September 12, 1940 Four French teenagers accidentally stumbled upon a narrow hole created by the fall of a pine tree, which was struck by lightning. They decided that this was the exit from an underground passage leading to the nearby ruins of a castle, and hoped to find treasure there. But when they got inside and saw huge drawings on the walls, they realized that it was not easy underground passage, and reported their finding to the teacher. This is how the Lascaux cave was discovered. 
All the walls of the cave were completely covered with amazing drawings of animals - bulls, bison, rhinoceroses, horses, deer, even a unicorn, drawn with ocher, soot and marl (a rock like clay) and outlined in dark outlines. Some of the drawings were life size!
The scientist A. Breuil spent several months in this cave, making all kinds of measurements and studying primitive painting. At first, art historians doubted the authenticity of the drawings, but a thorough examination rejected all suspicions of forgery, and the age of the images was estimated at 15 thousand years.
Very soon, many tourists began to come to the Lascaux cave and soon scientists noticed that the drawings were slowly beginning to collapse. This was due to the excess carbon dioxide exhaled by people visiting the caves. Soon tourists were no longer allowed into the Lascaux cave and it was mothballed, and a copy of it was created next to it - Lascaux II. It is a concrete structure, inside which rock paintings of selected parts of Lascaux have been accurately reproduced.
Osya and I really liked that on the official website you can make virtual trip through the cave. In some places you can stop, zoom in on the drawing, look at it and read a short text about it (there is no Russian language on the site, but there is English). Here is the website: http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/#/en/02_00.xml
The figures of animals are drawn mainly in profile, in motion. It is interesting that when several animals accumulate in one scene at once, different sizes And different colors, and at the same time drawn so that one figure overlaps another, then the feeling of a cartoon is created if you move the window on the site. Probably, the same effect will happen if you move next to these drawings with a flashlight in your hands, it’s a pity that we can’t check it :)
On the walls of the cave there is only one image of a person: here you can see four figures combined into one compositional space - a bison pierced by a spear, a lying man, a small bird and a fuzzy silhouette of a retreating rhinoceros. The bison stands in profile, but its head is turned towards the viewer. The person is depicted schematically, as in children's drawings. Everything is drawn with a thick black line and is not filled with color. Scientists are still arguing about what exactly is shown in this picture: did the bison kill the man, and did the horse inflict a mortal wound on the bison? Or is it the other way around?
I showed Osya this picture and told him that the paints were mineral back then. The black paint was based on manganese, and the red paint was based on iron oxide. Pieces of minerals were ground into powder on stone slabs or on animal bones, for example, on the shoulder blade of a bison. This colored powder was stored in hollowed out bones or leather bags that were worn on the belt.
In this picture you can see the image of a huge bull. The figure of the right bull is the largest rock art in the world, its length is 5.2 meters.
To make it clearer what five meters is, we measured this distance in the apartment and estimated how huge the bull was.
Interestingly, in the Lascaux cave there is an image of a mythical animal - a unicorn:
But this big black bull, 3.71 meters long, is interesting because it was painted with paint sprayed through a special tube:
What you can do if your child is interested in these drawings:
- you can take craft paper, crumple it properly (we didn’t figure it out right away, but when we came across a crumpled piece of wrapping paper, Osya himself noticed that it turned out more textured and the surface resembled the surface of a stone) and hang it on the wall to draw memorable memories on it figures in charcoal, sanguine or multi-colored pastels. Or you can use paints if the child doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. The main thing is not to forget to cover the floor around it.
Or you can make natural paints - from clay and berries, and paint animals with them. And then make an outline separately with charcoal.
You can also try painting with homemade brushes. Offer your child a small stick, some grass/flower stems, and some string. Will he guess what can be done with them? And if you cut off the top layer of a dishwashing sponge, you can play that it is an animal skin that ancient people used to paint over a large area of the design. Shall we try?
To draw pictures, you can simply sit on a table or on the floor, or you can imagine that we are in a cave and draw on its walls and arches. One day when we were playing primitive people, we covered the area under the table with paper, and Osya left the rock carvings while lying on his back.
