals depicted at Lascaux have their form emphasized in thick black outline.This is also uncannily similar to a pictorial device favoured at one time by Picasso and his post-Impressionist contemporaries, some of whom would be nicknamed in 1905 as les fauves (the wild ones). It must have unnerved the Spanish painter, to see a stylistic invention pre-empted by many thousands of years: ‘the shock of the old’, we might say. Later, at a Parisian exhibition in 1953, Picasso re-created for his own work the flickering, torchlit experience of viewing a prehistoric cave – such was his empathy for ancestral comrades.

  Picasso’s reaction is one that many of us would share. Identifying the precise species of bison, ibex or mammoth might be beyond us. But, like young Maria at Altamira, we have little essential difficulty in seeing what these ancient artists were trying to represent.

  Instinctively, then, we may want to ‘update’ the earliest human artists by assuming that they painted for the sheer joy of painting.

  The philosophers of Classical Greece recognized it as a defining trait of humans to ‘delight in works of imitation’ – to enjoy the very act and triumph of representation. If we were close to a real lion or snake, we should feel frightened. But a well-executed picture of a lion or snake will give us pleasure.Why suppose that our Palaeolithic ancestors were any different?

  This simple acceptance of cave-paintings as art for art’s sake has a certain appeal. To think of Lascaux as a gallery or salon allows it to be a sort of special viewing place where the handiwork of accomplished artistes might be displayed. And at Lascaux, the evident care with which individual animals have been abstracted from any natural background or landscape makes it tempting to suppose that the painters sought to create, as it were, ‘life studies’ of their subjects. Plausibly, daily existence in parts of Palaeolithic Europe may not have been so hard, with an abundance of ready food, and therefore the leisure time for art.

  The problems with this explanation, however, are various. In the first place, the proliferation of archaeological discoveries – and this includes some of the world’s innumerable rock art sites that cannot be dated – has served to emphasize a remarkably limited repertoire of subjects.The images that recur are those of animals; and, commonly, similar types of animal. Human figures are unusual; and when they do make an appearance, they are rarely done with the same attention to form accorded to the animals. If Palaeolithic artists were simply seeking to represent the beauty of the world around them, would they not have left a far greater range of pictures – of trees and flowers, of the sun and the stars?

  A further question to the theory of art for art’s sake is posed by the high incidence of Palaeolithic images that appear not be imitative of any reality whatsoever.These are geometrical shapes or patterns consisting of dots or lines. Such marks may be found isolated or repeated over a particular surface, but also scattered across more recognizable forms.A good example of this may be seen in the geologically spectacular grotto of Pech Merle, in the Lot region of France (Fig. 9). Here we encounter some favourite animals from the Palaeolithic repertoire – a pair of stout-bellied horses. But over and around the horses’ outlines are multiple dark spots, daubed in disregard for the otherwise naturalistic representation of the animals.What does such patterning imitate?

  There is also the factor of location.The caverns of Altamira and Lascaux might conceivably qualify as underground galleries, but many other paintings have been foundin recesses totally unsuitable for any kind of viewing – tight nooks and crannies that must have been awkward even for the artists to penetrate, let alone for anyone else wanting to see the art. For example, a painted cave adjoining Pech Merle, called Le Combel, can only be reached by squeezing through a narrow cleft in the rock and crawling along on one’s stomach; there was ne
ver any room to admire the handiwork in comfort.

  9 The ‘Spotted Horses’ in the caves of Pech Merle, France, c.20,000 BC, with the intriguing patterns of dark spots around the horses’ outlines.The hand stencils may be later touches.

  Finally, we may doubt the notion that the Upper Palaeolithic was a Garden of Eden in which food came readily, leaving humans ample time to amuse themselves with art. For Europe it was still the Ice Age. An estimate of the basic level of sustenance then necessary for individual human survival has been judged at 2200 calories per day.This consideration, combined with the stark iconographic emphasis upon animals in the cave art, has persuaded some archaeologists that the primary motive behind Palaeolithic images must lie with the primary activity of Palaeolithic people – hunting.

  ART AND HUNTING

  Hunting is a skill.Tracking, stalking, chasing and killing the prey are difficult, sometimes dangerous activities.What if the process could be made easier – by art?

  In the early decades of the twentieth century, an influential French archaeologist, Abbé Henri Breuil (1877–1961), made this suggestion the basis for his theory that the cave-paintings were all about ‘sympathetic magic’.The reason why Palaeolithic artists so often depicted animals was that the business of hunting animals preoccupied them and their contemporaries. And the artists strived diligently to make their animal images evocative and realistic because they were attempting to ‘capture the spirit’ of their prey. As Breuil stressed, these debutant human artists clearly did not draw like children. What could have prompted their studious attention to making such naturalistic, recognizable images? For Breuil, it had to come from some extraordinary belief about the power of images. If a hunter were able to make a true likeness of some animal, then that animal was virtually trapped. Images, therefore, had the magical capacity to confer success or luck in the hunt.