A friend of mine who wrote one of the standard histories of world art told me that it always made him happy, when revising the work for a new edition, to alter the dates in the prehistoric section in line with the latest scholarship: the changes were so enormous. The first really famous cave paintings, in Altamira in Spain, were discovered in 1879. One of these has since been carbon-dated to 14,330 BP (BP in this context means before the present). The Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche, discovered in 1994, put back the date of the earliest known parietal art (art on walls, that is, as opposed to portable art) by 15,000 years to 32,410 BP.
It might be expected to follow from this that the only books about prehistoric art worth reading are the very latest. But I was delighted to receive recently the gift of one published in 1957, Painted Caves by Geoffrey Grigson. This is partly because Grigson (the poet, husband of Jane and father of Sophie) was a man full of curious knowledge, and a beautiful writer. I have most of his books, but had never seen this one, or heard of its publisher, Phoenix House Ltd.
Anyway I've left it too late to go to Lascaux, which had to be closed because of the deterioration of the paintings, and so there is interest in a book that tells you what it was like, in mid-last century, to visit such caves. But Grigson also has plenty of information on the early inquirers into prehistoric man, those top-hatted investigators for whom Archbishop Ussher's dating of Creation to 4004 BC had the weight of biblical authority, and was indeed printed in the margins of the bibles from which they read every day.
David Lewis-Williams, in The Mind in the Cave, reminds us of Ussher's successor, Bishop John Lightfoot, who ran through the calculations again, and fixed the moment more precisely as 9 am, October 23 4004 BC, which neatly coincided, he claims, with the beginning of the Cambridge academic year. The story of the discovery of prehistoric man and his art is interesting in itself, because it is tied up with the discovery of evolution, the discovery of the vast antiquity of nature.
It was not in the least obvious, to the first examiners of cave paintings, what period these belonged to, and it is touching to read of the discoverer of Altamira ending his days in disappointment, because scientific opinion dismissed its art as fakes. But it is absolutely clear today that the question of the rough date of the origin of art is a long way from being settled - if it ever can be.
I became interested in this subject rather reluctantly, since I am sure that it attracts plenty of cranks, and no doubt drives the sane crazy. I was curious about the history, specifically, of drawing, and I wanted to learn what could be said, simply and uncontroversially, about the earliest drawings known.
In 1996, Thames and Hudson published Chauvet Cave: The discovery of the World's Oldest Paintings, a narrative of the finding of the cave, and the way the explorers went about ensuring that they did not destroy the evidence as they went along. The sequel to this work, Return to Chauvet Cave, by Jean Clottes et al, which came out last year, bears in the English edition a ridiculous subtitle: "Excavating the Birthplace of Art".
Any fool can work out for himself, however, that the cave paintings shown in these photographs must be the work of an established artistic tradition. These artists had trained themselves, or had been trained, to descend with a torch into the bowels of the earth and there depict, with diagnostic accuracy, a repertoire of animals.
The authors claim that among the felines one can see: a lioness snarling, showing her teeth; a solicited lioness who is refusing advances and protecting herself; and a consenting female rubbing against her companion before mating. This is a sophisticated art, then, based on observation. So we may be fairly sure that Chauvet Cave is not the birthplace of art, any more than Lascaux is. What Chauvet teaches us is to keep looking, and not to be surprised when a new cave turns up that forces us to revise our chronology all over again.
Still, the two Chauvet books are worth it for the photographs - since we won't be able to see the cave itself. And by the way I'm not sure I want to see any art, however good, that involves crawling through narrow cave mouths. The Mind in the Cave, which is subtitled "Consciousness and the Origin of Art", has just been issued in paperback. It is written in a spirit which says: we have been accumulating data for years; now it is time to attempt a theory as to what it all means.
This is the latest addition to my cave art shelf, an attractive book for the layman, in the way it explains the intellectual background to previous eras of research. But I shall want, when I finish it, to read another book, in order to decide what I believe about its larger hypotheses. And this is precisely what I feared would happen, precisely what I dreaded, if I started reading about the Aurignacians and their art.