This time we hung the drawings under the desk, then Osya blocked the entrance to the “cave” with pillows from the sofa, and we played as if we ourselves were walking and unexpectedly found such a treasure - a cave with ancient rock paintings. In the evening, when it was already dark, we turned off the light and climbed into the cave with flashlights and candles and looked at the images on the walls.
Discovery of caves art galleries raised a number of questions for archaeologists: what did the primitive artist draw with, how did he draw, where did he place the drawings, what did he draw and, finally, why did he do it? The study of caves allows us to answer them with varying degrees of certainty.Palette primitive man was poor: it has four main colors - black, white, red and yellow. To obtain white images, chalk and chalk-like limestones were used; black - charcoal and manganese oxides; red and yellow - minerals hematite (Fe2O3), pyrolusite (MnO2) and natural dyes - ocher, which is a mixture of iron hydroxides (limonite, Fe2O3.H2O), manganese (psilomelane, m.MnO.MnO2.nH2O) and clay particles. Stone slabs on which ocher was ground, as well as pieces of dark red manganese dioxide, were found in caves and grottoes in France. Judging by the painting technique, pieces of paint were ground and mixed with bone marrow, animal fat or blood. Chemical and X-ray structural analysis of paints from the Lascaux cave showed that not only natural dyes were used, mixtures of which give different shades of primary colors, but also quite complex compounds obtained by firing them and adding other components (kaolinite and aluminum oxides).
Serious study of cave dyes is just beginning. And questions immediately arise: why were only inorganic paints used? The primitive man-gatherer distinguished more than 200 different plants, among which were dyeing ones. Why are the drawings in some caves made in different tones of the same color, and in others - in two colors of the same tone? Why does it take so long to enter early painting colors of the green-blue-blue part of the spectrum? In the Paleolithic they are almost absent; in Egypt they appear 3.5 thousand years ago, and in Greece only in the 4th century. BC e. Archaeologist A. Formozov believes that our distant ancestors did not immediately understand the bright plumage of the “magic bird” - the Earth. The most ancient colors, red and black, reflect the harsh flavor of life at that time: the sun's disk on the horizon and the flame of a fire, the darkness of the night full of dangers and the darkness of the caves bringing relative peace. Red and black were associated with opposites ancient world: red - warmth, light, life with hot scarlet blood; black - cold, darkness, death... This symbolism is universal. It was a long way from the cave artist, who had only 4 colors in his palette, to the Egyptians and Sumerians, who added two more (blue and green) to them. But even further from them is the 20th century cosmonaut who took a set of 120 colored pencils on his first flights around the Earth.
The second group of questions that arise when studying cave painting concerns the technology of drawing. The problem can be formulated as follows: did the animals depicted in the drawings of Paleolithic man “come out” of the wall or “go into” it?
In 1923, N. Casteret discovered a Late Paleolithic clay figure of a bear lying on the ground in the Montespan cave. It was covered with indentations - traces of dart strikes, and numerous prints of bare feet were found on the floor. A thought arose: this is a “model” that incorporates hunting pantomimes around the carcass of a dead bear, established over tens of thousands of years. Then the following series can be traced, confirmed by finds in other caves: a life-size model of a bear, dressed in its skin and decorated with a real skull, is replaced by its clay likeness; the animal gradually “gets to its feet” - it is leaned against the wall for stability (this is already a step towards creating a bas-relief); then the animal gradually “retracts” into it, leaving a drawn and then a pictorial outline... This is how archaeologist A. Solar imagines the emergence of Paleolithic painting.
Another way is no less likely. According to Leonardo da Vinci, the first drawing is the shadow of an object illuminated by a fire. Primitive man begins to draw, mastering the “outlining” technique. The caves have preserved dozens of such examples. On the walls of the Gargas cave (France) 130 “ghost hands” are visible - human handprints on the wall. It is interesting that in some cases they are depicted with a line, in others - by filling in the external or internal contours (positive or negative stencil), then drawings appear, “torn off” from the object, which is no longer depicted in life-size, in profile or frontally. Sometimes objects are drawn as if in different projections (face and legs - profile, chest and shoulders - frontal). Skill gradually increases. The drawing acquires clarity and confidence of the stroke. By best drawings biologists confidently determine not only the genus, but also the species, and sometimes the subspecies of an animal.
