What Is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity by Jean Clottes

Author:Jean Clottes [Clottes, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226188065
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 15. A single person can slip into the narrow recess of the cave of Le Portel (Loubens, Ariège), whose walls and vault are covered in paintings.

In other cases, and sometimes in one and the same cave, the drawings were executed in a small recess with room only for a single person, such as the Camarin du Portel (Ariège), where the walls and vault are entirely covered in images that cannot be seen by a group (fig. 15). The same goes for the Cabinet of the Little Reindeer at Trois-Frères, the Sanctuary of the Hands at Gargas (Hautes-Pyrénées), or the Chamber of the Red Vulvas in Tito Bustillo (Asturias). In Lascaux, the very narrow Chamber of the Felines, thus named because of several engraved lions—the only ones in the entire cave, which undoubtedly has some significance—was frequented only rarely, judging by the absence of traces on its soft and unprotected wall surface. Frequent passage would inevitably have led to them being marked. Here, the logic of the spectacular is thus complemented by a logic of the remote and secret location, of the drawing per se, to which only the creator of the images or an initiate of a particular rite had access. Others truly constitute “theater stages,” as with El Pendo in Cantabria.33 This dual logic is noticeable from the Aurignacian of Chauvet to the Magdalenian of Trois-Frères and of Portel, passing through the Gravettian of Gargas and the Solutrean of Lascaux. It has thus persisted across ages and cultures and is an integral part of Paleolithic ways of thinking and, as a consequence, of the manner in which the caves were utilized.

This comes as no surprise. Regardless of the particular religion, revered sites need not be sacred in a homogeneous fashion. In a church—where the holy of holies, the chancel, will hold the consecrated host, tangible presence of the God of the Faithful—a chapel might be consecrated to St. Anthony of Padua, who supposedly favors the finding of lost objects, to one of the numerous incarnations of the Virgin Mary, or to any other saint with specific virtues for healing or protection.

The Mayas, who assiduously frequented the caves of Central America for their ceremonies for hundreds of years, had much in common with European Paleolithics in their manner of tackling the subterranean environment, which they also considered to be female.34 Like them, they moved about the caves barefoot and illuminated them with torches. Like them, they ventured very far below ground and were not deterred by the physical obstacles in their way.35 Finally, like them, they did not behave in a uniform fashion when inside. In this context, Andrea Stone36 refers to a “sacred geography” in which not only the entrances to this supernatural world but also the most remote locations (the farthest and most difficult to reach, located near a water inlet or an underground river) were charged with meanings and particular powers and were the object of ritual ceremonies and offerings.

So what about the individuals that had

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