CHAPTER 10
Strange, Stylized Women;
The World Below the World
F rom the first work by the abbe Breuil to Jean Clottes's response to critics of The Shamans of Prehistory is almost exactly a hundred years. Except for shamanism, which is not widely accepted, there is still no grand theory of what the cave paintings mean. That is frustrating for scientists and amateurs alike, since as works of art the paintings communicate directly and supremely well. Whatever cultural reasons prompted the ancient hunters to paint in caves, the great artists among them—and there were many—took the trouble to create paintings that had graceful lines, subtle color, precise perspective, and a physical sense of volume. The cave painters may or may not have had the idea of art as we understand it, but when they chose to draw an appealing line instead of an awkward one, they were thinking and acting like artists trying to create art in our sense of the word. That's why it's valid for us to respond to the cave paintings as art and not merely as archaeological evidence, although they are certainly that as well. The multicolored and stylized Chinese Horses in Lascaux, the pride of hunting lions with their eyes ablaze in Chauvet, and the weighty, yet delicately curving bison in Altamira and Font-de-Gaume all prove that beauty truly is eternal.
And that beauty is amplified because, against all logic, the paintings seem familiar as well, close to us in time despite being as far from us in time as any art could possibly be. How is it that they could be locked away in caves, unknown or misunderstood, for eons and yet, once discovered, fit naturally in the Western cultural tradition? The art historian Max Raphael is the only major thinker about the caves who seems much concerned with this question, even though the immediacy of the paintings despite their great antiquity and mysteriousness powerfully affects everyone who sees them. Raphael offered his own Marxist answer to this conundrum, as we've seen. But there is another answer, one that better illuminates the paintings both as art and as archaeology. The paintings speak to us so directly across the millennia because they are the conservative art of a stable society, because they have a comic rather than a tragic view of life, and because they are part of a classical tradition. In fact, they are the triumph of the first classical civilization in the world.
After their beauty, the first thing everyone notices about the cave paintings is that they are repetitive. The same animals in the same or similar poses appear again and again in cave after cave regardless of the date of the paintings. Each species is painted according to convention. The conventions change somewhat over time, but still they are there.
This consistency means that the art in the caves is fundamentally conservative. In modern times we almost demand that art attack the social order or mock it or undermine it in some way, and our art changes as the times change. Cave art, which is unvarying, could not have done that. It must have been a stalwart support of the social order. It sustained the society's beliefs by painting them as unfailing, constant, ever and always the same. And in its role as protector of society and its institutions, the art was spectacularly successful.
The culture that produced the painted caves, despite subtle differences belonging to specific times or places, lasted almost unchanged for more than 20,000 years, far longer than any since. Western culture, assuming that it began in the eastern Mediterranean around 2000 BC, is barely 4,000 years old. Because the Paleolithic culture survived so long, it means that the people who created Chauvet 32,000 years ago are almost as far from the people who created Lascaux 18,000 years ago as the people who created Lascaux are from us. A person from the time of Lascaux would be bewildered by our world, but that same person apparently would have been able to drop into the world of Chauvet, understand it immediately, and join in. He may have had to learn to make flint tools with a slightly different shape, but the rhythms of daily life were practically identical.
To last so long that culture must have been deeply satisfying— emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and practically. It must have engendered and supported a social system that reliably produced and distributed material needs like food, clothing, and shelter. It must have fostered and protected the basic human relations— friend to friend, man to woman, parent to child—or the society would not have been cohesive enough to survive. It must have given convincing answers to questions about the world like Why is the weather colder, then warmer, then colder again? or Why does the sun rise and set? It must have answered in a satisfying way the deep internal questions of each individual—Who am I? What is my purpose? It must have provided believable and profound answers to the great, eternal questions, such as Who created the world and why? And, perhaps most important of all, it must have allowed for an orderly daily existence where people treated one another in accepted, time-honored ways and where there were gatherings, celebrations, solemn ceremonies, and spontaneous bits of fun that soothed the pain and difficulties of their lives.
The caves are so beautiful that it's easy to forget that the rest of that complex and deeply satisfying culture has almost entirely disappeared. All that the Paleolithic people preserved by word of mouth—all the poems, songs, languages, customs, and social order—is lost and cannot be recovered. It is possible that fragments remain in our own ancient myths, but we can never know for sure. As for the visual record, the caves represent only part of all that once was there. The cliffs along the river valleys in France and Spain may once have had immense and magnificent paintings that were as important to the culture as the paintings in the caves. And the ancient hunters may have used other materials to create art that was even more important to them than the paintings in the caves or in the open air. They may have made elaborate creations from feathers or carved intricate wooden totem poles that were the center of the whole community and would cause us to marvel. They may have painted or tattooed their skin in designs we could never imagine. Perhaps, like the native tribes on the American Great Plains, they recorded their history and genealogies on hides that were the society's most precious possession. But the paintings in the open air and anything they made with organic materials such as wood or hides would have disintegrated in a relatively short time.
