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A Cave Mural of Lascaux located in
the Shaft of the Dead Man (15,000 BCE).
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 of Cave Art
Most of the cave paintings at Lascaux are
situated quite a distance away from the entrance, many of the secondary
chambers are relatively remote. Given the lack of natural light, these
artworks must have been created with the aid of candles, typically fuelled
by animal fat.
Dates of Cave Paintings at Lascaux
The cave murals at Lascaux have been dated
to the Solutrean-Magdalenian period (19,000–8,000 BCE), with the
earliest art dating from 17,000 BCE.
The Cave Art at Lascaux
What makes the prehistoric painting at
Lascaux so different, is the huge scale of some of the animal pictures,
and their exceptionally realistic portrayal. One of the bulls (aurochs)
in the Cave of the Bulls is 17 feet (5.2 m) wide - the biggest animal
image ever found in a Stone Age cave. In total, there are some 2,000 figurative
pictures, including 900 animal forms, of which some 600 have been identified.
In addition, there are many abstract images and symbols.
Animal Paintings
In the animal picture category, horses
are most popular (360 images), followed by stags (90 images), cattle and
bison (including the four huge, black aurochs in the Hall of the Bulls).
Other species include mammoths, ibex, lions, bears, and wolves. The images
include both hunted animals as well as predators; the latter usually appearing
in the remotest parts of the cave. However, rather surprisingly there
are no paintings of reindeer, the most commonly hunted animal of the period.
Little if any flora is included in the pictures, thus giving the animal
figures (typically painted in an alert and energetic stance) maximum impact.
The vitality and power of the figures is enhanced by their bold outlines
filled with areas of soft colour, as well as the use of Egyptian-style
combined frontal and side views - animal heads are depicted in profile,
but with both horns or antlers shown, as if painted from the front.
Colours
The Paleolithic painters of Lascaux employed
a variety of colours, including red, yellow, black, brown, and violet.
All these pigments would have been obtained locally from readily available
materials such as iron-rich clay ochre and manganese dioxide and charcoal.
No brushes have been found at Lascaux, thus one presumes that the paint
was applied with moss or fur pads, or crude crayons made from solid lumps
of pigment. Reeds and hollowed horns might also have been used as paint-sprayers.
For details of the colour pigments in
Stone Age cave painting, see: Prehistoric
Colour Palette.
Human Figures
As is the case in most Upper Paleolithic
painted caves, there are almost no images of human figures at Lascaux.
Only one appears to exist - a prone stick-like figure, in the Shaft of
the Dead Man.
Abstract Art
The Lascaux caves also contain two basic
categories of abstract art: simple shapes composed of dots or linework,
and more elaborate drawings of quadrangles, triangles, circles and pentagons.
The first category - according to one archeologist - may in fact be maps
of the night sky, as the patterns seem to match those of various constellations.
The second category has affinities with the cave art found at the Gabillou
cave, also in the Dordogne.
The Great Hall of the Bulls
The most famous chamber at Lascaux is The
Great Hall of the Bulls, featuring the famous four black aurochs (male
cattle) including one huge figure. Another famous chamber is known as
the Nave, which includes an image known as "The Crossed Bison",
a fine example in the use of perspective.
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