But then why did different animals predominate in different caves? Horses dominate Lascaux, but in Rouffignac, the cave that also has a shaft with paintings, it is the mammoth that dominates. Yet the diet of the people near these caves was more or less the same.
The hunting-magic theory was fading when Lascaux was discovered, despite Breuil's insistence on it, but the appearance of such a cave undermined it for good. Lascaux changed almost everything that had been assumed until then about the caves and the people who painted them. It wasn't just the beauty of the paintings. Altamira and Font-de-Gaume had beautiful paintings, too. But the scope of Lascaux was so grand and the paintings were so intense that it was clear that the people who created the art there had far greater intellects, a much richer culture both materially and spiritually, and a more powerfully energetic society than anyone had ever thought. Breuil, to his credit, recognized exactly that. “The variety and number of successive techniques, following each other in a relatively brief time,” he wrote in Four Hundred Centuries,“is indicative of a sort of artistic fever, rich in inspiration and experiment. There was nothing to foretell that, in this remote epoch of which, before Lascaux was discovered, we had known only a few artistic fragments of this Art, there would be such an outburst of really great Art, perfect of its kind.”
But, if it wasn't hunting magic, what did this perfect art mean? When World War II ended, it was sixty years after Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola looked up and saw the bison on the roof of Altamira. For all the papers and conferences, for all the archaeological digging and discoveries, the people who admired the paintings in the caves, whether they were scholars or laypeople, were still asking the same question Felix Garrigou had written in his notebook in 1864 after visiting the painted cave Niaux: “There are paintings on the wall. What can they be?”
CHAPTER 5
A Stormy Drama Among Bison;
The Golden Section
I n 1935 a man named Max Raphael left Paris on an excursion to visit the caves around Les Eyzies. He was an anomaly among students of the caves, being a German, a Jew, and a Marxist to boot. Furthermore, he was already forty-six and had had no training or experience in either archaeology or prehistory.
Until that trip Raphael had devoted his life to writing extremely intellectual studies of contemporary art and philosophy. His publications included books such as Proudhon, Marx, Picasso: Three Studies in the Sociology of Art and The Marxist Theory of Knowledge. These books and the rest of his work, brilliant as it was, remained in obscurity while he was alive. That was partly due to his peripatetic life. He deserted from the German army in World War I, lived in Switzerland, then in Berlin, then in France, and had to flee from Europe to avoid the Nazi concentration camps in World War II. He went through Portugal to New York, where he spent the rest of his life. His difficult personality also helped undermine his career. He was obsessive, dark, and given to bouts of depression. He had dark, deep-set eyes and an immense bald brow. With a straight mouth, his lips pressed together, he had an air of almost demonic concentration.
But Max Raphael did have the rare and valuable ability to see what was directly before his eyes. Looking at the paintings in the caves around Les Eyzies, he saw what no one else had ever seen until then: The paintings were whole compositions in which the positions of animals in relation to one another conveyed their meaning. As he wrote in a letter to the abbe Breuil shortly after his journey, “In front of the originals, I conceived the hypothesis that where there is a spatial proximity among several animals, there was an intended meaning that we must discover.”
This was a blinding, radical perception that seems not to have occurred to anyone else. It completely changed the thinking about the painted caves—but only eventually. It took about twenty years for Raphael's ideas to seep into the mainstream. With all the interruptions in his life, he didn't publish anything about the caves until 1945, when his Prehistoric Cave Paintings appeared, beautifully and expensively published by the Bollingen Foundation through Pantheon. It is only fifty-one pages long, but it is dense and difficult because the text was a stilted translation into English from Raphael's German manuscript. That muted its effect, but even if the translation had been velvet prose, the fact that the book appeared in English made it seem tangential. At that time, researchers in prehistory were almost always French or Spanish and the most important work was published in either French or Spanish, especially French. Work from the United States was nothing but an apparition on a distant periphery. In fact, Prehistoric Cave Paintings wasn't translated into French until 1986, forty-one years after it first appeared.
Although his work seemed to have little effect, Raphael labored on from New York, maintaining an extended correspondence with the leading prehistorians of the day, in particular with Breuil. At that time photography in the absolute darkness of the caves was still difficult and rare, so Raphael was dependent on the paintings, sketches, and tracings of cave art executed by Breuil and other researchers. With them at hand he prepared extensive notes for a second book on the caves and in 1952 began planning a trip to France and Spain so he could see the original paintings again.
All his life he'd had a staggering capacity for learning and for hard work, but now he found himself confronted by the miserable fact that he could not afford the journey he was planning. He descended into a deep depression. He was desperately poor, and summer in New York was especially hot that year. Max Raphael killed himself on July 14, the French national holiday celebrating the fall of the Bastille and the triumph of the Revolution. Much of his writing existed only in manuscript when he died and slowly appeared in the following years thanks to the efforts of his widow in cooperation with Boston University.
