Ice Age man’s most dazzling cave art
FRANCE: ‘It’s more than magnificent, it’s a masterpiece. I thought I was in the real thing. Naturally it brings so many memories flooding to the surface,’’ says Simon Coencas.
The 89-year-old Frenchman is fighting back tears after reliving a discovery that would change the way not just he, but all humanity, would view our past.
It was September 12 1940 and the 13-year-old Simon was ‘‘looking for treasure’’ with two friends in the wooded hills above Montignac, in the heart of Dordogne.
‘‘There was a legend doing the rounds of an underground tunnel leading to a chateau and a casket full of gold,’’ he recalls. So when an older local boy told them that his dog had stumbled across a mysterious hole in the woods, the four decided to investigate.
Squeezing through the opening, they slipped down a steep 15m shaft to find themselves inside a vast cavern. Shining a weak torch on the dark walls, the four gasped as a huge bull-like creature in black and rusty hues loomed towards them. Hundreds of other exquisitely painted and engraved animals would come alive in the flickering light: stags, horses and a bear, but also more exotic beasts lions, rhinoceros, horned aurochs (the huge native European cattle, now extinct) and even a unicorn.
‘‘It was dazzling,’’ he says. The intrepid youngsters had stumbled across the ‘‘Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art’’: the Lascaux cave. Painted up to 20,000 years ago, the collection of almost 2,000 palaeolithic beasts had been preserved thanks to a rockfall that had sealed the entrance.
After viewing the artwork on a private visit, Picasso remarked: ‘‘We have invented nothing.’’ Scientists agreed many of the paintings boasted a sense of perspective and anatomical detail that forced them to reassess their assumptions about Ice Age man and the evolution of Homo sapiens. The art suggested they were far more advanced than previously thought.
Lascaux was opened to the public in 1948, but in 1963 its entrance was sealed over concerns that human breath, heat and humidity were wrecking the paintings. Now, a complete life-size replica of the cave is about to open.
‘‘The public has a right to have an idea of the whole cave,’’ says Professor Yves Coppens, president of the International Scientific Committee of Lascaux. The astonishing replica, which is being housed in the new €50 million (NZ$73m) International Cave Painting Centre in Montignac, has taken 1000 people three years to complete and contains intricate copies of every painting in the original cave, reproduced in vivid red, yellow and black pigments.
The ‘‘cave’’ itself is made of a metal structure, resin shell and stone veil that mimics the mineral surface of the rock. Technicians used lasers, thousands of digital photographs and 3D computer imagery to mirror Lascaux’s paintings down to the last millimetre. Artists then painstakingly applied wall paints.
‘‘Sometimes one has to spend hours reproducing just 10 sq cm,’’ says Francois Ringenbach of the Perigord workshop. ‘‘[The work] was extraordinary.’’ When the paintings were finished, they were transported to the new museum in 48 separate segments and pieced together in situ.
The experience is breathtaking. After entering a twilit chamber, kept at the same dank 13C as the real Lascaux, one quickly finds oneself gaping at the famous Great Hall of Bulls with its vividly coloured aurochs drawn in Matisse-like whirls. The immediacy of the horses and stags is spellbinding.
Nicolas St-Cyr, artistic director of the museum, has seen the original cave, and describes the 22 minutes he spent inside as an ‘‘emotional moment’’.
Meanwhile, many mysteries still surround the art. Archeologists have worked out that the paintings were created in six ‘‘phases’’, but they have no idea of the timespan between sittings months, years or centuries. And nobody is sure what the paintings mean. - Telegraph Group