Horse painting in the Pech Merle Cave (Kat Nickola)
Spotted Horse painting (Kat Nickola)
The spotted pony’s head emerges from the painting as if the animal is trapped in the act of coming to life, its head forever shaped by the stone on which it is painted. At its rear, another horse faces the opposite direction looking beyond the stone slab canvas.
This is Pech Merle Cave, situated above the scenic canyon village of Cabrerets in south-central France. The artist who created the horses 25,000 years ago blew the black manganese pigment through a hollowed tube, possibly a bone, using their hand as a backstop for creating the beautiful defined lines of the horses with the talent of a minimalist illustrator.
Main negative art parietal lot pechmerle (Kat Nickola )
The artistic style is reminiscent of that in Pech Merle: line drawings evoking the animal with simple but precise features. (Kat Nickola)
In recent years, the prehistoric paintings inside the caves of France and northern Spain have been admired in a different light. Instead of solely focusing on the materials, dating, or subjects – the animals, the handprints, the stick figures – curators are presenting cave paintings to the public as works of art. And rightfully so.
During my tour in Pech Merle Cave, the guide drew our attention to depth and shading, the choice of rock canvas and the connection between paintings within the cave. We encountered a large panel full of stylized line drawings of horses, bison, mammoths and aurochs. Beyond it, only a few black lines were used to bring the shape of a wall to life. By painting a rounded back and belly, a mammoth emerges from the stone.
After being analyzed by artists and art historians, it is now accepted that the black line drawings in the cave were likely all made by the same artist. “The Artist” had a keen eye for bringing stone to life, and their reason is heavily debated. Were they participating in rituals, painting art for the sake of art, or are those actually the same thing? Perhaps we are looking at the work of the world’s first professional artist.
Somewhere along the tour, we pass a series of archaic footprints, fossilized in the cave floor, then the tracings of fingers in the cave ceiling. It is a visceral reminder of the continuity of humanity; these Ice Age people were just like us.
Lascaux Cave (VILLENA gERald - Adobe Stock)
Roughly 350 caves with paleolithic art have been found in both France and Spain, and many of those prehistoric sites are in this region north of the Pyrenees. Within two hours of Pech Merle are Cougnac Cave, Rouffignac Cave and the famous Lascaux Caves.
Tucked into the Vézère Valley, the Lascaux Caves are part of a UNESCO Heritage region preserved for the quantity of prehistoric sites, and certainly worth a visit. The cave itself is no longer accessible to the public, but I take a tour in an exact replica called Lascaux IV which feels like visiting an archaic art gallery. Inside, the walls are a masterpiece of colorful animal figures that seem to run further into the cave. The entire space is covered with red aurochs, yellow and brown horses, black bulls and stags. When a flashlight is used to mimic a flickering oil candle, a row of deer appears to swim with their heads just above the water. The artistic style is reminiscent of that in Pech Merle: line drawings evoking the animal with simple but precise features. But here there are other exquisite artistic leaps like new perspectives and techniques that the tour guide details. It is a popular place for a reason and thousands of people from all over the world visit Lascaux every year.
At Lascaux, about 8,000 years have passed since The Artist painted the horses at Pech Merle, and while it is mind-bogglingly impressive, I appreciate the simplicity and authentic cave experience at the older site.
The village of Cabrerets is tucked into a canyon carved by the Cele River. (von michelgrangier - Adobe Stock)
It’s cold inside Pech Merle Cave, but outside it’s a balmy summer day. Hiking back down to the village of Cabrerets, I look over a landscape of scrubby trees and canyons carved in the local limestone by the same processes that created the caves. During the Ice Age, this area would have been subject to permafrost with stunted vegetation and the ground frozen year-round. As the world thawed roughly 10,000 years ago, melting and floods further shaped the land and one landslide sealed Pech Merle, preserving its artworks.
The village of Cabrerets is tucked into a canyon carved by Célé River. It is a bucolic place with sand-colored stone buildings and mossy terra cotta roofs abutting the canyon walls, many of which are dug further underground. It has a lively little town square and great waterside restaurants; a far cry from the massive tourist crowds and overdone infrastructure that made Lascaux a tad overwhelming. My family takes a canoe trip down the river, enjoying the slow pace and the chance to float below the canyon walls.
Later, my dog and I go for a long walk across the river, then up and out of the canyon east of town. We are on a mission to find a dolmen: a megalithic tomb. After the Ice Age, the people of this area, and far beyond, began using stone in a different artistic manner. They propped giant capstones on upright boulders to create a burial structure that was usually covered in a mound. These dolmens are some of the only art or architecture left from people’s lives 5,000 years ago.
At the top of a massive hill, I find the Mas d’Arjac Dolmen still half buried in its surrounding mound. I swat away spider webs and the pup and I crawl inside. It’s large enough for us and maybe another couple of folks to cram in. There are hundreds of prehistoric dolmens like this in France, and it’s interesting to think that the art in the caves belowground was already 15,000 years old when it was created.
We stayed for three days in the village of Cabrerets and wish we had planned for longer. While there is much to do – from traversing a cool via ferrata to seeing fossil footprints of pterosaurs and visiting clifftop villages – it’s also a place that demands slow travel. I could have spent a week meandering the trails and bike paths, exploring more caves or just sitting at the local café trying regional wines and tasting the area’s famous goat cheese and black truffles while pondering the art galleries underground.
