The Collected Prose, page 4
Man destroyed the order of nature by his thought and labor. He sought to create a new order through an array of self-imposed prohibitions. He was ashamed of his face, a visible sign of difference. He often wore masks, animal masks, as if propitiating for his own treason. When he wanted to appear graceful and strong, he changed his dress and became a beast. He returned to his origins, joyfully submerged himself in the warm womb of nature.
In the Aurignacian epoch the images of man take the form of hybrids with the heads of birds, apes, and deer: for example, in the cave of Trois Frères a human figure is dressed in animal hide and antlers, with large arresting eyes, which is why prehistorians call him the “god of the cave” or “the wizard.” One of the most beautiful etchings depicts a fabulous animal carnival. A crowd of horses, bucks, bison, and a dancing man with a bison’s head who plays a musical instrument.
The idea of an absolute, mimetic animal representation, inseparable from the picture’s magic function, was probably the reason the ancient painters began to use pigments. The ancient palette is simple and can be reduced to red and its derivatives, plus black and white. It seems that prehistoric man was unresponsive to other colors, like the Bantu tribe today. Anyway, the old scriptures of humanity, Veda, Avesta5, the Old Testament, the poems of Homer, are faithful to this limited perception of color.
There was a great demand for ochre. Prehistoric stores were found in the caves of Les Roches and Les Eyzies with traces of large-scale quarries in the Tertiary Sounds near Nantron. Pigments were formed from minerals: manganese was the base of black; ferrous oxides the base of red. Minerals were ground to powder on stone plates or animal bones like the buffalo shoulder-blades found in Pair-non-Pair. The coloring powder was stored in hollow bones or small sacks suspended from belts similar to those used by the Bushman artists6 before their annihilation by the Boers.
Pulverized pigment was mixed with animal grease, marrow, or water. Contours were drawn with a stone point; and the paint was applied by finger, fur-brush, or twigs. Sometimes it was blown through a special pipe: perhaps the technique used in Lascaux where large surfaces are covered by a coat of uneven colors. This procedure gives the effect of soft outlines, a grainy surface, an organic texture.
The surprisingly skillful painting and drawing techniques of the Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian periods have led prehistorians to speculate that art schools existed in those times, removed from our own by many millennia. This seems corroborated by the development of Paleolithic art from the simple outlines of hands in the caves of Castillo to the masterpieces of Altamira and Lascaux.
The chronology of Paleolithic art is difficult to determine; however, more reliable dating may be based on the evolution of tools. In this thin span of human history (thin only for us, because of the lack of written materials and the small number of remains for the vastness of the epoch) the clocks measure neither hours nor centuries but tens of thousands of years.
The early Paleolithic, the era of reindeer and rational man, lasted some fifteen to twenty-five thousand years, terminating in the fifteenth millennium before the Christian era. It is divided into three periods: Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian. The climate stabilized during that period, giving birth to Franco-Cantabrian civilization. The nightmare of glacial catastrophe—white ice masses moving in from the north, more devastating than volcanic lava—vanished. Yet this warming brought about the culture’s downfall: by the end of the Magdalenian era, the reindeer had migrated to the north. Man remained alone, deserted by gods and animals.
What is the place of Lascaux in prehistory? We know that the cave was not decorated at a stroke and that it contains a palimpsest of paintings from different millennia. Basing his findings on an analysis of style, Breuil decided that the main paintings were made in the Aurignacian period. Their chief characteristic was a certain kind of perspective. It is obviously not a convergent perspective, which requires a knowledge of geometry, but rather a “twisted perspective.” Animals are usually presented in profile while parts of their bodies—heads, ears, and legs—are turned towards the spectator. The bison’s horns in the shaft scene have the shape of a slanting lyre.*
The story of the discovery. It is September, 1940. France has fallen to the Germans. The Battle of Britain is approaching its climax. Far away, in the margin of events, in a forest near Montignac a scene from a novel for adolescents is taking place, an adventure which was to give the world one of its greatest prehistoric finds.
