In 1901 a schoolteacher in Les Eyzies discovered both Font-de-Gaume and a cave close by named Les Combarelles whose walls were covered with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of engravings. Cartailhac visited these two caves as well as La Mouthe and Pair-non-Pair. At last even he was convinced that all these paintings and engravings were not “a vulgar joke by a hack artist” but the work of prehistoric people. At La Mouthe he himself had scraped away a layer of dirt at the base of a wall and exposed the hoof of a painted animal. I've often wondered what this proud, stubborn, but intelligent man was thinking as he uncovered with his own hand the proof that his twenty years of malicious contempt toward Sautuola was all a terrible mistake.
It could be that even then he had conceived of what would become his masterstroke. He repented publicly in a paper he published in 1902 in L'Anthropologie, then as now the leading journal for prehistory in France. Cartailhac gave his paper the awkward title “Les cavernes ornees de dessins. La grotte d'Altamira, Espagne. ‘Mea culpa’ d'un sceptique.”
This apology is sincere in its way, and his searching for reasons to explain his errors would even be somewhat touching if it didn't have an air of calculation. He begins with his visit to Pair-non-Pair and to La Mouthe, which convinced him of the “prehistoric antiquity” of the engravings. But how, he wonders, could they have been done with such a sure hand in the “vacillating light of smoking lamps?” He sees only one solution to this mystery: “One must believe that the eyes of the prehistoric people were more accustomed to seeing in semi-darkness than our own.” Then, prevaricating, he says it was not having thought of that that made him complicit twenty years earlier in “an injustice that it's necessary to admit clearly and to put right.” No, he continues, resigned at last to the inevitable, “One must bow before the reality of a fact, and I, as far as I am concerned, must make amends with M. de Sautuola.”
Two generations of French anthropologists and archaeologists would reverently cite Cartailhac's “mea culpa” as an example of the bravery of a true scientist who loves truth enough to admit his mistakes publicly. That adulation meant that Cartailhac kept his position as the leading prehistorian of his generation for decades after his death. But lately there has been a movement to resurrect Edouard Piette, the man who first helped Sautuola at the World Exposition in 1878 and who believed from the very first that Altamira was genuine. Yes, the thinking goes, Cartailhac admitted his error, but he was wrong all those years while Piette was right. Piette didn't need to admit an error because he hadn't made one.
Perhaps it's the cynicism of our age, but in recent years the “mea culpa” has begun to look like stage management rather than incorruptible honesty. When one is wrong, a splashy public apology can not only eradicate the error but also create more attention and respect than one might get just for being right. It's similar to a gambit in chess where an early loss turns out to be a trap for the opponent that leads to a stunning victory. One modern prehisto-rian who had been on the winning side of a public dispute confided to me that in the aftermath of the battle he had feared that his opponent would “do a Cartailhac” on him.
To Cartailhac's credit, however, his conversion was real. In August 1902, shortly after publishing his “mea culpa,” he again visited La Mouthe, Les Combarelles, and Font-de-Gaume as part of the yearly meeting of the French Association for the Advancement of Science. These visits gave the cave paintings an official approval so that the doubters who remained were suddenly outside the scientific establishment rather than within it. Cartailhac then tried to make up for twenty years of lost time. He convinced a young assistant to come with him for an extended archaeological investigation of… Altamira!
That young assistant had not needed much convincing to go. He was a twenty-five-year-old priest named Henri Breuil who had decided that studying prehistoric art was his calling in life. He would unrelentingly devote all of his considerable energy and intellect to that calling for the next fifty-five years. Within three years of leaving for Altamira with Cartailhac he had become the preeminent force in the world in prehistory. Others called him the Pope of Prehistory, and in time he too began calling himself that. Beginning in 1902 he initiated several brave attacks on the existing orthodoxy about the painted caves, and he won every battle and every war. Throughout his long life his stature and influence never disappeared entirely, and waned only when he was well into his seventies.