In addition to the disruptions in his life and the negative effect of being published in English, one other circumstance slowed the recognition and acceptance of the brilliant originality of Prehistoric Cave Paintings. Raphael was not a “dirt archaeologist,” as those who get down on their knees and sift through the soil at a site proudly call themselves. Dirt archaeologists like Cartailhac, like Breuil, and like some others we will encounter have always dominated the field of prehistory. Raphael, on the other hand, was an art historian and an intellectual, which meant his ideas were automatically suspect to archaeologists. (I once mentioned an academic scholar of prehistory in a conversation with a confirmed, lifelong dirt archaeologist. “Oh, her,” he said. “The thing about her is she's really just an intellectual.”) The archaeologists believe, with some reason, that art historians are ignorant about prehistory. Worse still, art historians don't know they are ignorant because they study the paintings as art rather than as part of the evidence that remains to us about the Paleolithic world. Art historians also think they can understand the cave paintings just by looking at them instead of studying them in the context of all that is known of the Paleolithic world. And this pride leads them to make ridiculous errors.
It's true that Raphael's work is marred by a few small errors of fact. In some cases, such as when Raphael remarks that Paleolithic artists painted mammoths even after they were extinct in France, his work has been overtaken by new research. Now it appears that mammoths survived in France much longer than had been thought. But in other, more culpable cases, Raphael simply misidentifies the figures in a painting. Once he calls a grown bull with well-developed horns a calf. But the essential, illuminating perception about the cave paintings—that they are compositions and not simply pictures of individual animals—escaped the dirt archaeologists for a generation and first occurred to an art historian, Max Raphael.
Raphael for his part bristled at the prejudice against art history. In Prehistoric Cave Paintings he went on the counterattack: “Paleolithic archaeology, disdaining, so to speak, its own magnificent discoveries, has regarded its own material as a collection of unrelated fragments and thus completely missed the forms and even the subject matter expressed by the forms.” Paleolithic archaeology had made this disastrous mistake because it regarded pre
historic art as primitive. That smug assumption infuriated Raphael, since for him prehistoric art was not primitive art at all: “It has been said that Paleolithic artists were incapable of dominating surfaces or reproducing space: that they could produce only individual animals, not groups, and certainly not compositions. The exact opposite of all this is true: we find not only groups, but compositions that occupy the length of an entire cave wall or the surface of a ceiling; we find representation of space, historical paintings, and even the golden section! But we find no primitive art.”
Today, most scholars, whether they are art historians or archaeologists, would deny that there even is such a thing as primitive art. Instead the current wisdom holds that each culture creates the art it needs according to its own beliefs, history, and conventions. Whether or not that current wisdom is true, it's not at all what Raphael meant.
His thinking about the caves contained two main pillars. The first is his belief that the cave paintings could not be understood by comparison to the art and societies of “the so-called primitive people of today.” According to Raphael, the Paleolithic people who painted in the caves were “in the throes of a continuous process of transformation” because they were a heroic people who “squarely confronted the obstacles and dangers of their environment and tried to master them.” This put them in “fundamental opposition” to the undeveloped people of today, toward whom Raphael was impatient and unsympathetic. He thought they had adopted certain habits and beliefs that they never changed, and did not allow to be challenged. As a result, their existence was “stagnant” because they stubbornly clung to their superstitions, which were rigid and dogmatic, and avoided difficulties that might cause change. The contrast Raphael perceived between the dynamic, continuously transforming society of the Paleolithic culture and the stagnant society of modern undeveloped cultures still trapped in the Stone Age led him to the conclusion that “prehistory cannot be reconstructed with the aid of ethnography.”
This is a direct attack on Breuil, although Raphael doesn't frame it that way. Breuil used ethnography—comparing the Paleolithic world to present-day undeveloped societies—in order to explain the meaning of the cave paintings, to the exclusion of any other method. Most other scholars of his generation followed Breuil's example. But are these comparisons really valid? Is it legitimate to study people of today such as the Australian aborigines or the San of Africa—both of whom make elaborate paintings on rocks—and use their example to draw conclusions about the life and society of the Paleolithic artists? For Breuil and for many prehistorians even today, the temptation is just too great to resist, especially when an ethnographic comparison can support a pet theory.
Raphael rejects this approach entirely and in a very dogmatic way. He believed in the “continuous process of transformation” in Paleolithic times. He offers no support for this belief, much less any proof, and it's even difficult to know what transformations he could possibly be talking about. His notions about the “stagnant” life of undeveloped societies in the present are also unsupported and, I suspect, would drive a modern ethnographer into apoplexy. But, for all that, his instincts led him to a profound conclusion about a central problem. Using ethnography to explain even the slightest things about the world of the cave painters is not just dangerous but deeply counterproductive.
To imagine the lives of people living in the Paleolithic era we must look back across 40,000 years of discovery, of invention, and of advances in science, technology, medicine, agriculture, and much else. In this long history we can see the differences that major advances such as writing or electric power have made in individual lives and in civilizations. That makes it almost inevitable for us to think of those people who live outside that long history—that is, people who still live in undeveloped cultures—as essentially the same as the people of the Paleolithic era in Europe and Asia who lived before any of those advances were made. But that is an error.