No one knows when a storm overturned a tree, uncovering the hole which excited the imagination of eighteen-year-old Marcel Ravidat and his companions. The boys thought that it was the entrance to an underground passage that led to the ruins of a nearby castle. Journalists invented a dog that fell into the hole, becoming the de facto discoverer of Lascaux. It is more probable that Ravidat had the soul of an explorer, though he cared less for fame than for treasure.
The hole was eighty centimeters wide and seemed as deep. But a stone thrown into it took an unusually long time to reach the bottom. The boys enlarged the entrance. Ravidat was the first to enter the cave. Someone brought a lamp, and the paintings buried underground for twenty thousand years were revealed to human eyes. “Our joy was unbounded. We performed a wild war dance.”
Fortunately the youths did not explore the caves on their own but called their teacher, M. Laval, who in turn summoned Breuil, who lived in the vicinity at the time and arrived nine days after the discovery. The academic world learned of the discovery only five years later, at the end of the war.
The boys deserve, if not a monument, at least a plaque no smaller than the one dedicated to Marie Martel, midwife and officier d’Académie. Their hometown Montignac became famous. And fame brought substantial profits. The town got improved bus connections, and a variety of cafés, with names like “The Bull,” “The Bison,” and “The Quaternary” multiplied, and more than twenty families now live on the sale of souvenirs. Perhaps Ravidat will open a restaurant and as an old man will sit around the fireplace telling the story of his discovery to the tourists; or he will get a degree in archeology. It is improbable that he will ever accomplish anything to rival this. To tell the truth, no one has heard of him since.
Less than a kilometer from the cave, a private prehistorical enterprise was built. The owners of a nearby meadow discovered something that resembled an entrance to another cave and found some insignificant fossils. They built a hut to contain these “exhibits” and in order to make the museum appear scholarly, decorated the walls with charts from which one can learn that there were four glaciations: Günz, Mindel, Riss, and Würm. A shrewd peasant, smelling of sheep’s milk cheese, is ready to provide further information on paleontology for one franc.
Because we live in doubting times, the authenticity of the cave paintings was questioned. It began in 1879 with the discovery in Altamira by Marcellino de Sautuola. The Jesuits were suspected of forging the paintings and bringing them to the attention of scientists, waiting for a debate to break out. Then they would reveal the deception to discredit the claims of the archeologists who were threatening to extend man’s knowledge beyond biblical interpretation. It took scientists twenty years after the discovery to establish the authenticity of Altamira.
Their skepticism is quite understandable if we recall the famous affair of the Piltdown skull7, on which the most prominent archeologists wrote for twenty years until it turned out to be a forgery. A forgery of genius, it was said, because it was prepared meticulously by someone who had access to collections of similar finds and knew the secrets of the laboratory.
The processes that can be applied to a piece of bone to render it “Paleolithic” are much simpler than painting enormous cave surfaces. The latter requires a team possessing both knowledge and extraordinary artistic talent. Besides, it would be an endeavor whose cost was utterly disproportionate to all profit.
What provokes most suspicion in the mind of the layman is that some reproductions, including those published soon after the discovery, differ in detail from the paintings to be seen in the grottoes. It is suspected that some details deemed essential by prehistorians were added. In magazine reproductions of the shaft scene, the prostrate man has no phallus. This fragment was simply obliterated by editors mindful of their readers’ moral sensibility. Since many Paleolithic statuettes and etchings are connected with fertility rites and emphasize and enlarge the genitalia, the whole affair is cleared up.
While visiting the Lascaux caves, I myself felt skeptical for a moment about the astonishing freshness of color and the perfect condition of the relics. But the explanation is simple. For thousands of years the caves were covered by earth so they remained in stable physical conditions. The humidity produced a translucent coat of salt that preserved the painted surfaces like varnish.
