A New View of the Western European Group of Quaternary Cave Art

Abstract

There is no feature of quaternary cave art that has called forth more admiration for the Aurignacians and Magdalenians than the apparent liveliness and naturalness of action in their pictured animals. The general belief seems to be that the artists were impelled by a definite desire to depict characteristic actions. This is implied by the titles that have been given to various examples such as ‘The trotting boar,’ ‘The bellowing bison,’ ‘The charging mammoth,’ ‘The wounded and falling reindeer,’ ‘The galloping reindeer,’ ‘The browsing reindeer,’ ‘The neighing horse.’ Yet there are excellent reasons for asking whether the general acceptance of these beliefs has not been too casual and whether the spirit of enquiry might not have carried us much further in this field than it has so far done. The faults in the action of many of the pictures have received much consideration and it is perhaps fair to say that the following quotation represents current general opinion regarding the matter. ‘We cannot,’ says Mr Baldwin Brown, ‘credit our palaeolithic artist with either the desire or the capacity for analysing and reproducing the actual movements which instantaneous photography has now revealed to us. Many actions which he rendered in the walk or the canter, accord fairly well with the well-known Muybridge photographs, though where the difference comes in the artist gives a more convincing appearance of movement than the camera. It may therefore be said that as a rule action is rendered in an artistic and not a scientific spirit, and the animals are made at all hazard to look as if they were moving. At the same time there is secured a fairly large measure of scientific accuracy. In two cases … the eye of the hunter artist has been quick enough to catch a position, revealed to us moderns by photography.’

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