Raphael believed that since the hand was the body part that became the instrument of domination, it always had great importance in the magic of early humans. “It would seem,” he wrote, “that Paleolithic man took for granted the formal analogy between the animal and the hand, which for us remains a paradox.” Yet in Raphael's words, the analogy between the two is quite clear: “The hand is not a structure centered on an axis, it is unsymmetrical in shape, it has one-sided direction just like the animal in motion, and its motions are free and independent of one another, because, unlike the human body as a whole, hands do not constitute a single system of balance.”
Also, the hand had a role in the formation of language, since language must have developed to articulate communication that previously was possible only through signs or other gestures made with the hands. Raphael says, “the fact that the hunters used the hand as a means of communication in order to avoid frightening their prey by shouts, suffices to support my assertion that the hand is the basis of formal composition of all Paleolithic (Franco-Cantabrian) painting.” Deriving the golden section from the hand was “the first concrete example of the derivation of the aesthetic significance of the hand from its magic significance.”
The magical, or at least the spiritual, significance of the hand is universal. We see it in the hand of God on the Sistine Chapel reaching to touch the hand of man, in the pointing finger in the paintings of Leonardo and other Renaissance artists, in the laying on of hands in religious ceremonies, in the hand and finger postures in the Buddhist art of India and China. But “during the Paleolithic age the animal was the measure of all things—but only through the intermediary of the human hand.” Thus the paintings showed animals, but animals created by the hand and based on the proportions of the hand. (Raphael doesn't make the obvious connection between this fact and the numerous imprints of hands in either red or black on the walls of many painted caves. Perhaps that was because there are no painted hands in Lascaux and few in the caves he visited near Les Eyzies.)
Finally, Raphael puzzles over one of the great conundrums of cave art, one that archaeologists tend to ignore because it is emotional rather than scientific. The paintings look modern, familiar. But how could that be, since, as Raphael says, “in reality there is no art more distant and alien to us?” It is distant because it is so old, and it is alien, first of all, because it begins with a different premise. Art in the West is centered on humans or on the relations between humans and gods. Paleolithic art is centered on animals. This central focus means “there is no place in [Paleolithic art] for the middle axis, for symmetry and balance inspired by the structure of the human body. Rather, everything is asymmetric and shifted.” And the point of view is different in Paleolithic art: “The objects are not represented as they appear when seen from a distance, as we are accustomed to seeing them in paintings from the times of classical antiquity, but as near at hand—for the Paleolithic hunter struggled with the animal at close quarters, body against body; only the invention of the bow … made the distant view possible.” And finally, the paintings should seem alien because “the object of Paleolithic art is not to picture the individual existence of animals and men, but to depict their group existence, the herd and the horde.” How, then, can this art, while remaining mysterious, still appear so close to us and speak to us so directly?
Raphael's solution to this mystery is a testament to his genius. He believes the reason is that the painters “were produced in a unique historical situation and are a great spiritual symbol: for they date from a period when man had just emerged from a purely zoological existence, when instead of being dominated by animals, he began to dominate them. This emancipation from the animal state found an artistic expression as great and universally human as was later found by the Greeks.”
This assertion—this inspired guess—can never be proved, but it cuts close to the bone. It is another version of the biblical Fall of Man. For millennium upon millennium, members of the genus Homo did not see themselves as separate from the other animals. Then, somehow, Homo sapiens acquired forbidden knowledge and came to believe they were somehow distinct from other animals. The paintings express the guilt, the regret, and the triumph that came with the belief in that separation.
Raphael, as an atheist and a Marxist, avoided characterizing this new awareness as a fall and instead described it as the result of a social struggle: “The Paleolithic paintings remind us that our present subjection to forces other than nature is purely transitory; these works are a symbol of our future freedom. Today, mankind … is striving for a future in the eyes of which all our history will sink to the level of ‘prehistory.’ Paleolithic man was carrying on a comparable struggle. Thus the art most distant from us becomes the nearest; the art most alien to us becomes the closest.” Today, when it is clear that the Marxist future Raphael envisioned in 1945 has failed, these lines seem jagged and off-key. But if you drop out the Marxism, what remains is Raphael's shrewd perception that the dynamic—the struggle against domination by nature—in Paleolithic civilization that led to the art is similar to a dynamic—the struggle against domination by forces other than nature, that is, by forces of ideology—in our own time. That's one reason why this ancient art is deeply meaningful to us and not merely a pretty curiosity from the distant past.
CHAPTER 6
A Lively but Unreliable Creation;
Quaint, Symbolic Arrows
I n 1951, just a few months before his death, Max Raphael mailed a typed manuscript of thirty-one pages to a woman in Paris named Annette Laming-Emperaire. He'd titled it “On the Method of Interpreting Paleolithic Art.” It consisted of introductory notes to the first part of a long work Raphael had intended to call “Iconography of Quaternary Art: Methods and Systems.” It was meant to extend and in some ways replace the work he had begun with Prehistoric Cave Paintings. Raphael's second book would have included not only his methods of interpretation but also his revised chronology of the painted caves, a chapter on isolated paintings of two or three animals, and a treatise on the concept of historical progress, which Raphael thought was somehow the key to understanding prehistoric art. At the time of his death, “Iconography of Quaternary Art” consisted only of the notes he sent Laming-Emperaire, earlier and later drafts of those same notes, and some other random notes and observations. The 1986 French translation of these papers, which is the only published version in any language, is less than sixty pages.
