Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

Following the pioneer studies of Lartet, the history of the art of the Reindeer Period, as manifested in bone, ivory, and the engraved and sculptured horns of the deer, occupied the last thirty-five years of the life of Edouard Piette,[(19)] a magistrate of Craonne who pursued this delightful subject as an avocation. He was a pioneer in the interpretation of l'art mobilier, the mobile art. It must be remembered that in Piette's time the fourfold divisions of Upper Palæolithic culture so familiar to us were only partly perceived; his studies, in fact, related chiefly to the mobile art of Magdalenian times, and he undertook to follow its modifications in every successive grotto, beginning with his brochure La Grotte de Gourdan, in 1873, in which he first announced the idea which underlay all his later conclusions, that sculpture preceded line engraving and etching. He divided the art into a series of phases; that of the red deer (Cervus elaphus) he termed Elaphienne, that of the reindeer Tarandienne, that of the horse Hippiquienne, and that of the wild cattle Bovidienne. In concluding this early work of 1873, he remarked: "To write the history of Magdalenian art is to give the history of primitive art itself." He observed that in sculpturing the horn of the reindeer the artist was obliged to work in the hard exterior bone and to avoid the spongy interior; this defect in material suggested the invention of the bas-relief. The statuette he regarded as the assemblage of two bas-reliefs, one on either side of the bone. Thus he described the ivory head of the woman of Brassempouy, the only human face of Upper Palæolithic times which is even fairly well represented; also the two imperfect feminine torsos in ivory. In 1897, at the age of seventy, Piette undertook his last excavations, and the sum of his labors is preserved for us in the magnificent volume entitled l'Art pendant l'âge du Renne, published in 1907.

The pupil and biographer of Piette, l'Abbé Henri Breuil, observes that his scheme of art evolution is exact along its main lines.[(20)] It is true that human sculpture appears for the first time in the lower Aurignacian, that it survives the Solutrean, and even extends into middle Magdalenian times, but this enormous period cannot be placed in one archæological division as Piette supposed; in truth, he did not suspect the prolonged gestation of Quaternary art, but contracted into one small division the documents of numerous phases. At the same time, Piette was right in attributing the flower of the art of engraving accompanied by contours of animal forms in relief to the second and third levels of the Magdalenian industry, but he had no idea that this development had been preceded by a long period in which engraving had been practised in a timid and more or less sporadic manner as a parietal art on the walls of the caverns as well as on bone and stone. It is also true that a considerable facility in sculpture preceded the art of engraving, but it was arrested in its progress while engraving slowly developed; in the early choice of subjects the sculptors of middle and late Aurignacian times showed a preference for the human form, while later, in Solutrean and early Magdalenian times, they inclined principally toward animal figures, so that sculpture was not suddenly eclipsed. The first engravings made with fine points of flint on stone are hardly less ancient than the first sculptures, and modestly co-exist beside them up to the moment where engraving, greatly multiplied, largely supplants sculpture. Finally, observes Breuil, it is one of the glories of Edouard Piette to have understood that the painted pebbles of Mas d'Azil represented the last prolongation of the dying Quaternary art.

It is fortunate that the mantle of Piette fell upon a man of the artistic genius and appreciation of Breuil, to whom chiefly we owe our clear understanding of the chronological development of Upper Palæolithic art. In the accompanying table (p. 395) are assembled the results of the observations of Piette, Sautuola, Rivière, Cartailhac, Capitan, Breuil, and many others, largely in the order of sequence determined through the labors of Breuil.

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Fig. 196. Geographic distribution of the more important Palæolithic art stations of Dordogne, the Pyrenees, and the Cantabrian Mountains. After Breuil and Obermaier.

