80. Palæolithic Art
The highest achievement of the men of the Old Stone Age is their art. The perfection to which they carried this art is simply astounding in view of the comparative meagerness of their civilization otherwise. It is also remarkable how full-fledged this achievement sprang into existence. The Lower Palæolithic seems to have been without a trace of art. With the Aurignacian, simple carving and painting appear; and while the acme of accomplishment was not reached until the Magdalenian, the essential foundations of a graphic art of high order were laid in the late Aurignacian.
The Upper Palæolithic people carved in ivory, bone, and horn; they incised or engraved on flattened and rounded surfaces of the same material; and they carved and painted the walls of caves. They modeled at times in clay and perhaps in other soft materials, and may have drawn or painted pictures on skins and on exposed rock surfaces, for all we know; we can judge only by the remains that have actually come down to us. This art is not a child-like, struggling attempt to represent objects in the rough, nor is it a mere decorative playing with geometric figures. These first human artists set boldly to work to depict; and while their technique was simple, it was carried to a remarkably high degree of perfection. A few bold strokes gave the outlines of an animal, but they gave it with such fidelity that the species can often be recognized at a glance. The Cro-Magnon people must have developed a high power of mental concentration to be able to observe and reproduce so closely. The most gifted individuals perhaps practised assiduously to attain their facility.
Palæolithic art is very different from that of most modern savages. The latter often work out decorative patterns of some complexity, richness, and æsthetic value, but when they attempt to depict nature, they usually fail conspicuously. The lines are crude and wavering. Any head, body, and tail with four legs stands for almost any animal. It is a reasonable representation of an abstraction that they accomplish, not the delineation of what is characteristic in the visible form. Both observer and painter, among most living savages, are supposed to know beforehand that the drawing represents a fox and not a bear. At most, some symbols are added, such as a bushy tail for a fox or a fin for a whale. It is only in rare cases that any but advanced nations break away from these primitive tendencies and learn to draw things as they really appear. The ancient Egyptians developed such a faculty, and among savages the Bushmen are remarkably gifted, but, on the whole, successful realistic art is an accomplishment of high civilization. It is therefore something of a mystery how the Cro-Magnon men of the Aurignacian brought themselves to do so well.
Fig. 20. Limestone statuette from Willendorf, Austria. Characteristic of Aurignacian treatment of the female figure: the face and limbs are abbreviated or only indicated; the parts concerned with reproduction are exaggerated.
In sculpture their first efforts were directed upon figurines. These mostly represent the human female. The head, hands, and feet are either absent or much abbreviated. In the body, those parts having to do with reproduction and fecundity are usually heavily exaggerated, but at the same time given with considerable skill ([Fig. 20]). It is likely that these statuettes served some religious cult. At any rate, the carvings in three dimensions often represent the human figure, whereas two-dimensional drawings, etchings, and paintings mostly represent animals and are much more successful than the human outlines. In the Magdalenian, miniature sculpture of animals was added to that of the human figure ([Fig. 21]).
Success in seizing the salient outline was the earliest characteristic of the paintings and drawings. The first Aurignacian engravings are invariably in profile and usually show only the two legs on the immediately visible side. In time the artists also learned to suggest typical positions and movements—the motion of a reindeer lowering its head to browse, the way an angry bull switches his tail or paws the ground, the curl of the end of an elephant’s trunk (Figs. [22], [24]). In the Magdalenian, all four legs are usually depicted, and the profile, although remaining most frequent, as it is most characteristic, is no longer the only aspect. There are occasional pictures of animals from before or behind, or of a reindeer with its head turned backward.
Fig. 21. Horse carved in mammoth ivory. From Lourdes, France. The spirited portrayal of the neck, ears, eyes, and mouth parts is characteristic of Magdalenian sculpture.
There are also some devices which look like the beginnings of attempts at composition. The effect of a row of reindeer is produced by drawing out the first few in some detail, and then suggesting the others by sketching in their horns ([Fig. 23]). Artists were no longer content, in the Magdalenian, always to do each animal as a solitary, static unit. They were trying, with some measure of success, to represent the animals as they moved in life and perhaps to combine several of them into one coherent picture or to suggest a setting.
By this time they had also acquired considerable ability in handling colors. The Aurignacian and Solutrean artists restricted themselves to monochrome effects. They engraved or painted outlines and sometimes accentuated these by filling them in with pigment. But the best of the later painters in the Magdalenian—those, for instance, who left their frescoes on the walls of the famous cave of Altamira in Spain—used three or four colors at once and blended these into transition tones.
Fig. 22. Engraving of a charging mammoth. On a fragment of ivory tusk found at La Madeleine, France. While the artist’s strokes were crude, he was able to depict the animal’s action with remarkable vigor. Note the roll of the eye, the flapping ears, the raised tail expressive of anger.
While animals constitute the subjects of probably four-fifths of the specimens of Palæolithic art, and human beings most of the remainder, representations of plants and unrealistic decorative designs are known. The latter seem to have begun to be specially prevalent in the latest Magdalenian, as if in preparation of the conventionalized, non-naturalistic art of the transitional Azilian and Neolithic.