The Magdalenian artists take the next step: through painting they convey dynamics and perspective. Color helps a lot with this. Full of life the horses of the Grand Ben cave seem to be running in front of us, gradually decreasing in size... Later this technique was forgotten, and similar drawings are not found in rock paintings either in the Mesolithic or Neolithic. The last step is the transition from a perspective image to a three-dimensional one. This is how sculptures appear, “emerging” from the walls of the cave.
Which of the above points of view is correct? A comparison of the absolute dating of figurines made of bones and stone indicates that they are approximately the same age: 30-15 thousand years BC. e. Maybe the cave artist took different paths in different places?
Another of the mysteries of cave painting is the lack of background and frame. Figures of horses, bulls, and mammoths are scattered freely along the rock wall. The drawings seem to hang in the air; not even a symbolic line of land is drawn under them. On the uneven vaults of caves, animals are placed in the most unexpected positions: upside down or sideways. No in drawings of primitive man and a hint of the landscape background. Only in the 17th century. n. e. in Holland the landscape is designed into a special genre.
The study of Paleolithic painting provides specialists with abundant material for searching for the origins various styles and directions to contemporary art. For example, a prehistoric master, 12 thousand years before the advent of pointillist artists, depicted animals on the wall of the Marsoula cave (France) using tiny colored dots. The number of similar examples can be multiplied, but something else is more important: the images on the walls of caves are a fusion of the reality of existence and its reflection in the brain of Paleolithic man. Thus, Paleolithic painting carries information about the level of thinking of a person of that time, about the problems that he lived with and that worried him. Primitive art, discovered more than 100 years ago, remains a real Eldorado for all kinds of hypotheses on this matter.
Dublyansky V.N., popular science book
On December 18, 1994, the famous French speleologist Jean Marie Chauvet discovered a cave gallerycancient images of animals. The discovery was named in honor of its discoverer — Chauvet cave. We decided to talk about the most beautiful caves with rock paintings.
Chauvet Cave
The discovery of the Chauvet Cave in the south of France near the town of Pont d'Arc became a scientific sensation that forced us to reconsider the existing understanding of the art of ancient people: previously it was believed that primitive painting developed in stages. At first, the images were very primitive, and more than one thousand years had to pass for the drawings on the walls of the caves to reach their perfection. Chauvet's find suggests the opposite: the age of some images is 30-33 thousand years, which means that our ancestors learned to draw even before moving to Europe. The discovered rock art represents one of the oldest examples of cave art in the world, in particular, the drawing of black rhinoceroses from Chauvet is still considered the most ancient. The south of France is rich in such caves, but none of them can compare with the Chauvet Cave either in size, or in the preservation and skill of the drawings. Mostly animals are depicted on the walls of the cave: panthers, horses, deer, as well as woolly rhinoceros, tarpan, cave lion and other animals of the Ice Age. In total, 13 images were found in the cave. various types animals.
Now the cave is closed to tourists, as changes in air humidity can damage the images. Archaeologists can only work in a cave for a few hours a day. Today the Chauvet Cave is national treasure France.
Caves of Nerja
The Caves of Nerja are an amazingly beautiful series of huge caves near the city of Nerja in Andalusia, Spain. They received the nickname "Prehistoric Cathedral". They were discovered by accident in 1959. They are one of the main attractions of Spain. Some of their galleries are open to the public, and one of them, which forms a natural amphitheater and has excellent acoustics, even hosts concerts. In addition to the world's largest stalagmite, several mysterious drawings were discovered in the cave. Experts believe that seals or fur seals are depicted on the walls. Fragments of charcoal were found near the drawings, the radiocarbon dating of which gave an age between 43,500 and 42,300 years. If experts prove that the images were made with this charcoal, the seals of the Nerja Cave will turn out to be significantly older than rock paintings from Chauvet Cave. This will once again confirm the assumption that Neanderthals had the ability for creative imagination no less than that of Homo sapiens.