Annette Laming-Emperaire was thirty-four years old in 1951 when she found Raphael's package of typescript in her mailbox. As with everyone else who lived through those times, the normal course of her life had been interrupted and delayed by the war, but now she was racing toward the future. She was technically just a graduate student at the Sorbonne who had begun studying the painted caves only five years earlier. But her brilliance was already apparent, and word about her had begun to spread in the small but intense community of French prehistorians.
In 1948 she wrote the text for Lascaux: Chapelle Sixtine de la prehistoire, a book of photographs taken by Fernand Windeis, who had begun photographing the cave soon after its discovery. The English translation of this book appeared in the United States in 1950. Raphael must have spent hours studying it, since these were the most complete photographs available of Lascaux at that time. In fact, they were the most complete photographs of any cave. That Laming-Emperaire got to write the accompanying text was an impressive debut and probably what prompted Raphael to send her his notes.
Laming-Emperaire, for her part, was intrigued but not seduced by the notes for “Iconography of Quaternary Art,” or so she wrote when she discussed Raphael in the book that earned her place in history, La signification de Vart rupestre paleolithique(The Meaning of Paleolithic Rock Art). The important word in her title is signification,“meaning.” It's a testament to her desire to confront the most important questions and also to her nerve. Modern scholars have mostly abandoned the search for what the paintings mean because they believe i
t is impossible for us ever to know. That's correct, in a way, but for Laming-Emperaire studying cave art without searching for its meaning rendered that study, well, meaningless.
She was the precise image of a postwar, French, intellectual woman. She was handsome and physically appealing without being glamorous. She wore plain, sensible clothes that were also flattering. Her thick, almost luxuriant hair was sometimes unruly even though she wore it in a short bob. She was serious, hardworking, concentrated. Photographs often show her staring without expression into the distance, although in one taken in South America sometime in the 1970s she reveals a radiant and completely natural smile. Her students adored her. In Annette Laming-Emperaire ‘s character there was also something that was soulful, romantic, and passionate, perhaps because she seemed to live in the shadow of tragedy.
She was born to French parents in St. Petersburg in 1917 on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Soon after her birth, the family had to flee with her toddler brother and Annette, a babe in arms, through Finland and Great Britain back to France. Ten years later her father died, leaving his widow with four young children and a difficult and unclear future. Annette lived for a while in Turkey with her grandfather, whom she loved. For years she kept a Turkish carpet, even though it grew more and more threadbare, because it came to her from him.
She was twenty-five, living in Toulouse, and a student of philosophy, chemistry, and biology, when she began working in the Resistance against the occupying Germans. Her daughter remembers her occasionally telling stories of carrying documents by bicycle among Resistance cells, of secretly tearing down German notices, and of trying to stay warm when fuel and rations were scarce by drinking tea with butter. After the war Annette worked in Germany helping to repatriate French children who had been sent to concentration camps. It was 1946 before she was able to return to Paris and resume her studies.
By now she had focused on prehistory, and in 1948 at the Sorbonne began the lengthy labors that would eventually lead to La signification. She supported herself by working for the Musee de l'Homme (Museum of Mankind) in Paris and by serving as a member of the archaeological teams sent by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique to digs in France, England, and Switzerland. At one of those digs she met a young ethnographer and anthropologist named Jose Emperaire, whom she married in 1953, their relationship having begun several years before.
Jose had recently returned to France after spending twenty-two months among the Alakaluf, a tribe that still lived according to its traditional ways on remote Wellington Island in the Straits of Magellan. He was planning a long archaeological expedition to Patagonian Chile as well as writing a book about his time with the Alakaluf. He left for South America in August 1951. Annette left to join him a few months later. This would have been only a short time after she received the typescript of “Iconography of Quaternary Art” from Max Raphael. Jose and Annette did not return to Paris until October 1953. From then on Annette spent about half of each year in South America, sometimes in Patagonia but often in Brazil, and the rest of the year teaching in Paris at what is now the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) during this exceptionally fertile period in French anthropology and archaeology. Her daughter Laure Emperaire, being a botanist, works at a different institution, but she has inherited Annette's pattern of life and splits her time between Paris and Brazil.
In June 1957 Laming-Emperaire successfully defended her thesis at the Sorbonne and began preparing it for publication as La signification. But tragedy intruded. In December 1958 Annette and Jose Emperaire were in Patagonia preparing to mount a major dig when Jose was killed. He suffocated when an excavation trench where he was working collapsed and buried him beneath rocks and dirt.
