Lascaux Cave is the most valuable Paleolithic monument of world importance in terms of the quality, preservation, and quantity of cave paintings. It is often called the “Sistine Chapel” of primitive art and “Prehistoric Versailles”, thereby equating its unique cave painting with works of art presented in the world’s most famous museums. The paintings of the Lascaux cave dates back to the Upper Paleolithic period culture, their age is 17 – 15 thousand years BC (Groeneveld, 2016). The drawings and inscriptions’ peculiarity is that they are perfectly preserved and are of great historical and artistic value. Thanks to the Lascaux cave, the world can learn about how ancient people lived, hunted, and defended their homes.
Such materials as ocher, manganese oxide, and iron oxide were used to make paint. Ancient artists ground the mineral and mixed it with water or animal fat, the paint was applied to the walls with a stick or brush made from animal fur (Lewis & Ingalls Lewis, 2019). Perhaps this method was also used: the painter blew the powder onto a damp wall using an improvised tube, a hollow bone, and the paint, hardening, retained its color for many millennia. The technique of applying paint with water resembles the watercolor technique. In addition to this, the artists used engraving the contours and images in the cave walls and filled them with paint. It is also surprising that in these polychrome paintings, the desire of artists to convey perspective is noticeable: by changing the strength of tones, volumes are formed, due to which, as well as the ability to maintain proportions, a remarkable similarity with the objects of the image is achieved.
From these images, one can judge that man appeared on Earth several millennia ago and was actively engaged in his activities. Thanks to the drawings discovered in the cave, a fantastic discovery was made: the animals that now live in hot African countries (lions, rhinos) and the inhabitants of the northern countries (reindeer) once existed in one place, on the territory of modern France (Wunn & Grojnowski, 2016). The images found allowed scientists to determine which animals lived in those distant times. The power of the beast, its greatness, as it were, its beauty in a fight, in impulse, and at rest is depicted on the cave walls. The eternal and formidable presence of animals in the surrounding world: this is what the late Paleolithic painters wished to convey and conveyed with complete skill. All this is not a glorification of human power, but of an animal power over which a person still had to triumph.
Due to the antiquity of the paintings, no reliable evidence of the reasons for the creation exists. There are several hypotheses regarding their significance, but science has not developed a consensus about the meaning that ancient artists put into their works. Some scholars assume that the rock paintings were a part of hunting magic rituals and, according to primitive people’s ideas, brought good luck (Lewis & Ingalls Lewis, 2019). South African explorer Lewis-Williams (2019), drawing on examples of tribes that still live by hunting and gathering, believes that cave painting is a part of the shamanic beliefs of primitive people. Some scientists conclude that they are just primitive people’s images of their fantasies (Wunn & Grojnowski, 2016). One thing is exact: prehistoric man presented himself to descendants through art, which became a figurative expression of his hopes (Boetzkes, 2017). Homo sapiens have achieved a genuine difference from everyone else in the world as creative, artistically gifted, able to sense, and create beauty.
References
Boetzkes, A. (Ed.) (2017). Heidegger and the work of art history. Routledge.
Groeneveld, E. (2016). Lascaux cave. In Ancient History Encyclopedia. Web.
Lewis R. L. & Ingalls Lewis, S. (2019). The power of art (3rd ed.). Cengage Learning.
Lewis-Williams, D. (2019). Image-makers: the social context of a hunter-gatherer ritual. Cambridge University Press.
Wunn, I., & Grojnowski, D. (2016). Ancestors, Territoriality, and Gods. Springer. Berlin, Heidelberg.