Breuil had fixed on his vocation during the summer of 1897 while he was still a seminary student. A friend at the seminary named Jean Bouyssonie invited Breuil to come home with him to Brive-la-Gaillarde, a railroad town and commercial center on the Vezere River a short way northeast of Les Eyzies. The two friends investigated the known prehistoric sites in the area. Then Breuil continued on alone, going from site to site and in September finally arrived in Rumigny, a small village north of Paris that was the home of Edouard Piette, now sixty. Piette liked Breuil—not everyone did—and recognized his latent talent. During his career, Breuil worked with all the great names in prehistory, but he always referred to Piette as his master and inspiration.
Piette showed Breuil his collection of prehistoric objects of art, which was then unrivaled by any other collection, public or private. Breuil was overwhelmed, and in that moment he decided to devote his life to studying what he then called the Reindeer Age. Breuil was an excellent artist, and his artistic skill would soon make his reputation. He set to work making careful drawings of each object in Piette's collection—drawings for which the kind gentleman was generous enough to pay Breuil four hundred francs.
In September 1901 Breuil, working with two other enthusiasts, was again in the Vezere Valley around Les Eyzies. His small team had inspired the townspeople to explore the caves in the area. That was how a local schoolteacher had come to discover Les Com-barelles. The teacher persuaded Breuil and his associates to explore it themselves. They entered on September 8 and immediately realized the teacher had made a discovery that would remove any lingering doubts about art in the caves. There are no paintings in Les Combarelles, but the walls are covered with hundreds of engravings. Breuil counted almost three hundred during his first few days studying the cave. Many of them show superb delicacy and artistic skill. Breuil threw himself into a frenzy of work in the cave and his excitement spilled over into a letter to Jean Bouys-sonie on September 10: “Hurrah! Talking of discoveries, here is one and what a one; an immense engraved grotto more than 300 meters long and on over half of it, engraved figures of animals, especially horses, but also antelopes, reindeer, mammoths, ibexes.
I still feel as though I had dreamed it all—just to happen on it, quite casually, as you might find a stone on the road. And how we slaved yesterday; I traced eighteen of the beasts—some of them are magnificent … all in all I spent ten hours in the grotto; I am half-dead, I am aching all over, but I am very well pleased. Extraordinary, eh? As for myself, I am giving thanks to Providence.”
Just four days later, on September 12, the same young schoolteacher from Les Eyzies went alone to explore a different cave nearby. He was hoping to find another Les Combarelles, but instead he found the long galleries of unrivaled beauty at Font-de-Gaume. For Breuil, here was a second gift from Providence, and he began furiously copying the paintings in the newly discovered cave.
Breuil and his colleagues published papers complete with Breuil's drawings early in 1902. This was the work that convinced Cartail-hac to invite Breuil to accompany him to Altamira. They had nine hundred francs between them for the expedition. Cartailhac had obtained five hundred francs from a patron and Breuil contributed the four hundred francs Piette had paid him for the drawings of his collection. Breuil had saved the money for some special purpose for five years, and now that purpose had arrived.
Cartailhac arrived in Santander unsure of his welcome. After all, he had antagonized and ridiculed Sautuola, who was remembered affectionately and whose family still held a lofty status in the province. But he and Breuil were welcomed warmly by local dignitaries, w
ho continued to perform various courtesies during their stay. Whatever had happened in the past could stay in the past; this was a chance for Santander, beautiful but remote, to become famous. Cartailhac, who was seeing Altamira for the first time, was also eager to forget the way he had treated Sautuola. The paintings now excited him more than any artifacts he had ever seen. He proclaimed that Altamira was the “most mysterious and astonishing” of all the ornamented caves.
He and Breuil had intended to stay only three or four days, but the cave was so rich that, stretching their money, they stayed a month. They began work at dawn, going into the cave through its unimposing entrance, which was hardly more than a hole in a hillside among some bushes. By the time they left, night had fallen.