I don't mean to be blind to the difficulties of life in the Ice Age or to idealize that life, but many of the difficulties seem so only by comparison to our lives today. The skeletons that survive from those days show people who were generally quite healthy, who were as tall and robust as we are, and who often lived for fifty or sixty years. The climate was no colder than southern Sweden is today and food was plentiful most of the time. There was so much game and so much territory compared to so few people that we have no direct evidence of warfare or intentional violence. Even the Neanderthals might have withered away on their own. With food and shelter there for the taking and with a society that, as the caves prove, had a rich imaginative life and was capable of regularly producing artistic geniuses—with all that, life must have seemed good. Where was any reason to want the world to change?
The art and the beliefs continued for something like a thousand generations because, during all that time, people could see with their own eyes that the world remained ever the same. When the world did change, when the herds of reindeer diminished even as the number of people increased and the weather warmed and the glaciers retreated, then painting in caves ended as well.
The second fundamental quality of the art in the caves is less immediately striking, but it fits very well with a conservative art that supports the accepted social order. The cave paintings are scenes of comedy, not tragedy.
One frustration in studying the art in the caves is that any discussion of its meaning inevitably turns toward the serious. That's because few would doubt that, in the end, the art is serious in the way that all great art is serious. But it's misleading—in fact, it's blinding—to think that it is only serious and that the ceremonies that may have gone along with it, whether they were religious or not, were necessarily solemn affairs.
The mysterious Unicorn in Lascaux that looks l
ike a man in an animal suit has inspired many bewildering interpretations, but it is far less bewildering to think of it as comic, as some concoction that made Stone Age people smile. The lion in Les Trois-Freres with a tail in the shape of an arm and hand—well, it's funny when you think about it. And there are many more examples of what looks like playfulness in cave art, including visual puns, comic monsters, and different animals sharing the same body or, in one case, just the same nose.
The engravings of people seem particularly playful. There are all those strange, stylized, headless women with huge haunches that taper off into skinny legs without any feet. Often they are drawn pressed together with the breast of one becoming the hip of her neighbor. They're not funny exactly—at least not to us— but they're not somber either. Leroi-Gourhan and others have assumed that they represent the female principle, but it's difficult to see them that way. The pictures of men don't seem to symbolize any grand principle either. Although the phallus of the Sorcerer of Les Trois-Freres is truly impressive, generally men are represented by cute, grinning faces. They don't give the impression of potent maleness. Their skin is often sagging with age or otherwise deformed. Though they are male, sex doesn't seem to be much of a concern for them. It may not even be within their ability. Yes, there is the lecherous man-bison next to the woman on the hanging rock in Chauvet, but on the whole, contrary to Leroi-Gourhan, the great universal, sexual drama of male and female principles apparently wasn't very much on the minds of the cave painters—at least not while they were painting. Instead they painted a benign world.
I'm not forgetting the four images of killed men, two at Cougnac and one each at Pech-Merle and Cosquer. They apparently show men killed by other people. Perhaps they even show murder or torture. Although we have no other evidence for passionate crimes like murder or for cruelty like torture, it would not be a surprise to learn one day that they existed and that Ice Age art included those themes. But it is surprising that it depicts them so rarely. The killed men are just four images out of thousands.
The cave painters did not make perfectly naturalistic images of men, women, vulvas, or penises, but paintings of hands are nearly always realistic. Their frequency and realism are an argument in favor of Max Raphael's theory of the primacy of the hand in Paleolithic thinking and of its role in leading the cave painters to base their work on the golden section. O f course, hands weren't painted as the animals were, but, as we ‘ve seen, were made by placing the hand on the wall and blowing red or black paint around it, thus leaving a negative image. Hands don't appear in every cave, but they are prominently displayed in the many caves where they do appear. Whether or not the purpose was to cause the hand to appear to melt into the wall, as Jean Clottes declared in his book on shamanism, it is still obvious that touching the wall and leaving a record of the touch was immensely important. Maybe by touching the wall the person received some power from the animals pictured or from the wall itself. Or perhaps it was the other way around— the person transmitted power to the animals or the rock. Then again, perhaps the hands were evidence of a baptism or a genealogical record where the bent fingers, instead of being a code in the usual sense, show family or clan affiliation. That would explain why some caves contain hands from women, men, and children. One hand from a small child is high enough on the wall that someone older must have lifted the child and held it while someone blew enough paint around the tiny hand to leave its image on the wall. Whatever power the cave wall gave to people who pressed their hands to it, or whatever power the wall took from them, everyone in the community could share in the process.
The caves must not have been considered so very dangerous and forbidding if everyone in the community, including the smallest children, was welcome to come in and leave a mark. Often, although not often enough for archaeologists, there are ancient footprints in the caves. The footprints always include some left by children. In most cases their different sizes indicate that the children were of various ages. Sometimes adults were present, sometimes not. Certain scholars have theorized that the caves were places for initiation ceremonies. The footprints contradict that theory, since some of the children were clearly far too young to be initiates. Also, initiates would all be about the same age, not a variety of ages.
