Paleolithic Cave Art



Paleolithic Cave Art

Prehistoric Art

Paleolithic art is known to the public through paintings found in caves. But this art is not limited to paintings. It is very diverse in its themes, techniques and media. It includes figurative animal, representations anthropomorphic often sketchy, and many signs. The wall art includes paintings, engraved or sculpted. These are often associated with rock-shelters. The Lascaux cave has more prints than paintings. Depending on the hardness of the wall, the artist used his own hands (clay walls) or tools of stone and wood to cut into the wall. For painting, different colors were used such as the ocher, yellow, red or brown. The coal used was manganese oxide for black. The pigment analysis showed in some cases the production of complex recipes including mineral fillers unstained (Ucko, 1992).

In some cases, the artist drew an outline with a brush or directly with a piece of coal and then filled in various ways such as brush, application by hand, blowing into a tube. The latter process finely speckled wall, allowing subtle effects of gradients. Sometimes only a few contours of the figure are represented, the rest being suggested by the shape of the wall.

They are more scattered in southern Germany, rather than grouped in Italy and Sicily, Yugoslavia, Romania and Russia. Some sites contain only few works, but others have a lot of art work such as Lascaux, Chauvet and the Three Brothers, the hundreds. In recent years, an open-air rock art has also been updated to Spain, Portugal and southern Italy. The cave art, i.e. "images" that are drawn on the walls of caves or shelters, knows no size limit. Small drawings were found alongside the great figures. The most common size of animals varies between 50 cm and 1m. The drawings above this size are rare and exceptional when it reaches the size of those of Lascaux (Welsh, 2000).

The animals are not represented in their environment; no decor is featured, not even a line indicating the ground. In wildlife painting, we find almost all species visible, consumers and users. Almost all animals are shown in profile; most are adult specimens of species identified and some imaginary as the "unicorn of Lascaux."

Painting techniques

It is an artistic technique by addition, refers to adding a pigment to a support. The brackets are usually the walls of caves, rarely that of rock-shelters. Although known painting on furniture is ...