Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and ArtOsborn, Henry Fairfield
History
Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art
Osborn, Henry Fairfield
Art, Primitive; Prehistoric peoples; Stone age
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In 1908 Déchelette listed eight caverns in Dordogne, six in the Pyrenees,
and seven along the Cantabrian Pyrenees of northern Spain, but there are
now upward of thirty caverns in which traces of parietal art have been
found, and doubtless the number will be greatly enlarged by future
exploration, because the entrances of many of the grottos have been
closed, and the remote recesses in which drawings are placed, as in the
recent discovery of Tuc d'Audoubert, are very difficult to explore.
The chief divisions of Upper Palæolithic art are as follows:
1. Drawing, engraving, and etching with fine flint points on surfaces
of stone, bone, ivory, and the limestone walls of the caverns.
2. Sculpture in low or high relief, chiefly in stone, bone, and clay.
3. Sculpture in the round in stone, ivory, reindeer and stag horn.
4. Painting in line, in monochrome tone, and in polychromes of three
or four colors, usually accompanied or preceded by line engraving,
with flint points or low contour reliefs.
5. Conventional ornaments drawn from the repetition of animal or plant
forms or the repetition of geometric lines.
DRAWINGS AND ENGRAVINGS OF THE EARLY MAGDALENIAN
We have already traced the art of engraving, as it first appears in late
Aurignacian times, into the Solutrean; in the latter it is but feebly
represented. Its further development in early Magdalenian times is found
in the engravings made with more delicate or more sharply pointed flint
implements, capable of drawing an excessively fine line; these were
doubtless the early Magdalenian _microliths_. The animal outlines, with an
indication of hair, are frequently sketched with such exceedingly fine
lines as to resemble etchings; the figures are often of very small
dimensions and marked by much closer attention to details, such as the
eyes, the ears, the hair both of the head and the mane, and the hoofs; the
proportions are also much more exact, so that these engravings become very
realistic. Breuil ascribes to the early Magdalenian the engraved mammoth
tracings of Combarelles. Engravings of this period are also found in the
grottos of Altamira in Spain, and of Font-de-Gaume in Dordogne, and to
this stage belongs the group of does at Altamira, distinguished by the
peculiar lines of the hair covering the face. The subjects chosen are
chiefly the red deer, reindeer, mammoth, horse, chamois, and bison. The
striated drawings of Castillo and Altamira, which partly represent hair
and are partly indications of shading, belong to this period.
[Illustration: FIG. 197. Primitive outline engravings of woolly mammoths
of Aurignacian or early Magdalenian times, from the walls of the cavern of
Combarelles. After Breuil.]
[Illustration: FIG. 198. Engraved outlines and hair underlying the
painting of one of the mammoths, from the wall of the _Galerie des
Fresques_, Font-de-Gaume. After Breuil.]
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