We are far from 1880, observes Cartailhac,[(21)] when the discovery by Sautuola of the paintings on the roof of the cavern of Altamira was met with such scepticism and indifference. Knowing the artistic instincts of the Upper Palæolithic people from their engraving and carving in bone and ivory, we should have been prepared for the discovery of a parietal art. The publication of the engravings in the grotto of La Mouthe by Rivière[(22)] in April, 1895, was the first warning of our oversight, and immediately Edouard Piette recalled Altamira to the memory of the workers on prehistoric art. The discovery of Sautuola ceased to be isolated. Led by the engravings found in La Mouthe, Daleau discovered the engravings in the grotto of Pair-non-Pair, Gironde. In 1902 there was the double discovery of the engravings in the grotto of Combarelles, and of the paintings in the grotto of Font-de-Gaume, communicated by Capitan and Breuil. Discoveries at Marsoulas, Mas d'Azil, La Grèze, Bernifal, and Teyjat soon followed.[AX]

STAGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF UPPER PALÆOLITHIC ART

	Sculpture	Incised Figures	Painted Figures
Azilian.		VI. No animaldrawings.	VI. Conventional Azilian decoration. Flat pebbles (galets) colored in red and black. Mas d'Azil, Marsoulas, Pindal.
Late Magdalenian.		V. Entirely wanting.	V. No animal art. Various schematic and conventional figures and signs (bands, branches, lines, punctuated surfaces suggesting the Azilian galets).
Middle Magdalenian.	Slender human figurines in ivory and bone. Animal forms in reindeer and stag horn on implements of the chase and ceremonial insignia.	IV. Graffites feebly traced; fine lines indicating hair predominate in modelling obtained the drawings, as at Font-de-Gaume and Marsoulas. Perfected animal outlines and details. Fine animal outlines, Grotte de la Mairie, Marsoulas. Perfected engraving on bone and ivory.	IV. Polychrome animal figures with the contour in black and interior through a mingling of yellow, red and black color. Constant association of raclage and of incisions with painting. Mains stylisées. Great, brilliant polychrome frescoes of Marsoulas, Font-de-Gaume, Altamira. Animal outlines in black, Niaux.
Early Magdalenian.	Animal sculpture. Bisons of Tuc d'Audoubert; high reliefs of horses, Cap-Blanc.	III. Deeply incised lines followed by light graffite contour lines. Incised outlines and hair, e. g. mammoths of Combarelles. Striated drawings, Castillo, Altamira, Pasiega.	III. Figures of a flat tint and Chinese shading without modelling, also dotted animal figures as at Font-de-Gaume, Marsoulas, Altamira, Pasiega.
Soultrean.	Bone sculpture in high relief; Isturitz, Pyrenees. Animal sculpture in the round, Předmost.	Engravings.
Late Aurignacian.	Heavy human statuettes (idols) of Mentone, Brassempouy, Willendorf, Brünn. Human bas-reliefs of Laussel. Heavy human figurines of Sireuil, Pair-non-Pair.	II. Animal and human figures, at first very deeply incised, then less so; four limbs generally figured. Designs vigorous, somewhat awkward, as at La Mouthe, then more characteristic, as at Combarelles.	II. Filling in lines at first feeble, then more and more strong, finally associated with contour modelling which ultimately covers the entire silhouette. Incised lines associated with painting as at Combarelles, Font-de-Gaume, La Mouthe, Marsoulas, Altamira.
Early Aurignacian.	Animals in low relief.	I. Figures deeply incised, heavy, in absolute profile; stiff in form as at Pair-non-Pair, La Grèze, La Mouthe, Gargas, Bernifal, Hornos de la Peña, Marsoulas, Altamira. Archaic animal outlines of Castillo.	I. Linear tracings in monochrome, single black or red lines, indicating only a silhouette. Two limbs out of four are ordinarily figured. The most ancient paintings of Castillo, Altamira, Pindal, Font-de-Gaume, Marsoulas, La Mouthe, Combarelles, Bernifal.
	Statuary and bas-relief.	Mobile and parietal art in line.	Parietal and mobile art in color.

In 1908 Déchelette listed eight caverns in Dordogne, six in the Pyrenees, and seven along the Cantabrian Pyrenees of northern Spain, but there are now upward of thirty caverns in which traces of parietal art have been found, and doubtless the number will be greatly enlarged by future exploration, because the entrances of many of the grottos have been closed, and the remote recesses in which drawings are placed, as in the recent discovery of Tuc d'Audoubert, are very difficult to explore.