Fig. 198. Engraved outlines and hair underlying the painting of one of the mammoths, from the wall of the Galerie des Fresques, Font-de-Gaume. After Breuil.
Fig. 199. Charging mammoth engraved on a piece of ivory tusk, from the station of La Madeleine. After E. Lartet. For the sake of showing this figure clearly, other outlines in this drawing, which were probably designed to indicate a herd of charging mammoths, are omitted or represented by dotted lines. This classic engraving, described on pages 384 and 385, is one of the most lifelike Palæolithic representations known of an animal in action.
The engravings in the grotto of La Mouthe were discovered by Rivière, in 1895, and were the means of directing attention afresh to the long-forgotten parietal art found in Altamira by Sautuola in 1880. The drawings at La Mouthe begin about 270 feet from the entrance and may be traced for a distance of 100 feet, scattered in various groups; they manifestly belong to a very primitive stage, probably early Magdalenian, the point of chief interest being that, while the greater part of the engravings are in simple incised lines, here and there the contour is enforced by a line of red or black paint; this is the beginning of a method pursued throughout the Magdalenian parietal art, in which the artist carefully sketches his contours with sharp-pointed flints before he applies any color. This treatment, at first limited to the simple outlines, led to tracing in many of the details with engraved lines, the eyes, the ears, the hair; thus Breuil has shown that in its final development a carefully worked-out engraving underlies the painting. In the La Mouthe drawings the proportions are very bad; they represent the reindeer, bison, mammoth, horse, ibex, and urus; spots of red are sometimes splashed on the sides of the animals; here and there is a bit of superior work, such as the reindeer in motion.
Fig. 200. Engraved outlines believed to represent human grotesques or masked figures found on the cavern walls of Marsoulas, Altamira, and Combarelles. After Obermaier.
The cavern of Combarelles, discovered in 1901, in Dordogne, near Les Eyzies, contains by far the most remarkable record of early Magdalenian art; there are upward of four hundred drawings and engravings representing almost every animal of early Magdalenian times, among them the horse, rhinoceros, mammoth, reindeer, bison, stag, ibex, lion, and wolf; there are also between five and six representations of the men of the time, both masked and unmasked; the style is more recent than that of the oldest drawings in Font-de-Gaume, but much more ancient than the period of polychrome art.[AY] The gallery is 720 feet long, and barely 6 feet broad; the drawings begin about 350 feet from the entrance, and are scattered at irregular intervals to the very end. In general the art is very fine and evidently largely the work of one artist; representations of the woolly rhinoceros and of the mammoth are very true to life; there is a pair of splendid lions, male and female; the drawings of the horse are abundant, and side by side we have a representation of several types of horses, the pure forest type with the arched forehead, the small, fine-headed Celtic type, and a larger type reminding us of the kiang, or wild ass. Here the greater part of the work is engraving, as contrasted with the painted outlines in the cavern of Niaux and with the etched outlines of the Grotte de la Mairie.