The work was arduous and was made worse by hazards in the cave. Rocks that had fallen from the ceiling covered the floor in the largest gallery. The amateurish digs Sautuola and Vilanova had made in 1880 were now very much in the way and a constant annoyance. The two men tried to clean things up and level the floor but it still remained littered with pointy, angular slabs. The painted ceiling that had so overwhelmed Sautuola, and now had the same effect on Cartailhac and Breuil, was about twenty yards long and twelve yards wide. It was quite low and uneven, so that the two men had to move around the room bent double. It was difficult for Breuil, who was only twenty-five and quite short; but Cartailhac, who was thin and rangy and fifty-seven years old, suffered even more. In some places the ceiling was so low they had to lie on their backs to see the figures completely. They used sacks of straw as cushions against the rocks, but the sacks provided more aggravation than comfort because the rocks constantly poked through the shifting straw.
In the end, Breuil was the one who had to lie on the ground, often in the most tortured positions, because his work was to make copies of the paintings. In those days before photography was common and inexpensive, drawings of discoveries were the only way for both scholars and the general public to see what the paintings were like. More important, an accurate copy allows for detailed study without risk of damaging the art itself. Since prehistoric paintings and engravings are frequently placed one on top of another, copies are a means of separating out the individual works. Today, elaborate manipulation of copies using computers is one of the most productive methods of studying the art in the caves.
At Altamira, as Breuil worked on his copies, Cartailhac circled uneasily around him measuring the dimensions of the paintings and taking notes. He had to be ever vigilant not to straighten up even slightly, since then he would brush against the paintings. At the same time, he directed the handful of local workers they had hired to hold lighted candles so that the faint light illuminated the precise area of a painting Breuil was copying.
In the midst of this tense, painful, and enervating work, the two men were interrupted constantly. As news about them spread through the neighboring villages and beyond, curious onlookers began to arrive. Some had traveled considerable distances to get there. To exclude them from the cave or to ignore them while they were there would have offended local customs. With their backs contorted in pain and with so much work still to do, Breuil and Cartailhac had to pause repeatedly and chatter politely with anyone who came to see the cave. Besides that, it rained hard day after day.
Occasionally, though, when the sun pierced the clouds, they were able to have lunch outside the cave on a hillside looking across the long, majestic valley. A photograph from the time shows Breuil sitting on a blanket during one of those pleasant afternoons. Although he has not yet lost his hair, he looks older than his years, with a high forehead and thick black eyebrows. His black cassock is covered with white daubs of wax that had fallen from burning candles as he worked inside the cave.
The persistent rain raised the humidity in the cave to the point that the paint on the walls and ceiling became sticky. Breuil couldn't trace the paintings directly without ruining them. Also, the watercolors he usually worked with were useless in the cave's damp atmosphere. Fortunately, Breuil had also brought some pastels with him, and he taught himself how to use them. First he would make rough sketches of each painting. Then, using Cartail-hac's measurements, he would execute his copies.
All the while, they saw the remains of hearths, broken bones from ancient meals, and stone tools, but they knew they lacked the time and resources to make proper excavations. Instead their month of work produced Breuil's copies and Cartailhac's inventory and description of all the paintings that they saw in the cave. Having finished and no longer having to endure long days bent double under the painted ceiling, Cartailhac became almost giddy with euphoria. “We left Santander on October 28,” he wrote, “on one of those extraordinary nights when the entire sky was lit up with strange fires. We left thankful and enchanted, enriched by a dossier without equal of the oldest paintings in the world.”
Breuil, too, left in high spirits. He was more certain than ever that he had found his true calling. “After Altamira,” he said, “I copied many thousands of paintings and engravings. The animal art of the Cave Age was my main concern during my life as an artist.” Later he estimated that over the years he had spent more than seven hundred days in seventy-three different caves “with my lamp in the darkness, deciphering, copying, tracing.”
But what should be done with Cartailhac's dossier and Breuil's copies? Their work was too important to confine to a few run-of-the-mill papers in academic journals, yet publishing it as a book would be far too expensive for any scholarly society to afford. They had to wait four years until Prince Albert I of Monaco eagerly agreed to underwrite the publication.
Prince Albert was the great-grandfather of Prince Rainier of Monaco, who married Grace Kelly, and the great-great-grandfather of the present monarch, Prince Albert II. Albert I, who lived from 1848 to 1922, was a robust, active, appealing man with real intellectual interests. He was passionate about deep-sea research and also about aviation, which was then just beginning. In 1906 he traveled by dogsled to the North Pole.
