larger painting approximately 60 feet long). Sanz de Sautuola was
certain the bison painted on the ceiling of the cave on his estate
dated back to prehistoric times. Professional archaeologists, how-
ever, doubted the authenticity of these works, and at the Lisbon
Congress on Prehistoric Archaeology in 1880, they officially dis-
missed the paintings as forgeries. But by the close of the century,
other caves had been discovered with painted walls partially covered
by mineral deposits that would have taken thousands of years to ac-
cumulate. This finally persuaded skeptics that the first paintings
were of an age far more remote than they had ever dreamed.
The bison at Altamira are 13,000 to 14,000 years old, but the
painters of Paleolithic Spain approached the problem of represent-
ing an animal in essentially the same way as the painter of the
Namibian stone plaque (FIG. 1-3), who worked in Africa more than
10,000 years earlier. Every one of the Altamira bison is in profile,
whether alive and standing or curled up on the ground (probably
dead, although this is disputed; one suggestion is that these bison are
giving birth). To maintain the profile in the latter case, the painter
had to adopt a viewpoint above the animal, looking down, rather
than the view a person standing on the ground would have.
Modern critics often refer to the Altamira animals as a “group”
of bison, but that is very likely a misnomer. In FIG. 1-9,the several
20 Chapter 1 ART BEFORE HISTORYT
he caves of Altamira (FIG. 1-9), Pech-Merle (FIG. 1-10), Lascaux
(FIGS. 1-11and 1-13), and other sites in prehistoric Europe are
a few hundred to several thousand feet long. They are often choked,
sometimes almost impassably, by deposits, such as stalactites and
stalagmites. Far inside these caverns, well removed from the cave
mouths early humans often chose for habitation, painters sometimes
made pictures on the walls. Examples of Paleolithic painting now
have been found at more than 200 sites, but prehistorians still regard
painted caves as rare occurrences, because the images in them, even if
they number in the hundreds, were created over a period of some
10,000 to 20,000 years.
To illuminate the surfaces while working, the Paleo-
lithic painters used stone lamps filled with marrow or
fat, with a wick, perhaps, of moss. For drawing, they
used chunks of red and yellow ocher. For painting, they
ground these same ochers into powders they mixed
with water before applying. Recent analyses of the pig-
ments used show that Paleolithic painters employed
many different minerals, attesting to a technical sophis-
tication surprising at so early a date.
Large flat stones served as palettes.The painters
made brushes from reeds, bristles, or twigs, and mayhave used a blowpipe of reeds or hollow bones to spray pigments on
out-of-reach surfaces. Some caves have natural ledges on the rock
walls upon which the painters could have stood in order to reach
the upper surfaces of the naturally formed chambers and corridors.
One Lascaux gallery has holes in one of the walls that once probably
anchored a scaffold made of saplings lashed together. Despite the
difficulty of making the tools and pigments, modern attempts at
replicating the techniques of Paleolithic painting have demonstrated
that skilled workers could cover large surfaces with images in less
than a day.Paleolithic Cave Painting
MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES1-10Spotted horses and negative hand imprints, wall
painting in the cave at Pech-Merle, France, ca. 22,000 BCE.
11 2 long.
The purpose and meaning of Paleolithic art are unknown.
Some researchers think the painted hands near the Pech-
Merle horses are “signatures” of community members or
of individual painters.
1 ft.bison do not stand on a common ground line (a painted or carved
baseline on which figures appear to stand in paintings and reliefs),
nor do they share a common orientation. They seem almost to float
above viewers’ heads, like clouds in the sky. And the dead(?) bison
are seen in an “aerial view,” while the others are seen from a position
on the ground. The painting has no setting, no background, no indi-
cation of place. The Paleolithic painter was not at all concerned with
where the animals were or with how they related to one another, if at
all. Instead, several separate images of a bison adorn the ceiling, per-
haps painted at different times, and each is as complete and infor-
mative as possible—even if their meaning remains a mystery (see
“Art in the Old Stone Age,” page 21).PECH-MERLEThat the paintings did have meaning to the Paleo-
lithic peoples who made and observed them cannot, however, be
doubted. In fact, signs consisting of checks, dots, squares, or other
arrangements of lines often accompany the pictures of animals. Rep-
resentations of human hands also are common. At Pech-Merle in
France, painted hands accompany representations of spotted horses
(FIG. 1-10). These and the majority of painted hands at other sites
are “negative;” that is, the painter placed one hand against the wall
and then brushed or blew or spat pigment around it. Occasionally,