IMHO, the coolest thing about the Chauvet cave paintings is their refinement. They are not the scrawlings of some half-beast scratching the cave walls with a stick for the first time. They represent well-observed — and memorized! — details as well as a holistic understanding of how an animal's anatomy works, including its volume and its motion. The gradient shading is subtle and volumetric, and not crude daubs. Already they are reckoning with the technical problem of how to make a rendering of a 3-D subject believable in 2-D. And the arrangement of animals across the cave walls, designed so that when viewed by flicking torchlight, the animals appear to move like the frames in a Muybridge film — this is very sophisticated. There are just too many innovations to represent the work of one genius. The Chauvet cave paintings have to represent the culmination of a long, inherited and highly developed visual tradition. They raise questions about the rest of the culture — the mythology, the literature, the verbal tradition, the music, the dance, the fashions (because fashion is a visual language and there are always fashions) — and they raise questions about what happened to this people, what was its history, what happened to their highly skilled tradition, and why.
IMHO, the coolest thing about the Chauvet cave paintings is their refinement. They are not the scrawlings of some half-beast scratching the cave walls with a stick for the first time. They represent well-observed — and memorized! — details as well as a holistic understanding of how an animal's anatomy works, including its volume and its motion. The gradient shading is subtle and volumetric, and not crude daubs. Already they are reckoning with the technical problem of how to make a rendering of a 3-D subject believable in 2-D. And the arrangement of animals across the cave walls, designed so that when viewed by flicking torchlight, the animals appear to move like the frames in a Muybridge film — this is very sophisticated. There are just too many innovations to represent the work of one genius. The Chauvet cave paintings have to represent the culmination of a long, inherited and highly developed visual tradition. They raise questions about the rest of the culture — the mythology, the literature, the verbal tradition, the music, the dance, the fashions (because fashion is a visual language and there are always fashions) — and they raise questions about what happened to this people, what was its history, what happened to their highly skilled tradition, and why.
Love this commentary! Thanks Shelah!
I am always in awe of these, thank you for sharing them!