As Europe begins opening as much as vacationers once more, it’s extra thrilling than ever to consider the cultural treasures that await. For me, one of many nice joys of journey is having in-person encounters with nice artwork and structure — which I’ve collected in a e book referred to as Europe’s High 100 Masterpieces. Right here’s an historic favourite:
The caveman man cave at Lascaux is startling for a way fashionably it’s embellished. The partitions are painted with animals — bears, wolves, bulls, horses, deer, and cats — and even a couple of animals that at the moment are extinct, like woolly mammoths. There’s scarcely a Homo sapiens in sight, however there are human handprints.
All this was completed in the course of the Stone Age practically 20,000 years in the past, in what’s now southwest France. That’s about 4 occasions as previous as Stonehenge and Egypt’s pyramids, earlier than the arrival of writing, metalworking, and farming. The caves had been painted not by hulking, bushy-browed Neanderthals however by fully-formed Homo sapiens generally known as Cro-Magnons.
These should not crude doodles with a charcoal-tipped stick. The cave work had been subtle, expensive, and time-consuming engineering tasks deliberate and executed in about 18,000 BC by devoted artists supported by a unified and steady tradition. First, they needed to haul all their supplies into a chilly, pitch-black, hard-to-access place. (They didn’t dwell in these deep limestone caverns.) The “canvas” was enormous—Lascaux’s principal caverns are greater than a soccer area lengthy, and a few animals are depicted 16 ft tall. They erected scaffolding to achieve ceilings and excessive partitions. They floor up minerals with a mortar and pestle to combine the paints. They labored by the sunshine of torches and oil lamps. They ready the scene by laying out the determine’s main outlines with a connect-the-dots collection of factors. Then these Cro-Magnon Michelangelos, balancing on scaffolding, created their Stone Age Sistine Chapels.
The work are impressively practical. The artists used wavy black outlines to recommend an animal in movement. They used scores of various pigments to get a variety of colours. For his or her paint “brush,” they employed a type of sponge made out of animal pores and skin. In one other method, they’d draw the outlines, then fill it in with spray paint — blown by means of tubes fabricated from hole bone.
Think about the debut. Viewers could be led deep into the cavern, guided by torchlight, into a chilly, echoing, and otherworldly chamber. Within the darkness, somebody would mild torches and lamps, and out of the blue — whoosh! — the animals would flicker to life, showing to run across the cave, like a prehistoric film.
Why did these Stone Age individuals — whose lives had been in all probability harsh and precarious — hassle to create such an obvious luxurious as artwork? Nobody is aware of. Perhaps as a result of, as hunters, they had been portray animals to magically improve the provision of recreation. Or maybe they thought if they might “grasp” the animal by portray it, they might later grasp it in battle. Did they worship the animals?
Or possibly the work are merely the results of the common human drive to create, and these caverns had been Europe’s first artwork galleries, bringing the primary vacationers. Whereas the caves are closed to as we speak’s vacationers, rigorously produced reproduction caves adjoining give guests a vivid Stone Age expertise.
As we speak, visiting Lascaux II and IV, as these reproduction caves are referred to as, permits you to share a typical expertise with a caveman. It’s possible you’ll really feel a bond with these long-gone individuals…or stand in awe at how completely different they had been from us. In the end, this artwork stays very like the human species itself — a thriller. And a marvel.