During the last half of the nineteenth century, archaeological digs in caves along the coast of Monaco had found human skeletons and a number of statuettes of women with huge buttocks. Albert had worked in these digs himself and met Cartailhac there. In 1906 he met Breuil at a scientific conference in Monaco. The encounter began a long association between the two men that culminated in 1910, when the prince founded the Institut de Paläontologie Humaine in Paris with the Abbe Breuil as director. The Institut remains a vital institution under the continuing patronage of Monaco's ruling family, who still maintain an apartment in a building across the street. There are many photographs of Prince Rainier, his family, and his ancestors along the dark halls of the Institut. In one, Princess Grace, wearing a pair of black glasses, daintily examines a prehistoric human skull.
In 1906, with Albert's patronage, Cartailhac and Breuil published La Caverne d'Altamira a Santillane, an immense (thirteen-by-eleven-inch) and expensive tome that Cartailhac, who cannot be faulted for a lack of ambition, made the monumental repository of everything then known about painted caves. It is here that all the subsequent studies of the painted caves—thousands of books and papers—have had their beginning.
In the book there is of course an account of the discovery of Altamira and the controversy that followed, as well as the inventory and description of the paintings in the cave. But that is only about a third of La Caverne d'Altamira. There are histories and descriptions of La Mouthe, Pair-non-Pair, Les Combarelles, Font-de-Gaume, and the six other decorated caves that were known at the time. One whole chapter is devoted to red ochre, its preparation and how it was used as pigment in the paintings. Another chapter compares the engravings on bones, ivory, and antlers to the paintings on cave walls.
But most important are three chapters comparing the art of native peoples in North America, Africa, and Australia with that in the prehistoric caves in Europe. These chapters anticipate the modern sensibility that regards all rock art, wherever it occurs and whenever it wa
s done, as part of the same phenomenon. There from the very beginning was the risky but tempting habit of trying to explain the people who made art in the caves in France and Spain by comparing them to Stone Age societies that still exist. Since they assumed those societies used their art as hunting magic, Car-tailhac and Breuil assumed the art in the caves must have been hunting magic as well. Australian tribes used abstract signs in their art as symbols of real objects; therefore, the geometric signs in Altamira “are also some images of some device, of a weapon.” The faint silhouettes of human shapes with animal heads must be the hunting masks often worn by shamans in rituals. “A priori,” Cartailhac argues, “the mask must have been known by our Paleolithic artists and also the masked dance.” By using analogy it's possible to “join our group of Paleolithic engravings and paintings to the work presented by all primitive races across the continents.” Through such analogies, he concludes, “We have had the satisfaction of seeing the civilization and the mentality of our prehistoric people revived in a manner we could not have hoped for.” Although the language is outdated—Cartailhac, for instance, habitually refers to native people as “primitive,” a word taken to be a serious affront today—the argument from analogy and the evocation of masked dances and shamanism as an explanation of the painted caves has never disappeared. On the contrary, it has recently been revived.
Cartailhac's text, although eerily prescient, is interesting mainly as history. That is not true of the plates of Breuil's pastel renderings of Altamira's paintings. Bold, fluid, subtly shaded, vivid, Breuil's work shows the most loving and tender sensitivity both toward the paintings and toward the animals they depict. These species of horses, deer, and bison had been extinct for millennia. Breuil knew about them only through the paintings, yet it seems as if he knew them firsthand, as if he had somehow managed to inhabit the mind and body of one of the original artists in the cave who painted the animals from direct observation. Breuil himself apparently believed he really could transport his sensibility back through the ages. He once wrote, “I can readily imagine the artists of the Reindeer Age were like me … They cast upon the rock face, as I did upon paper, the inner vision they had of an animal.” Again and again, in pastel renderings with titles like “Reclining Bison Turning Back Its Head” and “Female Bison Curled” and “Halted Bison Bellowing,” Breuil creates images of such delicacy and such sympathy that looking through La Caverne d'Altamira is an intense emotional experience. You forget, almost, that these are not the paintings themselves.
The Cave Painters Page 6