Magdalen Parallax

The Magdalen Artists of Lascaux created some monumental cave art some 17,000 years ago.  It is easy to dismiss this as 'primitive'.  The figures seem rudimentary, often simple line drawings. They overlap without much consideration for the figure behind. There seems to be no consistency.  And after all this time we no longer have any context.  So, granted, they are hard drawings for us to understand.

Except that there are a couple of important considerations.  In the first place, these drawings have no corrections.  They show a confidence and a superb command of a medium that does not allow mistakes.   In the second place the scale and the number of drawings would require significant time spent at this labour.   In a hunter/gatherer society, this precious time must have been possible because the artists were exempt from the constant need to participate in the hunt. These drawings were created by professionals.  And if we believe they were pros, then we must also believe that the overlapping and the transparency of the images is not accidental.

The overwhelming sensation when standing in this chamber is one of movement.  In reality, if we were to stand in the middle of a stampede of animals, this is exactly what we would see, although we would not see it all at the same time.   The Magdalen Artists found a way to collapse and combine both time and space in a wonderfully expressive Perspective form.  If that is a primitive concept, it is certainly not a simplistic one.

.Hall of the Bulls: reproduced in Delluc and Delbert, Discovering Lascaux, Sud Ouest, 1990, Plates 2 and 9.