Kapova Cave (Shulgan-Tash)
This karst cave was found in Bashkiria, on the Belaya River, in the area of which the Shulgan-Tash nature reserve is now located. This is one of the longest caves in the Urals. Cave paintings of ancient people from the Late Paleolithic era, the likes of which can only be found in very limited places in Europe, were discovered in Kapova Cave in 1959. Images of mammoths, horses and other animals are made mainly with ocher, a natural pigment based on animal fat, their age is about 18 thousand years. There are several charcoal drawings. In addition to animals, there are images of triangles, stairs, and oblique lines. The most ancient drawings, dating back to the early Paleolithic, are in the upper tier. On the lower tier of the Kapova Cave there are later images of the Ice Age. The drawings are also notable for the fact that human figures are shown without the realism inherent in the animals depicted. Researchers suggest that the images were made in order to appease the “gods of the hunt.” In addition, cave paintings are designed to be perceived not from one specific point, but from several angles of view. To preserve the drawings, the cave was closed to the public in 2012, but an interactive kiosk was installed in the museum on the territory of the reserve for everyone to look at the drawings virtually.
Cueva de las Manos cave
Cueva de las Manos (“Cave of Many Hands”) is located in Argentina, in the province of Santa Cruz. Cueva de las Manos became world famous in 1964 thanks to the research of archeology professor Carlos Gradin, who discovered many wall paintings and human handprints in the cave, the oldest of which date back to the 9th millennium BC. e. More than 800 prints, overlapping each other, form a multi-colored mosaic. Until scientists came to unanimous opinion about the meaning of the images of hands, from which the cave got its name. Mostly left hands were captured: out of 829 prints, only 36 were right hands. Moreover, according to some researchers, the hands belong to teenage boys. Most likely, drawing an image of one’s hand was part of the initiation rite. In addition, scientists have built a theory about how such clear and clear palm prints were obtained: apparently, a special composition was taken into the mouth and forcefully blown through a tube onto a hand attached to the wall. In addition to handprints, on the walls of the cave there are depictions of people, rhea ostriches, guanacos, cats, geometric shapes with ornaments, hunting processes (the pictures show the use of bolas - traditional throwing weapons of the Indians South America) and observations of the sun. In 1999 the cave was included in the list World Heritage UNESCO.
Rock painting - images in caves made by people of the Paleolithic era, one of the types of primitive art. Most of these objects were found in Europe, since it was there that ancient people were forced to live in caves and grottoes to escape the cold. But there are also such caves in Asia, for example, Niah Caves in Malaysia.
For many years modern civilization had no idea about any objects ancient painting, however, in 1879, the Spanish amateur archaeologist Marcelino-Sans de Sautuola, together with his 9-year-old daughter, during a walk, accidentally came across the Altamira cave, the vaults of which were decorated with many drawings of ancient people - an unprecedented find extremely shocked the researcher and inspired him for her close examination. A year later, Sautuola, together with his friend Juan Vilanova y Pierre from the University of Madrid, published the results of their research, which dated the execution of the drawings to the Paleolithic era. Many scientists perceived this message extremely ambiguously; Sautuola was accused of falsifying the finds, but later similar caves were discovered in many other parts of the planet.
Rock art has been the object of great interest among scientists around the world since its discovery in the 19th century. The first discoveries were made in Spain, but later cave paintings were discovered in different corners world, from Europe and Africa to Malaysia and Australia, as well as in North and South America.
Rock paintings are a source of valuable information for many scientific disciplines, related to the study of antiquity - from anthropology to zoology.
It is customary to distinguish between single-color, or monochrome, and multi-color, or polychrome images. Developing over time, by the 12th millennium BC. e. Cave painting began to be carried out taking into account volume, perspective, color and proportion of figures, and took into account movement. Later, cave painting became more stylized.
To create the designs, dyes of various origins were used: mineral (hematite, clay, manganese oxide), animal, vegetable (charcoal). Dyes were mixed, if necessary, with binders such as tree resin or animal fat, and applied directly to the surface with the fingers; Tools were also used, such as hollow tubes through which dyes were applied, as well as reeds and primitive brushes. Sometimes, to achieve greater clarity of the contours, scraping or cutting out the contours of figures on the walls was used.
Since the caves in which most of the rock paintings are located are practically not penetrated sunlight, when creating drawings, torches and primitive lamps were used for lighting.
