The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (28 page)

On de Sautuola’s side was the fact that some of the paintings were covered with a stalagmitic layer, and that the existence of the cave had been unknown to the neighborhood until 1868. But the experts, led by Émile Cartailhac, professor of prehistory at Toulouse and the dean of French archaeology, declared the paintings to be fakes. The Altamira caves showed no paintings of reindeers, which was surprising if these were really made in the so-called Reindeer Age, the last phase of the Old Stone Age. They saw none of the calcite which would have been deposited over the thousands of years, and paint in the cracks of the walls suggested the use of a brush—another anachronism. And where was the smoke from the torches of prehistoric times? They firmly concluded that the paintings had been made after de Sautuola’s first discovery of the cave in 1875. Skeptics even accused him of hiring a French artist friend to paint the Altamira ceiling. By the time of his death in 1888 de Sautuola was still not vindicated. The Altamira paintings remained in disrepute.

Then, providentially, a series of spectacular discoveries across western and southwestern Europe brought fame to Altamira and credibility to Palaeolithic artists. In 1872 a French cave explorer, Émile Rivière (1835–1922), in Menton on the French Riviera had made the sensational find of a Palaeolithic human skeleton with ornamented headdress, thus providing evidence of burial rites much earlier than ever before imagined. He was summoned in 1895 to view a newly discovered cave, the Grotte de la Mouthe in the Dordogne. This cave, like that at Altamira, was found by accident, when a local farmer clearing a rock shelter for a toolshed broke through its wall. Boys of the neighborhood crawled a hundred yards into the cave, where they reported pictures of animals engraved on the walls and ceiling. On his arrival Rivière confirmed these pictures to be the work of prehistoric artists and found a decorated stone lamp that those artists could have used.

In 1901, more caves were discovered in the Dordogne, at Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume, revealing a fantastic array of drawings, paintings, and engravings which also now began to be credited to Palaeolithic man. In 1902 the Association Française pour l’Avancement des Sciences convened a meeting in the Dordogne to view the paintings. With academic solemnity they decreed these to be Palaeolithic.

The eminent Professor Cartailhac now took the young abbé Henri Breuil with him for another look at Altamira. In their enthusiasm they stayed
there a month while Breuil laboriously copied the paintings. As rain fell in torrents outside, Breuil in the shallow caves lay on his back on straw-filled sacks with only candles for light. Though as a child he had enjoyed drawing butterflies, Breuil had no training as an artist. It is lucky for us that he was so talented and that he dared make his scrupulous drawings while the discovery was fresh. Breuil’s drawings are in many respects more accurate and more vivid than later color photographs. The irregular rock surface can distort the photographed image and makes engravings hard to decipher. Breuil’s admirable copies in color vividly shaped our visions of Palaeolithic art.

Now Professor Cartailhac made his apologies not only to Palaeolithic man but to the maligned Marquis de Sautuola, long dead. “Mea Culpa d’un Sceptique” was the title of his article on Altamira (1902). He confessed himself “party to a mistake of twenty years’ standing, to an injustice which must be frankly admitted and put right.” Within these twenty years the learned world had completely revised its view of prehistoric man’s creative powers. Once Altamira was confirmed, the additional evidence of those powers appeared overwhelming. In 1912, fantastic sculptures of bison were found by three boys exploring the Volp River where it went underground between Enterre and le Tuc d’Audoubert in the Pyrenean foothills. There the spectacular drawings of Les Trois Frères caves in 1916 included the famous “sorcerer,” a man mysteriously cloaked in reindeer skin and wearing antlers.

In 1940 at Lascaux in the Dordogne during the grim days of the Nazi occupation there was an uncanny reenactment of Altamira. Boys in the neighborhood had been alerted to possible cave discoveries in the limestone hills. Their former schoolmaster, who had become an archaeologist, had seen that they were equipped with flashlights. When the lead boy’s dog disappeared, the boy followed down a narrow descent into the circuitous passages of a long cave. There the boy’s flashlight revealed a spectacular procession of painted animals on the white limestone walls. An endless parade of horses, stags, bisons, and wild cattle. Four colossal bulls triple life-size collided on the dome of the ceiling. On one side stags appeared to be swimming across a lake; on the other side was a line of shaggy ponies. And then, too, wild goats, enormous humpbacked cattle, and a two-horned rhinoceros. Among them was the first Palaeolithic action picture, a man falling before the charge of a wounded bison. The boys had happened on a climactic exhibit of Palaeolithic art excelling anything found before. The boys swore one another to secrecy and placed a twenty-four-hour guard at the entrance to keep their find safe from souvenir hunters.