Annette had just turned forty-one, and after her husband's death she threw herself ever more passionately into her work. She never remarried. Most of her later work took place in Brazil as she tried to discover and understand the series of migrations from the north that peopled South America. Her interest in Paleolithic art seems to have waned by comparison. In later life she published only a few minor papers and short book reviews in this area. Perhaps the work in South America consumed her because it let her, in a sense, still share a life with her husband. But the work she had done on the caves in the 1950s, culminating with the publication of La signification de Vart rupestre paleolithique in 1962, made her the great central figure in the history of the study of cave art. Everything that came before leads directly to her; everything that came afterward proceeds directly from her. Sadly, in 1977 she, too, died in an accident. Gas from a leak filled her room while she slept in the house of friends in Brazil.
Although during her life her brilliance was always apparent, her great originality seems to have burst into being like a fire. La signification turned out to be that most rare beast, a graduate thesis that changed an entire discipline, which was exactly what she meant for it to do. In the first sixty pages she gives the history of the discovery of Paleolithic art and the methods for dating it. The next ninety pages are a history of the theories about the meaning of the art. In successive chapters she demolishes the long-honored explanations of hunting magic, fertility magic, and totemism. Then she gives a detailed and critical description of Henri Breuil's work. All of this, the whole body of work dedicated to explaining cave art, sixty years of consistent effort by many brilliant minds, she sweeps aside.
For Laming-Emperaire, all the research that had come before her—all of it—was fatally flawed because it depended on ethnography. Max Raphael thought that using ethnography to explain the cave paintings was wrong because the Paleolithic societies were undergoing a “continuous process of transformation” while the contemporary Stone Age societies were “stagnant.” Laming-Emperaire ‘s reasoning is less romantic, but more convincing. She even admits that there are two circumstances when ethnographic comparisons are legitimate. The first is at the beginning of research in order to orient ideas or create hypotheses. The second is when a characteristic is universal, found among all the known “primitive” societies. Then “everyone acknowledges that it is legitimate to attribute it equally to prehistoric times.” But there are only a few universal characteristics. Practicing sympathetic magic is one. So is the belief in man-beasts or fantastic animals. An elaborate mythology is another. It's therefore safe to assume all of these were present during the Paleolithic as well. There are other universally shared characteristics, but the list dwindles quickly.
She thought that, except in these restricted instances, using comparisons with present-day “Stone Age” people is dangerously misleading. Laming-Emperaire said researchers “indiscriminately invoke facts from some societies that, by their social, religious, or economic structure, can be very different from prehistoric societies—about which we know practically nothing in any case— and that are often very different among themselves.” One of the biggest offenders was Breuil: “In order to explain the presence of masked individuals in Paleolithic art, the abbe Breuil invokes each in turn, the Paleo-Siberians, the Eskimos, the Indians of North and South America, the bushmen of South Africa, and the Australian tribes.” But the masked figures that exist in these societies do not all represent the same thing. The masks are for hunting among the bushmen; they were used in sacred dances among American Indians, and as representations of gods and mythic ancestors among the Australian tribes. The Paleolithic people might have used masks for any of these reasons or for different reasons entirely. The comparison proves nothing at all.
And these comparisons tend to be completely arbitrary. A researcher finds an artifact, a sign, or a symbol exposed during a dig. He forms a hypothesis to explain it and then he leafs through monographs of ethnology. “And,” Laming-Emperaire writes, “such is the richness of human invention that one can generally find some way to support his thinking.” Or sometimes the process works in reverse. The researcher finds a hypothesis in ethnography and then returns to the digs looking f
or evidence to support it. Either way, a prehistoric symbol or figure can mean anything one wants it to mean.
Despite the iron certainty of her logic, Laming-Emperaire must have arrived at that conclusion with some reluctance. She knew that without comparisons drawn from ethnology, the state of research in prehistory would begin to look bleak. She saw it dividing into two schools. One consisted in gathering artifacts and then dividing and subdividing them in a rigorously exact and objective enumeration of places, dates, sizes, and shapes. This work would establish a template where future artifacts could be arranged in order. “For some,” she said, “in practice if not in theory, the field of prehistory stops there.”
Researchers who use the second method begin with this chronological and geographical order but try to wring a vivid, living past from it. They want to create a “complex image of prehistoric man including his physical appearance, the world in which he lived, his habitat, his skills, and his beliefs.” This method, pushed to its extreme, leaves science behind and creates fiction set in prehistory instead.
Laming-Emperaire saw prehistoric research oscillating between these two poles: “sclerotic rigor on one side, a lively but unreliable creation on the other.” Her purpose in the remainder of La signification was to show a way forward that avoided both extremes.
She believed that from the very beginning students of the paintings had always been far too eager to look for explanations outside of archaeology—that is, in ethnography—before they had exhausted all the possibilities that archaeology offered. The archaeological study of an object such as a blade made of flint focuses on three characteristics: the way it was made, the signs of use it exhibits, and the location in which it was found. Why, she wonders, shouldn't the paintings and engravings be studied the same way? After all, they are archaeological artifacts themselves.
The Cave Painters Page 13