Cave painting of the Paleolithic era consisted of lines and was dedicated mainly to animals. Over time, cave painting evolved as primitive communities developed; In the painting of the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras, there are both animals and handprints and images of people, their interactions with animals and with each other, as well as the deities of primitive cults and their rituals. A significant proportion of Neolithic paintings are depictions of ungulates, such as bison, deer, elk and horses, as well as mammoths; a large share also make up handprints. Animals were often depicted as wounded, with arrows sticking out of them. Later rock paintings also depict domesticated animals and other subjects contemporary to the authors. There are known images of the ships of the seafarers of ancient Phenicia, noticed by the more primitive communities of the Iberian Peninsula.
Cave painting was widely practiced primitive societies who hunted and gathered and found shelter in caves or lived next to them. The lifestyle of primitive people changed little over thousands of years, and therefore both the dyes and the subjects of rock paintings practically did not change and were common to populations of people living thousands of kilometers from each other.
However, differences exist between cave paintings from different time periods and regions. Thus, the caves of Europe mainly depict animals, while African cave paintings pay equal attention to both humans and fauna. The technique of creating drawings also underwent certain changes; later painting is often less crude and shows more high level cultural development.
Cave or rock paintings are drawings that are found on the walls and ceilings of caves and rock surfaces. Made during the prehistoric period, the images date back to the Paleolithic era, approximately 40,000 years ago. Some scientists believe that cave paintings of primitive people are a way of communicating with the outside world. According to another theory, the drawings were applied for ceremonial or religious purposes.
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History of discovery
In southwestern France and northern Spain, archaeologists have discovered more than 340 caves containing images from prehistoric times. Initially the age of the paintings was controversial issue, since the radiocarbon dating method may have been inaccurate due to the dirty surfaces that were examined. But further development technologies made it possible to establish the exact period of drawing images on the walls.
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The chronology can also be determined by the themes of the drawings. Thus, the reindeer depicted in the Cueva de Las cave, which is located in Spain, dates back to the end Ice Age. The earliest drawings in Europe were discovered in the Chauvet Cave in France. They appeared 30,000 BC. The surprise for scientists was that the images had been altered many times over thousands of years, which caused confusion in the subsidization of the drawings.
Painting in three stages
There are monochrome and polychrome cave drawings. Polychrome rock painting was created in three stages and depended entirely on the experience and cultural maturity of the artist, lighting, type of surface and available raw materials. At the first stage, the contours of the depicted animal were outlined using charcoal, manganese or hematite. The second stage involved completing the drawing and applying red ocher or another pigment to the image. At the third stage, contours were drawn in black to visually enlarge the image.
Subjects and themes
The most common subject in cave paintings of primitive people is the image of large wild animals. At the beginning of the Stone Age, artists painted:
- Lviv;
- rhinoceroses;
- saber-toothed tigers;
- bears.
Images of animals hunted by people appear during the Late Paleolithic period. The image of a person is very rare occurrence and the pictures are less realistic than the painted figures of animals. IN primitive art There are no images of landscapes or landscapes.
Work of ancient artists
Prehistoric inhabitants of the planet discovered that paint made from animals and plants is not as stable as paint extracted from the earth. Over time, people have determined the property of iron oxides in the ground not to lose their original appearance. Therefore, they looked for hematite deposits and could walk tens of kilometers a day to bring the dye home. Modern scientists have discovered paths leading to deposits along which ancient craftsmen plied.
Using sea shells as a reservoir for paint, working by candlelight or weak daylight, prehistoric painters used a variety of painting techniques and techniques. At first they painted with their fingers, and then moved on to crayons, moss pads, animal hair brushes, and plant fibers. They used a more advanced method of spraying paint using reeds or bones with special holes.
Holes were made in the bird's bones and filled with red ocher. By studying the cave paintings of ancient people, scientists have determined that such devices were used 16,000 BC. In the Stone Age, artists also used the techniques of chiaroscuro and foreshortening. In each era, new painting methods appear and the caves are replenished with drawings made in new styles over many centuries. The ingenious works of prehistoric artists have inspired many modern masters to create beautiful works.