In their art the cave painters revered animals. Only animals were grand and important enough to be worth the trouble of painting them across the walls of a cave. They, not men and women, had all the leading parts in the great drama of the universe. Here again, however, that drama doesn't seem to be either sexual or tragic. Of course, it's easy to tell bulls from cows and stags from does in the paintings, but in species like horses where sexual differences are less obvious it's often hard to tell whether a painting shows a male or a female. In any case, except for rare scenes like the male reindeer in Font-de-Gaume licking a female, the animals appear indifferent to one another. They don't seem to have sex or to be born or to grow old or to die. In fact, the animals don't even seem to be hunted very often, as the lack of evidence for Breuil's hunting magic theory proves. Their unchanging existence and their muted emotions give the animals in the paintings calm, uneventful lives rather than tragic ones.
The greatest painters must have surveyed their caves in meticulous detail. They needed to find suitable walls, but more than that, they were looking for places in the cave where the walls suggested what should be painted there. Often, after I had spent several hours in a cave, or when I had visited several caves in succession in a single day, I would sometimes think I saw an animal painted or engraved on a wall; when I looked more closely, nothing was there. The contours of the wall had suggested a head or chest or horns and the play of shadows along with some colored stains from minerals had made me think I was seeing a horse or a bison.
This confusion annoyed me at first. But eventually I realized that it was inevitable in a cave because the expectation of discovering new paintings or engravings, even on cave walls that had been studied thoroughly, was perfectly sensible. At Les Combarelles a guide who had shown a particular wall to tourists hundreds of times noticed a bear's head about a foot across that no one had seen before. Jean Clottes had been in Niaux countless times and even written a book about the cave. But on a recent visit, as he regarded a wall he thought he had studied thoroughly, he looked again at two black converging lines and realized they were the horns of an ibex. Shapes in the rock formed the body of the animal. So at last it occurred to me that seeing animals in the rock must have been desirable, perhaps even the primary purpose of the art. The paintings and engravings—maybe not all of them, but many—weren't adding animals on top of the rock but were a means of pulling out of the stone the animals that were already there. With the rock's shape as a start, the artists could begin to lay out the plan for their work.
Some caves have mostly paintings and others have mostly engravings. Some large ones like Lascaux have both, although the paintings and the engravings each seem to be relegated to their own chambers. Paintings tend to be near the front of the cave while the engravings are often far from the entrance in difficult passageways where only one or two people could fit. The painted chambers are planned. The paintings do overlap on occasion but by and large these paintings are left whole and respected. These chambers, like the Hall of Bulls and the Axial Gallery in Lascaux, must have contained the knowledge and wisdom of the culture— the stories, certainly, but also perhaps history, mythology, cosmology, and maybe genealogy. These are works of general meaning and prominent as they are it would have been expected that everyone who entered the cave saw them.
The engraved chambers are quite different. They don't seem to be planned because the engravings are made over one another in wild profusion. Here the preceding work is not purposely destroyed or defaced. It's just ignored as the next artist worked. This work is more personal and could not have been intended for everyone to see.
These two parts are somehow united. Jean Clottes and Lewis-Williams thought that the painted portions were used to prep
are individuals for the visions they would have in the private portions. That makes sense even if the shamanism is dropped out. Somehow the big rooms are the universal; they are located first in the cave. Then farther in are the private locations, where individuals engraved on the wall their own personal ideas, thoughts, visions. This art is less predictable than the paintings in the large rooms. The engravings are each the ideas of a single person, although of course they are informed by the society's shared beliefs. The paintings were the considered art of the whole society.
That means that it is possible to think of the paintings, particularly such grand an intricate compositions as the Hall of Bulls in Lascaux, as similar to other public art that expresses the unified beliefs of a whole society. In that way the cave paintings are like the bas-relief sculptures on the pediments of the Parthenon, which portray a rich unifying mythology and were executed, like the cave paintings, by the hands of anonymous artists. In fact the comparison with the Parthenon is precise since the cave painters were working in their own classical tradition, just as the Greek artists were. The qualities that define classicism—dignity, strength, grace, ease, confidence, and clarity—are also the principal qualities of the cave paintings. Above all, the essence of classical art is that it aspires to imitate nature by creating images of nature ‘s ideal forms. In the Paleolithic era the ideal forms were not the Discus Thrower or the David. They were horses, bison, mammoths, and the other species that obsessed the early artists, all created as ideals. The horses and bison are perfect horses and bison, never old or sick or dying, and the detailed knowledge of the anatomy of the animals is repeated in the Greeks’ understanding of human anatomy. Even, or perhaps especially, the unvarying conventions in the painting of these ideal animals—the poses in profile, the curving horns in twisted perspective—are themselves as much a sign of the classical sensibility as is the standing figure with one bent leg in Greek sculpture. The cave paintings possess classical ideas, classical grace, classical confidence, and classical dignity, and that is why they feel familiar and appear to be a direct part of our heritage. We connect so closely with the cave art because the Greek and Renaissance masters have unwittingly taught us to appreciate it.
The Cave Painters Page 22