In the summer of 1952, while visiting the caves of Pech-Merle, the poet André Breton decided to solve the problem of authenticity by a simple experiment. He scratched a painting and, seeing that color came away on his finger, resolved that the work was a recent forgery. He was fined (for scratching, not for his beliefs), but the affair did not end there. The Societé des Gens de Lettres called for an investigation into the authenticity of the painted caves. L’abbé Breuil regarded this request as inadmissable in his report to the high commission for historical monuments. The method of scratching did not enrich the arsenal of archeological research on prehistoric art.
I RETURNED FROM LASCAUX by the same road I arrived. Though I had stared into what some call the abyss of history, I did not feel I was returning from another world. Never before had I felt a stronger or more reassuring conviction: I am a citizen of the earth, an inheritor not only of the Greeks and Romans but of almost the whole of infinity.
This is precisely human pride and a faith cast into the vastness of the heavens, space, and time: “Poor bodies that perish without a trace, let humanity be nothing to you; from the earth with its traces of the Aurignacian half-beast and traces of vanished kingdoms, feeble hands dig up images which, whether evoking indifference or understanding, testify equally to your dignity. No greatness can be separated from its support. The rest are passive creatures and thoughtless worms.”
The road opened to the Greek temples and Gothic stained glass. I walked towards them feeling the warm touch of the Lascaux painter on my palm.
AMONG THE DORIANS
The only harmony that gives the soul a perfect1
tranquility is the harmony of the Dorians.
ARISTOTLE
I TRIED TO CONVINCE Naples of the artistic merits of silence. In vain. Some aesthetics are based on noise. So I used a terrorist argument: “Listen, Naples, Vesuvius never sleeps. If a tremor should foretell disaster, no one would even hear it. Remember Pompeii’s fate. Of course, I don’t demand that you imitate its grave peace, but observe a little moderation, as Pericles recommended. I mention this name not without reason. For you border Magna Graecia.”
There were only two relatively quiet places: the Museo Capo di Monte and the elevator at the Albergo Fiore. The museum is situated in a large park on a hill, where the town’s murmur resonates like the voice of an old record.
I came to a halt most frequently at Mantegna’s portrait of young Francesco Gonzaga. The boy is dressed in a pale-pink lucco and cap, from which a fringe of evenly cropped locks protrudes. Maturity and adolescence contend for possession of his face. A sharp eye, a strong masculine nose, and a childish, puffy mouth. The background is a magnificent deep green, alluring like water under a bridge.
The elevator at the Albergo Fiore was also a work of art. Spacious as a bourgeois sitting-room with intricate golden ornaments, a mirror and a settee, upholstered in red plush, of course. The salon rises slowly, sighing all the way for the nineteenth century.
I stayed at the Albergo for patriotic reasons (the owner was a compatriot) and ulterior motives (it was cheap). Signor Kowalczyk had fair hair and an open Slavonic face. At night we talked over wine about the complexities of the war, the vices of Italians, the merits of the Poles, and the influence of pasta on the soul. When on the first day I confessed to him my dream of visiting Sicily, Signor Kowalczyk reached into his desk drawer and generously handed me an unused train ticket to Paestum which had been left by a tourist.
Paestum is not Syracuse, but it is still Magna Graecia. Without much regret I abandoned the possibility of visiting the Blue Grotto. I knew Capri, that “Island of Lovers,” quite well from a charming pre-war song; and I did not want to spoil my sense of it by confronting my ideal with reality. As it turned out, Paestum would have been worth the pilgrimage even on foot.
The Sunday train reaches Paestum almost empty. Most tourists get off between Sorrento and Salerno where they are greeted by small carts drawn by donkeys festooned with flowers.
From the station you follow a straight, cypress-lined road to the Gate of Mermaids, where you enter a town inhabited by high grass and stone. The Greek colonies in Italy were by no means peaceful oases. The mighty wall, in places seven meters thick, offers immediate evidence of this. From their stony, unyielding homeland the Greeks crossed “the wine-dark sea” on their quick ships to a country warmed by the fires of many generations. Ancient necropolises dating back to Paleolithic times attest to their presence.
