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PREHISTORIC ART
in IRELAND
For details of arts & culture
during the Pleistocene and
Holocene epochs, see:
Irish Stone
Age Art
Mainly megalithic architecture
Irish Bronze
Age Art
Celtic metalwork, tomb-building
Irish Iron Age
Art
La Tene Celtic culture, sculpture
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Layout
The Altamira cave is roughly 300 metres
in length, its main passageway varies from 2-6 metres in height, and consists
of a series of twisting channels and chambers.
The Cave Art at Altamira
The pictures at Altamira are renowned for
their extraordinary realism and colours. Subjects are mostly animals figures,
painted with great accuracy in their physical proportions. The figures
are outlined in a black manganese contour, then filled in with a variety
of ochre pigments: the whole lending a remarkable volumetric quality to
the works. If the earliest art of this
type comes from Chauvet, probably the most magnificent comes from Altamira.
Animal Paintings
The focus of these paintings is bison.
Possibly this is because of the unique contribution made by this animal
to Paleolithic life, which included its meat for food, its fur and hide
for clothing and foot-coverings, and its horns, teeth and hooves for use
as tool making equipment. The caves's main ceiling display features a
herd of multi-coloured bison in different poses. Other animals portrayed
in the cave's murals include reindeer, wild boar and goats - all native
to Cantabria - with, as usual, no accompanying flora, vegetation or landscape.
Other Art
As well as pictures of animals, the Altamira
cave contains a number of abstract images and geometric shapes, together
with examples of human hand stencils, and sculpted humanoid masks.
Painting Methods
The paintings at Altamira are unique for
several reasons. First, they are composed of many different colours, more
than is common in most other examples of parietal art (up to three colours
in a single animal). Second, when arranging them, the Magdalenian artists
took full advantage of the facets and angles of the rock surface to give
their figures maximum impact.
For details of the colour pigments in
Stone Age cave painting, see: Prehistoric
Colour Palette.
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