110- Identity: the
building blocks of
2. Literature
and philosophy
3. Art and
architecture
4. Performing
arts
5. Cinema
and fashion
6. Media and
communications
7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the details of
On the rocks: prehistoric art in Spain
Do the cave paintings of Altamira deserve a place in the
gallery of Spanish art? Why not.The drawings of bison,
deer and horses may well have been sketched out 15,000
years ago as an early, picture-heavy Idiot’s Guide to
Hunting, but you can’t deny their accomplished aesthetic
impact. Rock contours are used to give the images depth,
while abstract stencilled hand shapes contribute to
strangely modern forms.The images may have had some
magical significance, used by Ice Age hunters like wall-
mounted voodoo dolls. Despite the ‘primitive art’ tag,
the relative sophistication of the paintings saw various
pre-eminent archaeologists reject the images as forgeries
when their discovery was announced in 1879.
Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, the archaeologist whose
eight-year-old daughter first looked up at the cave ceiling,
was only vindicated in his assertion that the paintings
were Palaeolithic 20 years later, by which time he was
dead.The paintings have become a part of Spanish
iconography: Cantabria has used the bison image in some
of its tourist literature, while the cigarette brand Bisonte
carries a version of the cave painting on its packs.Classical art in Spain
The Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans all left
remnants of creativity on the peninsula, but the Iberians
themselves deposited Spain’s loveliest classical artwork,
La Dama de Elche. Found by a Valencian farmhand in 1897,
the bust has bejewelled hair, coiled Princess Leia-style on
either side of a demure face that may or may not belong
to an Iberian priestess. Alas, the once bright colours with
which it was painted have long since rubbed off. It must
be said that while the sculpture is probably native toAltamira colour schemes
The Palaeolithic painters
of northern Spain used
charcoal and natural
pigments like ochre and
rust-coloured zinc oxides
mixed with animal fat to
shade their work. Only
three colours - red, ochre
and black - were used.
“AFTER ALTAMIRA,
ALL IS DECADENCE.”
Pablo Picasso ponders the
famous cave paintings.
3.1.2 Going up the walls: Spanish art
from cavemen to cathedrals