The Lascaux Cave Paintings
Hundreds of horses, aurochs and deer painted with ochre, charcoal and manganese deep inside a cave in south-western France. Their discovery in 1940 showed how advanced art already was during the Ice Age.
See how the artists used the curves of the rock face to give the animals volume.
The Lascaux cave was discovered in September 1940 by four teenagers near the village of Montignac in the Dordogne. The story that a dog led them there is popular but uncertain. Soon the scholar Henri Breuil arrived, studied the images and made the cave famous. The paintings are usually dated to around 17,000 years ago, in the period known as the Magdalenian. The boys were called Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas. The cave lay in a wooded area, and its entrance had long been hidden.
The cave contains some six hundred painted figures and about fifteen hundred engravings. Most depict animals: horses, aurochs, deer, ibex and bison. Some signs, such as dots, grids and lines, are harder to understand. In the first large chamber, the Hall of the Bulls, there are aurochs several metres long. In the narrow Axial Gallery the animals cover both the walls and the ceiling. The animals are often drawn in profile with clear outlines, and several of them overlap. At times they seem to move in groups or herds.
At the bottom of a shaft is the cave’s only human figure. A stick figure with a bird-like head lies in front of a wounded bison whose entrails are spilling out. Beside it a bird stands on a pole. The scene is one of the most debated in prehistoric art, and no interpretation has won general agreement.
The colours come from earth and minerals. Ochre, which contains iron oxide, gave yellow, red and brown. The black comes mostly from manganese oxide, more rarely from charcoal. The artists applied the paint with pads, with brushes of hair or plant fibre, and by blowing powder onto the wall. Holes in the walls of the Axial Gallery suggest that they built scaffolding to reach the ceiling. The uneven surface of the cave was deliberately used to give the animals volume.
Why the images were painted we do not know. Breuil believed in hunting magic: depicting the prey would bring luck in the hunt. Later scholars have pointed out that the reindeer, an important prey animal, is almost absent from the images. Other interpretations concern myths, ordered symbolic systems or shamanistic rituals. The question remains open.
The cave was opened to the public in 1948. More than a thousand visitors a day brought in heat, moisture and carbon dioxide. Green algae and white calcite deposits began to grow on the walls, and in 1963 the cave was closed. Since then mould and black stains have caused new problems, and only a handful of researchers are allowed in. Efforts to save the walls have gone on for decades. Every intervention has proved capable of disturbing the cave’s fragile climate.
Instead, visitors can see copies. Lascaux II opened near the original in 1983, and in 2016 the larger replica Lascaux IV was inaugurated. Since 1979 the cave has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with other sites in the Vézère valley. Lascaux has become a symbol of Ice Age art and has been called “the Sistine Chapel of prehistory”.