They reported to their schoolmaster, who came quickly and risked a squeeze down the stalactite-encrusted entrance into the lengthy corridors.
Convinced that these Lascaux caves were no figment of adolescent imagination, he telegraphed Breuil, who arrived in haste. After study, Breuil certified Lascaux as one of the Six Giants of Palaeolithic cave art and spent two months recording the finds. Who can say how many more Altamiras and Lascaux still lie waiting for nosy hunting dogs, alert five-year-old girls or adventurous teenage boys?

This improbable drama of man the creator, set in the dark caverns of western Europe, is the product of some happy coincidences. Lascaux and these best works of Upper Palaeolithic art we can now date, not to the 40,000
B.C.
of Abbé Breuil but to about 15,000
B.C.
In the six decades after 1879 there was a Grand Opening of the Artworks of Palaeolithic Man that had lain unnoticed for millennia, and historians then stormed the citadel of prehistoric art speedily and serendipitously. To plumb the secrets of prehistoric cities was an arduous, incremental business of sifting sand, dusting artifacts, and collecting shards. Grand ancient structures, long since disappeared, leave only the traces of their foundations. The shape of Palaeolithic man’s dwelling-places can only be guessed. But the beauties of his pictures lie fully revealed once we have found and broken into the halls of stalagmitic caves, which seem to have been sealed for our sakes. While the beauties of Greek sculpture of their Great Age can be seen now only dimly reflected in accidental fragments or in inferior Roman copies, the paintings of Palaeolithic man fifteen millennia earlier still glowed in their aboriginal splendor for twentieth-century scholars.

Lucky for us, too, that these Palaeolithic caves were not opened much earlier or piecemeal over the centuries. The surprising revelation of what man could create even before he could write, and before he was civilized, came accidentally within a few recent decades. If these caves had been opened gradually, they might never have survived in the bulk that impresses us with Palaeolithic man the creator. The ominous experience of Lascaux showed man’s capacity to disintegrate speedily the inheritance of millennia. Opened in 1940, it was so overrun by tourists and fungus that it had to be closed to the public in 1964. The New England Puritans had explained the Indians’ presence in America as God’s way of preserving the continent uncorrupted until their purified version of Christianity could take over. By what providence were the works of prehistoric man preserved until the discovery of prehistory itself provided an era into which they could be placed?

Most remarkable was the burst of creative energy that had brought forth these paintings in the first place, a flowering of visual art among the Palaeolithic hunting peoples. Because it happened in prehistory, we are inclined to charge it to the “normal” development of cultures, and so rob it of its
mystery and surprise. We are told to see here a predictable stage of cultural anthropology. Or was it an unaccountable efflorescence of Man the Creator—none the less unaccountable because the artists remain anonymous? Discovery of Altamira was momentous for our grasp of the history of the arts, showing us that man’s creations do not necessarily improve with his tools, or with the passage of time.

Homo sapiens
may be nearly half a million years old. But not until recent geologic time, the Upper Palaeolithic epoch just before ours, did man make figures of living beings that have survived. Before then he seems to have worked at the decorative arts, shaping his tools and axes to give them a more pleasing form. But now finally in the works left to us in three great centers—the caves of the Dordogne, the central French Pyrenees, and the Cantabrian mountains of northwest Spain—man dares and succeeds in making images of the animals among whom he lives and from whom he makes his living. Why so suddenly, after so many hundreds of thousands of years, did man begin being a graphic artist? Perhaps the abundance of game in southwestern Europe in late Pleistocene times was an encouragement. Perhaps well-fed hunters now had the leisure to try their skill and imagination on the walls of their secure caves.

