Millennia before Matisse
The discovery of this 27,000-year-old “face” in a cave near Angouleme in western France last February had archaelogists consulting art historians about getting written up in the Guinness Records under “world’s oldest portrait” (photograph from Associated Press).
A Cro-Magnon Modigliani? A Palaeolithic Picasso?
“It is, of course, ironic that an ancient image discovered in France so uncannily resembles the Parisian modernism of the 1920s,” Jonathan Jones wrote in June in a fine essay for The Guardian, entitled “Old masters”.
If the caveman’s renderings of horses and mammoths had such marvellous detail and precision, Jones asks, “Why is the human face so much harder to decipher, so stylised? The earliest human instinct,” he suggests, “was not to photograph the face, but to decorate it, to ennoble it.”
The writer then describes a 10,000-year-old skull at the British Museum that was found in Jericho, which had been adorned after death with seashells in the eye sockets and a new face of lime plaster.
The agrarian founders of Jericho “were creating an urban, settled life for pretty much the first time in world history. They were vulnerable – and they wanted to be remembered when they were gone, to be preserved. And they evolved a way of doing so that was both a depiction and a physical relic; a sculpture of a head, with a head inside it …
“The reason the cave painter could draw like Picasso is the same reason Picasso could; because everyone knows what a face looks like. The face is so much part of our consciousness that long before there was writing, it could be simplified to a striking, stylised mark. This was, surely, as emotional as the act of the Jericho artisan who placed seashells in eye sockets, suggesting the changes wrought by death as mysteriously as Shakespeare: those are shells that were his eyes.”
After the 32,000-year-old Chauvet cave drawings and the 28,000-year-old paintings at Cosquer in Bouches-du-Rhône, the Vilhonneur grotto where the “face” turned up seems to have emerged as the planet’s oldest art gallery.
Europe, fittingly enough, was home to history’s first art movement, the Magdalenian art system (named for one of the main sites, not Jesus’ wife, who came later). It was also the longest-lasting, from 18,000 to 10,000 BC.
The first cave art was only discovered in the 1860s, and it took another four decades to convince anthropologists that it wasn’t the work of some village kid with crayons.
They started popping up everywhere, mostly in France and Spain, but if great care wasn’t taken, the caverns would gulp in modern air and the paintings would vanish like a mirage. Air-conditioning became necessary if the public was going to be allowed a look-see, and even then Mr and Mrs Public complained about having to crawl around in one-star accommodations.
From silhouettes of human hands to the long-gone woolly rhinoceros to weird runes and heiroglyphs, the artworks were made with scratches, mouldings and paints of iron oxide, manganese dioxide, mica and pounded evergreens. The ancient artisans mixed their minerals and vegetables into an impressive range of hues, storing their favourite pigments in barnacle shells or, in one instance, somebody else’s skull.
They also used oil binders, brushes, blown sprays, scaffolds and stencils.
Most importantly, as anyone who watches the Flintstones knows, Stone Age people didn’t live in caves, so the caves must have been deliberately selected for their creative endeavours because they would protect the art from the elements. They were studios as well as galleries.
As to why this art was created, the jury is hopelessly hung. Artchive has a long, pensive assessment taken from Paul Johnson’s “Art: A New History”, but other than offering some perspective, I’m afraid, it only ends in a question mark.
