Over the past year or two we have visited various caves in Spain and France and wondered at the pictures made in them by Palaeolithic artists. It all began in March last year with a visit to Lascaux, which uncovered memories I had of visiting the cave as a six year old, the year before the cave was closed to the public for good, in 1963.
Revisiting the excellent reconstruction (Lascaux IV) six decades later aroused deeply submerged memories. In November last year Mrs Blanco and I visited La Pileta cave, an astonishing network of caves not far from Ronda, in southern Spain. In January we made a trip to Ardales, also near Ronda, and wondered at the designs left there by its occupants. It has only recently been acknowledged that the earliest artists of Ardales were, in fact, Neanderthals. You can read about them here.
I am trying to piece together parts of a puzzle: it is not only what I seem to recall from my visit to the Lascaux caves as a young boy, but also the answer to a question posed by the writer Helen Macdonald in her memoir The Hawk, when her childhood schoolteacher came out with the curious remark that ‘no one knew why prehistoric people drew animals.’
Macdonald’s schoolteacher’s statement led me to write, on this blog:
Of course we knew why people painted on the walls of their caves! Children, perhaps, more than anyone else: we know it in the very fibre of our being. We need to draw the animals, and to sing the songs of the animals and dance their dances in our rituals, for a very simple reason: we recognise them as both ourselves and as other, a simultaneous perception of identification and of othering; the elemental you and I, perceiver and perceived; the subject and object of all encounters. The essential paradox of being.
Our ancestors were not only fascinated by these creatures who lived their lives in parallel with their own, and with whom they had a pact of sorts. They also loved them. This love is visible in the paintings so tenderly crafted, which in a modern-day observer stirs a sense of a forgotten intimacy, of profound loss.
So cave art has been on our minds for a while now, and this is what brought us to Cantabria this week. Specifically, we wanted to visit Altamira, which, along with Lascaux, holds the most complete collection of palaeolithic painting yet discovered. The cave was made famous by local landowner Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, whose eight year old daughter Maria first spotted the images of bison on the ceiling of the cave in 1879. The story of Sautola’s attempts to celebrate the discovery, and his rejection by the (mainly French) archaeological authorities of the day, who ridiculed his findings and even accused him of forgery, form the storyline of the 2016 Hugh Hudson movie Finding Altamira (starring Antonio Banderas). Although the film is spoiled by a ridiculous subplot involving Sautola’s wife and a vicious local priest (played by Rupert Everett), it has its moments, and gives a good idea of the local landscape — including scenes shot in Santillana del Mar (see yesterday’s post).
Sautuola died before his hypothesis of Altamira’s cave artists became accepted, and celebrated by the likes of Picasso, who, after visiting the cave, is supposed to have declared (somewhat self-defeatingly) ‘Después de Altamira, todo es decadencia’ — which might be loosely translated as ‘After Altamira, it’s all been downhill’. However, as Paul Bahn has pointed out in his article ‘A Lot of Bull? Pablo Picasso and Ice Age cave art’, there is no evidence that Picasso actually said this, any more than he said ‘We have invented nothing’ after a visit to Lascaux. But the fact that the quotes exist, however fallacious they might be, is revealing in itself. We have a gut reaction to this art; it touches deep emotions and feeds the imagination in ways that are hard to pin down. It reflects, perhaps, a sense of belonging within a natural landscape which we have lost forever, and for which we can only long, overcome by some elemental nostalgia.
We set out in bright midday sunshine, the storms of last night blown away by the clean Atlantic breeze, and after visiting the museum complex, waited our turn to join the guided tour. Compared with the layout of the Lascaux replica — which copies the descent through the cave in every detail — the Altamira version was spoiled somewhat by the modern gangways and the crowding of one group upon another of visitors. But once we reached them, after a short descent, the effect of the paintings themselves was exhilarating. The ceiling of the reproduction cave is quite low and, of course, we were free to photograph them. I caught a selection of images.
A plaque in the entrance hall of the museum that holds the replica cave quotes lines from the Spanish poet Rafael Albertí, who visited the cave in 1928, and later wrote in his memoir La arboleda perdida (The Lost Grove):
Parecía que las rocas bramaban. Allí, en rojo y negro, amontonados, lustrosos por las filtraciones de agua, estaban los bisontes, enfurecidos o en reposo. Un temblor milenario estremecía la sala. Era como el primer chiquero español, abarrotado de reses bravas pugnando por salir. Ni vaqueros ni mayorales se veían por los muros. Mugían solas, barbadas y terribles bajo aquella oscuridad de siglos. Abandoné la cueva cargado de ángeles, que solté ya en la luz, viéndolos remontarse entre la lluvia, rabiosas las pupilas
It seemed as if the rocks were roaring. There, in red and black, huddled together, lustrous from leaking water, were the bison, enraged or at rest. An ancient tremor shook the room. It was like the first Spanish cowshed, packed with wild cattle struggling to get out. No cowboys or herders could be seen on the walls. The animals roared alone, bearded and terrible under that darkness of centuries. I left the cave laden down with angels, which I released into the light, watching them ascend through the rain, their eyes wild.
But if one image stays with me from the visit, it is perhaps the single modest hand print that I photographed in the shadows of the cave. I remembered from my visits to other caves, in the south of Spain, how powerfully that image had shaken me. Neanderthals, as well as our human forebears, are known to have made the images of a hand on the walls of their dwelling places, either by placing their palms, sticky with red ochre, on the wall itself, or else spraying the paint over the outline of the hand, as a kind of stencil. It is the image of that hand planted against the rock that haunts me, the earliest creative gesture of a human being that we have on record. A statement of creative intent: here I am.
Thank you for this. I hope I’ll have the opportunity to see one of these sites in person. I’ve always known they would move me deeply. Your writing, as always, is appreciated by me.