Palaeolithic man of course carried the model of the human body everywhere he went. Man was the only omnipresent living figure in man’s presence. And yet the Palaeolithic cave artists painted and drew animals. Almost never did they draw a man or a woman. Their art is emphatically “zoomorphic,” depicting the wild animals from which man took his meat. He must have felt a community with the animals he hunted, with whom his own life was bound. Here, in the very act of trying to “represent”—to re-present—his quarry, the fearful powers all around him, he was awakened to another power in him, his power to create. Here in the secret passages of deep limestone caves, in the womb of the earth, he felt safe while he created. Was any of man’s other discoveries more shocking or mysterious?

We can mark stages toward this momentous self-discovery. The first notable step toward man’s self-awareness may have been his formal recognition of death, as shown by his acts of careful burial. So he saw the uniqueness of each creature and he saw himself as an object. The practice of ornamenting the body, which seems so natural to us, came late. None of the numerous Neanderthal burials has provided a single bead or other bodily ornament. Not until about forty thousand years ago did man begin to decorate himself. Artificial mirrors appear only much later, but prehistoric man could have used his reflection in water as his first mirror. Whoever first ornamented himself was the first artist.

The discovery of his power to paint vivid images, attested on the walls of his Neolithic cave dwellings, was a historic leap in man’s self-awareness.
Now man could be awed not only by the moving, menacing mammoths, humpbacked bison, reindeer, and wild pig. He had the power to awe himself by his own creations and his newly discovered powers as creator. The works of the artists of Altamira remain alive though we do not know and may never know their purposes. They remind us of the iridescence of art and the transcendence of the work of art over its maker.

T
HE
ancient Egyptians found their own way to create an immortal image. For three thousand years their sculpture showed less change than modern European sculpture in a decade. And their pharaohs of the Third Dynasty (2980–2900
B.C.
) still appear to the layman’s eye virtually in the same style as their pharaohs of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (663–525
B.C.
). These monuments and statues of unexcelled elegance were not the expression of individual artists but mementos of eternal god-kings. Tomb and temple reliefs and paintings perpetuated the changeless rhythm of daily life.

Their Pharaoh was not a mere agent of the god, he was the god. Crowning a Pharaoh was not like the Roman Senate deifying a dead emperor. It was “not an apotheosis but an epiphany,” not the making of a god but the revealing of the god. The unchanging god.

And anyone could “read” a sacred statue. Tomb and temple art did for the illiterate ancient Egyptian what the carvings on Gothic cathedrals would do for the medieval Christian.
Hieroglyph
(sacred carving), the name the Greeks gave to this writing, was just right. At first their hieroglyphs were pictures carved in stone. Then all Egyptian sculpture became a kind of three-dimensional hieroglyph.

The original Egyptian “picture writing” remained a mystery long after their ancient alphabetic writings had been deciphered. Historians insisted on oversimplifying. Possibly excepting Pythagoras, few if any of the Greeks understood the nature of Egyptian hieroglyphs. The irresistible temptation was to imagine they were intended to communicate what they showed in pictures. The Greeks characteristically assumed that hieroglyphs carried myth and allegory. In them Plotinus (
A.D
. 205?–270), the prophet of Neoplatonism, found hints of his own arcane philosophy.

The first clues to the discovery that hieroglyphs were phonetic symbols were detected by a phenomenal German polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). As a young man of thirty, summoned by Pope Urban VIII and Cardinal Barberini, he taught mathematics at the College of Rome, and then spent his last forty-six years as a restless explorer of every known science. He found ways to direct the light of the sun and moon onto a novel planetarium, and became an expert on catoptrics (the science of light reflected by mirrors). He experimented with phosphorescent substances, suggested the affinity of magnetism and light-rays, and sought ways to transmute iron into copper. He tried determining longitude by the declination of a magnetic needle. He was credited with inventing the first magic lantern. Fascinated by hieroglyphs, he, too, was misguided by the Renaissance assumption that they must have deep symbolic meaning. But when he imagined they might also be phonetic symbols, his study of the Coptic language led him to the correct suspicion that hieroglyphs were an earlier form of the Coptic. Two centuries later, in 1822 the mystery of hieroglyphs was finally solved by the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), using Coptic and Greek to decipher the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone. A few famous proper names—Ptolemy and Cleopatra and Rameses, each royally enclosed in a cartouche—gave him his crucial clues.