from the daylight. The largest painted area at Lascaux is the so-called
Hall of the Bulls (FIG. 1-11), although not all of the animals de-
picted are bulls. Many are represented using colored silhouettes, as at
Altamira (FIG. 1-9) and on the Apollo 11 plaque (FIG. 1-3). Others—
such as the great bull at the right in FIG. 1-11—were created by out-
line alone, as were the Pech-Merle horses (FIG. 1-10). On the walls of
the Lascaux cave one sees, side by side, the two basic approaches to
drawing and painting found repeatedly in the history of art. These
differences in style and technique alone suggest that the animals in
the Hall of the Bulls were painted at different times, and the modern
impression of a rapidly moving herd of beasts was probably not the
original intent. In any case, the “herd” consists of several different
kinds of animals of various sizes moving in different directions.
Another feature of the Lascaux paintings deserves attention. The
bulls there show a convention of representing horns that has been
called twisted perspectiveor a composite view,because viewers see the
heads in profile but the horns from the front. Thus, the painter’s ap-
proach is not strictly or consistently optical (seen from a fixed view-
point). Rather, the approach is descriptive of the fact that cattle have
two horns. Two horns are part of the concept “bull.” In strict optical-
perspective profile, only one horn would be visible, but to paint the an-
imal in that way would amount to an incomplete definition of it. This
kind of twisted perspective was the norm in prehistoric painting, but it
was not universal. In fact, the recent discovery at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc in
France of Paleolithic paintings (FIG. 1-12) in the Chauvet Cave, where
the painters represented horns in a more natural way, has caused art
historians to rethink many of the assumptions they had made about
Paleolithic art (see “The World’s Oldest Paintings?” page 22).
Perhaps the most perplexing painting (FIG. 1-13) in the Paleo-
lithic caves of Europe is deep in a well shaft at Lascaux, where man (as
opposed to woman) makes one of his earliest appearances in prehis-
toric art. At the left, and moving to the left, is a rhinoceros, rendered
with all the skilled attention to animal detail customarily seen in cave
art. Beneath its tail are two rows of three dots of uncertain significance.
At the right is a bison, also facing left but more schematically painted,
probably by someone else. The second painter nonetheless successfully
suggested the bristling rage of the animal, whose bowels are hanging
from it in a heavy coil. Between the two beasts is a bird-faced (masked?)
man (compare the feline-headed human,FIG. 1-4, from Hohlenstein-
Stadel) with outstretched arms and hands with only four fingers. The
man is depicted with far less care and detail than either animal, but
the painter made the hunter’s gender explicit by the prominent penis.
The position of the man is ambiguous. Is he wounded or dead or
merely tilted back and unharmed? Do the staff(?) with the bird on top
and the spear belong to him? Is it he or the rhinoceros who has gravely
wounded the bison—or neither? Which animal, if either, has knocked
the man down, if indeed he is on the ground? Are these three images
related at all? Researchers can be sure of nothing, but if the painter
placed the figures beside each other to tell a story, then this is evidence
for the creation of complex narrative compositions involving humans
and animals at a much earlier date than anyone had imagined only a
few generations ago. Yet it is important to remember that even if the
artist intended to tell a story, very few people would have been able to
“read” it. The painting, in a deep shaft, is very difficult to reach and
could have been viewed only in flickering lamplight. Like all Paleolithic
art, the scene in the Lascaux well shaft remains enigmatic.1-13Rhinoceros, wounded man, and disemboweled bison, painting in the well of the cave at Lascaux, France,
ca. 15,000–13,000 BCE. Bison 3 8 long.
If these paintings of two animals and a bird-faced (masked?) man deep in a Lascaux well shaft depict a hunting scene,
they constitute the earliest example of narrative art ever discovered.1 ft.Paleolithic Art 23