At that time the civilization that covered the vast territory from Western Europe to Siberia was advanced far beyond the rather limited cultures that had come before it. As Max Raphael understood, that civilization has little or nothing in common with the undeveloped societies of today. Rather, just as it is most appropriate to compare great civilizations with one another—classical Greece with Renaissance Italy or the Egypt of the pharaohs with the Indus Valley civilization—the Paleolithic civilization in Europe and Asia should be compared with the most advanced civilizations of the past and of today. The greatest flowering of that civilization was the paintings in the caves. We should study them, not as ethnography, but the same way that we study Greek tragedy or the temples of Angkor Wat, expecting to find on the cave walls the history and beliefs of a great people along with the deepest philosophy and the most profound understanding of which humanity is capable.
The second pillar of Raphael's thinking is that the paintings are not individual works done one by one over time as Breuil and his contemporaries had assumed. Instead the paintings were part of a single, deliberate composition. We first have to recognize “the existing material for what it is—and very often we have to deal not with single animals, but with groups.” After that it is necessary “to interpret the parts in relation to the whole, and not to isolate them.” Then by considering the form of such compositions we may derive their meaning, because “in art, content and form tend to become identical.”
The idea that the individual paintings are part of a planned composition is the equivalent of an axiom in mathematics. From it Raphael derives several provocative theories. They might even be true. He makes the same observation everyone else makes—that the same animals are painted again and again in cave after cave— but he then takes it one step further: “The character of each animal seems to be as limited as the subject matter; everywhere the reindeer live a bright cheerful idyll, just as the bison live a stormy drama; the horses display playful sensitivity and the mammoths unshakable dignity and gravity.” What did the artists mean by this consistency? Raphael believed the animals represented clans. The scenes on the walls with all their superimpositions represent conflicts, alliances, weddings, or other historical events among the clans: “Animals pictured one inside the other may represent … alliance in the struggle, while the superimposition of animals may stand for domination, mediation or a promise of support. The latter is probably the case in the many pictures showing a mammoth superimposed on other groups of animals.” He insists that the ceiling of Altamira is the history of the conflict between the deer clan and the bison clan and sees this conflict repeated on the walls of other caves. The wounded horses in the Nave in Lascaux represent the horse clan that was vanquished by the clan of bulls and cows. It's a very seductive notion, especially since Raphael presents it with such calm self-assurance. But there is no proof at all that Paleolithic people had clans or, if they did have clans, that those clans identified with totem animals.
Raphael also believed that the Paleolithic artists represented space in ways that are now alien to us. For instance, animals are commonly painted one inside the other, which seems confusing and arbitrary to us. According to Raphael, that might signify the unity of two clans or the dominance of one clan over another, but it also could be a convention for showing that one animal is behind the other. The size of the inside animal indicates how far away it is—the smaller, the farther away.
Similarly, the difference in size between two animals that are near each other is, according to Raphael, “equal to their distance from each other; in other words, if they were of equal size, they would touch each other.” Another way of explaining what he means is to say that the smaller the animal is, the farther behind the foreground represented by the cave wall it is supposed to be. On a wall where a large bison is standing next to a small mammoth, modern people, used to our artistic conventions, see two animals of wildly mismatched proportions standing in the same plane. The Paleolithic artist saw a mammoth standing far behind a bison.
Raphael also believed that
the prehistoric artists knew and routinely—even ritually—used the proportion that eons later Leonardo would name the golden section. These are proportions, based on the human body, that in theory produce the shapes that are most pleasing to the eye. For a shape like the body of an animal (not counting the legs) those proportions are 2:3 and 3:5, so that the body of a horse that was, say, two feet high should have a length of three feet. And Raphael insists that the animals in the caves conform to these proportions with “great frequency,” so often in fact that it is a phenomenon that requires explanation, which he is eager to provide. He believes that painters found these proportions by looking at their own hands.
On average, two lengths of a male's hand is equal to three widths. Also, when the fingers are separated in the most natural manner—that is, making a gap between the middle and fourth finger—both the proportions 2:3 and 3:5 are created. In one case, three digits (the thumb and two fingers) are opposed to two digits (the fourth finger and the pinkie). At the same time, three digits (again the thumb and two fingers) are opposed to five (the whole hand). That “there can be no doubt that the golden section … was developed out of the hand” has tremendous importance for Raphael, not just in his interpretation of the art but for his vision of Paleolithic society's ideas and beliefs. That's because the “hand was the organ by which erectly walking man could translate the superiority of his consciousness over the animal's thinking capacity into practice.” In other words, human intelligence could dominate the animal world only because the hand could make tools, blades, spears, and other weapons. Then the hand could throw and thrust them to wound and thus dominate animals—or other humans.
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