Images of the Ice Age
The prehistoric cave painters of Europe show a wide variety of creatures. These include groups of wild horses, herds of reindeer and wild oxen, wild cats, birds and mammoths. The animals are shown in action, galloping and running across the walls as if they were being chased by human hunters. They are dramatic action pictures, yet they were produced in dark, damp conditions in chilly caves. Ice Age artists also made sculptures and modeled figures from clay. They engraved cave walls and carved antlers and mammoth tusks into models of animals. The paintings and sculptures are often hidden so deep in underground caverns that many of them were not rediscovered until the 1900s. It is not known why the paintings were hidden away like this. In fact, no one really knows why the pictures were produced at all. Most experts agree that there was probably some religious reason for the paintings. They may have been used in magic ceremonies designed to help hunters, or to promote fertility. Sometimes there are several different outlines in the same place, one drawn over other. This makes some cave paintings and engravings very difficult to see. Experts have spent many hours redrawing them in their notebooks to try to make the outlines clearer. For the prehistoric artist, the act of making the image seems to have been more important than the finished result. Perhaps the actual process of painting or engraving was part of religious ceremony. Ice Age painters used chalk to make white, charcoal for black, ochre, a kind of earth, for yellow, and iron oxide for red. Sometimes artists used minerals that they could heat to make other colors. The pigments were mixed with water and applied with fur pads, animal-hair brushes or just the artist’s fingers.
The caves at Lascaux, France, contain perhaps the most brilliant of the known prehistoric paintings. Discovered inn 1940, they show a variety of animals, including reindeer and horses. These finely drawn, brightly coloured paintings began to show sighs of damage in the 1960 because the atmosphere in the caves was affected by so many visitors. The caves were closed to the public, who now visit a replica called Lascaux II. Essential Vocabulary
|
Another technique involved splitting the paint out of the mouth or a reed to make the same spray effect. The artists used the oil lamps to light the caves and sometimes built crude wooden frameworks to gain extra height while working. With these simple techniques, Ice Age artists produced images that were surprisingly complex for such a simple society.
