CHAPTER V.

THE FINE ARTS.

I. THE ARTS OF DESIGN IN THE CAVES.

IN their excellent work upon the relics of Aquitaine (Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ '), profane relics indeed, but perfectly authentic, MM. Lartet and Christy have described to us the carved or engraved articles which they collected from the bone caves of Périgord.'

Glancing at the illustrations contained in the work, and recalling to mind the originals collected together in the glass cases of the Exhibition of 1867, and those which were exposed in one of the rooms of the Trocadéro in 1878, the observer feels no small surprise at the comparative degree of perfection reached by the arts of design among a still savage people, living in caves and ignorant of the use of metals. We will look at some of these articles, of very doubtful value in the eyes of the vulgar, priceless to the man of science or of taste, and, above all, tc the true artist.2

Here is first a slab of fossil ivory found in the cave of La Madelaine by MM. Lartet and Christy; upon it (fig. 128) the antediluvian artist has engraved a picture of the mammoth (Elephas primigenius), easily to be recognised by its wide protruding forehead, its small shaggy ears, its

It must not, however, be forgotten that the first attempts at carving and engraving in bone were found in the caves of Aurignac, Savigné, and Massat.

2 According 10 M. G. de Mortillet, a lover of antiquities offered in 1869 to buy for a million of francs (40,0007.) the contents of the case containing the fifty-one specimens relating to the history of art in the reindeer age.

ANTEDILUVIAN ART.

289

long tusks with an upward curve; by the long hairs which cover its head and body, and, lastly by the heavy brown mane along its neck and back, and which seems to have resembled that of the bison. There can be no doubt that the engraver had seen the animal whose image he reproduced. His representation is even more accurate than that drawn after nature by a modern artist, a mere trader, certainly, of the elephant found in 1806, with its skin, flesh, and bones near the mouth of the Lena, on the Frozen Ocean. After comparing the two drawings reproduced together in the Bulletin of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg,' and after reading the accurate criticism on the latter by Professor Brandt, we are easily convinced of the superiority of the artist of the stone age over the contemporary Russian trader, at least as far as accuracy of morphological detail is concerned.1

To this portrait of the mammoth, produced by the graving tool of a reindeer hunter, we must add a second to which, found among his father's collection, M. Louis Lartet has lately drawn attention. The exact spot from which this curious specimen was taken is unknown, but all evidence tends to show that it came from Périgord. It represents the Elephas primigenius, engraved with a flint style by an artist who seems to have been impeded in his work by the movements of the animal before him. This appears to be the explanation of the several doubtful

1 In a series of papers published in German by the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg, vol. x. 1866, Professor Brand has made a complete and instructive study of the mammoth, and gives a picture of it (p. 115), which he honestly owns is somewhat idealised. The tail in the drawing is too long, the mane does not extend far enough along the back, and the hairs are not sufficiently long, since they really hung as low as the knees of the animal; lastly, this mane was not black as in the picture, but reddish-brown. The hair upon the head was soft to the touch, reddish-brown also, and six feet in length. Besides these long outer hairs the mammoth was provided with a thick, curly woollen fleece. All these corrections made by Brandt were suggested to him by the documents he collected relating to the mammoth preserved at Moscow, or to the remains of the specimen found in 1864, not near the bay of Tas as was at first announced, but in the neighbourhood of the bay of Jenissei. Brandt also confidently drew information from the drawing of the unknown artist of the Dordogne.

lines made by the draughtsman before he clearly decided the outlines of his first drawing. This he soon abandoned, and traced two drawings, fairly accurate this time, of the colossal beast whose trunk is lowered towards the earth in the one, curved inwards towards the body in the other. Both are engraved upon the two surfaces of a piece of bone, polished on both sides, and they represent almost the entire profile outline of the animal.'

Another passably-executed drawing probably represents the glutton, a migrated animal, whose presence in

SCHISTOSE ROCK.

We come

the caves of Périgord is a fact worthy of note. next to a schistose rock on which the draughtsman has represented a fight between two reindeer bucks (fig. 129). The one raises his head proudly to solicit the favour of the female as the prize of the victory which he has just won. "This complicated composition,' says M. G. de Mortillet, 'rendered with a true feeling of the situation, is never

See in the Matériaux of 1874 a note by M. Louis Lartet, entitled Gravures inédites de l'âge du renne paraissant représenter le mammouth et le glinton.

DRAWINGS OF ANIMALS.

291

Each animal is
Thus the fore

theless executed with extreme naïveté. drawn as though the others did not exist. legs of the conquered deer, which should be properly hidden by the body of the female, are distinctly represented notwithstanding.' The reindeer is the animal most frequently drawn or carved on the weapons or ornaments of the hunters of Périgord. The horse, in repose or galloping, is also often represented; but the picture is not always a success. The aurochs, the wild goat, the chamois, the stag, the ox, the fox, the hippopotamus, and the rhinoceros occur also on several sculptured bones. The saïga antelope, now confined to Tartary and the Ural Mountains, is likewise occasionally represented.

The Pyrenean caves also bring their contingent of materials for the history of primitive art; that of Bruniquel, whose inestimable riches now no longer belong to France, furnished M. Brun, the zealous director of the Natural History Museum of Montauban, with a piece of reindeer horn fashioned into the form of a wand of office. The hole for suspending it is pierced in part of the circumference. But whatever may have been the purpose for which this implement was intended, the figure of an animal is represented upon it; but unfortunately the drawing, inferior in execution to those of Périgord, is not sufficiently good to enable us to be certain what mammal it is intended to represent. We may also mention the drawing of a cave-bear, easily recognised by its protruding forehead, which Dr. Garrigou observed upon a pebble which he found in the lower cave of Massat (Bulletin of the Geological Society of France, 1867,' p. 143).

This drawing, engraved in outline like that of the mammoth of the Madelaine, represents an animal of a long extinct species. The artist of Ariège, who drew this accurate portrait, therefore saw the living animal; he was contemporary with it, as the artist of Périgord was with the mammoth whose picture he has left us.

Lastly, M. Ed. Lartet observed the head of the modern Pyrenean bear very accurately drawn upon the extremity of a stag's antler, broken across at the joint where a hole