After passing the Galerie des Fresques we penetrate to the final recess called the Diverticule final, through excessively narrow tubular openings barely admitting the body, and we are again overcome with the mystery as to what impulse carried this art into the dark, deep portions of the caverns. If it were due to a feeling partly religious which, regarded the caverns with special awe, why do we find equally skilful and conscientious work on all the mobile utensils of daily life and of the chase, apart from the caverns? The superposition of one drawing upon another, which is especially characteristic of this cavern, does not seem to strengthen the religious interpretation.
It would appear that the love of art for art's sake, akin in a very rudimentary form to that which inspired the early Greeks, together with the fine spaces which these caverns alone afforded for larger representations, may be an alternative explanation. There is no evidence that numbers of people entered these caverns. If this had been the case there would be many more examples of inartistic work upon the walls. It is possible that the Crô-Magnon artists constituted a recognized class especially gifted by nature, quite distinct from the magician class or the artisan class. The dark recesses of the caverns opening back of the grottos may have been held in awe as mysterious abodes. In line with this theory is the suggestion that the artists may have been invited into the caverns by the priests or medicine-men to decorate the walls with all the animals of the chase.
Fig. 226. Plan showing the grouping of bison, horses, red deer, and wild boar, in the polychrome paintings on the ceiling of Altamira. After Breuil.
The polychromes of the ceiling of Altamira in northern Spain, which rank in the crude art of Palæolithic times much as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does in modern art, are somewhat more conventional in technique than those of Font-de-Gaume, but they are manifestly the work of the same school, and prove that the technique of art spread like that of engraving, of sculpture, and of the preparation of flint and bone implements all over southwestern Europe. One could not have more striking proof of the unity of race, of a community of life, and of an interchange of ideas among these nomadic people than the close resemblance which is observed in the art of Altamira, Spain, and that of Font-de-Gaume, 290 miles distant, in Dordogne.
Fig. 227. The ceiling of Altamira, showing the round projecting bosses of limestone on which the recumbent figures of the bison are painted. After Lassalle.
Fig. 228. Female bison lying down with the limbs drawn beneath the body, so that only the horns and tail project beyond the convex surface of the limestone boss on the ceiling of Altamira. After Breuil.