The greatest period of Greek colonization occurred between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C.E. It was purely economic, thus differing from the previous wave of Greek expansion which reached the coasts of Asia Minor some centuries earlier and had a political basis—the pressure of the Dorians arriving from the north.
The first Greek conquests were unsystematic, piratical looting raids. A legend soon followed, claiming the lands before the first Greek cities had been built on them. For Homer the territories west of the Ionian Sea had been the domain of fable. But already poets were busy populating the foreign rivers, sea-coasts, caves and islands with Greek deities, mermaids, and heroes.
Odysseus, razer of cities was not a colonizer but a characteristic representative of the precolonial epoch. On his return from Troy, when he razed Ismarus, the city of the Ciconians, he was only interested in ship-worthy spoils—female slaves and treasure. No exotic charms could hold up his stubborn voyage to his stony homeland. The poetry of Hesiod shows even more clearly the attitude of the archaic Greeks, those noblemen tied to the soil, for whom the songs of wandering poets were often substitutes for travel.
Some ancient authors thought that the phenomenon of colonization was rooted in personal causes: a family quarrel or contested inheritance. One should not reject this explanation which points to underlying social transformations, the loosening of the strong tribal bonds prevalent during the time of the Trojan expedition. Thucydides and Plato give another interpretation that is both simple and convincing: lack of land. Sicily and the southern part of the Apennine Peninsula posed tempting prospects for agrarian and mercantile colonization.
However, these lands were not a no-man’s land. The Greeks won them from the Barbarians by sleight of hand or by force, with less cruelty than the Romans (those Prussians of the ancient world), though not without bloodshed. They were primarily concerned in securing coasts for their ports. Local populations sought shelter in the mountains, and observed the conquerors’ fat city with loathing. Cicero evocatively described the coastline as an ornamental band sewn on to the broad cloth of semi-barbarians, a golden band frequently stained with blood.
Poseidonia (Paestum in Latin) was founded in the middle of the seventh century B.C.E. by the Dorians who had been expelled from Sybaris by the Achaeans. The Greek settlements in Italy fought for hegemony as ruthlessly as in Greece itself. Attempts were made to unify southern Italy through a league of towns. This idea, as scholars have inferred from excavated coins, was to be furthered by the Pythagoreans from Croton2. It was they who turned the powerful city of Sybaris which at its peak counted one hundred thousand inhabitants, into a heap of rubble. The alliance of the Poseidonians with the victors was highly rewarded. Their wealth was based on the trade in corn and oil. Before too long, ten temples graced the town.
The temples were not just manifestations of a religious spirit or, as is ceaselessly repeated, the celebrated Greek love of beauty. Art, especially architecture, played an important role in the colonies by defining Greek identity against the surrounding peoples. A Greek temple on a hill was like a banner hoisted over a conquered land.
Greek civilization in Italy reached its zenith during the Periclean period in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. The merchant towns became havens for scholars, poets, and philosophers; the latter gained considerable political influence. Both Croton and Metapontum3 were ruled by the Pythagoreans. Those who have read Plato’s Republic will not be surprised by the popular rebellion of circa 450 B.C. against the philosophers who used the worship of numbers as a pretext for ordering the compulsory registration of men, and used the occasion to imprison all those suspected of anti-Pythagorean sentiments. An ordinary citizen becomes impatient with abstraction; he prefers dull, bureaucratic corruption to sages.
Not far from Paestum was Elea, home of Parmenides’ philosophical school founded at the turn of the sixth century B.C. It succeeded the Ionian school as the second important link in Greek thought. Pre-classical Greek philosophy is from the colonies.
Perhaps it is naïve, though not implausible, to claim that the perpetual state of danger in the Greek polis caused the Eleans to preach the consolatory doctrine of the immutability of the world, the constancy of existence. But the still Eleatic arrow of Zeno was not proven by history.
