The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anonymous · paintings, drawings and engravings on the walls of a deep cave, by several hands · charcoal, often stumped, red ochre in figures and dots, palm prints and hand stencils, engraving by finger and tool in the soft surface, on walls scraped pale in places · the Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche · Aurignacian, about 36,000 years ago as recorded · found 18 December 1994 · closed to the public since, on the World Heritage List since 2014 · scored as the body of figures of the Aurignacian campaign, as one work, in the cave as it now stands and as recorded
Mode
Drawn, painted and engraved cave; a sequence of panels by several hands read as one work; the animal on the living rock in the dark
Mythos
Predator and prey: a pride of lions moving toward bison, and facing it at the deepest point a woman joined to a bison on a hanging rock
Phase
Aurignacian, about 36,000 years ago as recorded, with later Gravettian visits; sealed by rockfall; found 18 December 1994, closed since, on the World Heritage List since 2014; a facsimile opened nearby in 2015
Presentation
Charcoal, often stumped, red ochre in figures and palm dots, hand stencils, engraving by finger and tool, on walls scraped pale in places and on the bulges and edges of the rock; met by carried flame
Register
Beauty and terror together: horses drawn in a beauty not surpassed, predators in a pride, far underground among the hollows and bones of bears
Scale
One cave, many species, four horses, one pride, one woman joined to a bison
Governing Proposition
In a cave sealed by rockfall, four horses’ heads in smudged charcoal recede across a swelling wall, rhinoceroses lock horns, a pride of lions moves along the rock toward bison, and at the deepest point a woman’s body is joined to a bison on a hanging rock, facing the hunt. The wager of the cave is that the animal, the dangerous animal above all, can be drawn out of the living rock in the dark as it is known from long attention, full at the start of the record and not tentative, and that the human need appear only as a hand at the threshold and a body at the back.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
On 18 December 1994 Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire found a cave at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, in the Ardèche, whose walls were drawn and painted with animals. The cave, the Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, has been closed to the public since. It was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2014, and in 2015 a full-scale facsimile, the Caverne du Pont d’Arc, opened nearby. Nobody outside a small scientific team sees the original. What almost everyone knows of it is the record: the published photographs, the scientific literature, and Herzog’s film of 2010.
The means are few. Charcoal drawing, often stumped, smudged to model a form; red ochre, painted in figures and set down in dots; engraving with fingers and tools in the soft surface of the wall; and, in places, the wall scraped clean before drawing to give a pale ground. The animals are those of the Ice Age, and the dangerous ones are the subject: lions, bears, rhinoceroses and mammoths, with horses and bison among them. Red figures, palm-print dots and hand stencils hold the front chambers; the strongest black figures are deepest in, in the Hillaire Chamber and the End Chamber. Nothing is written and nothing can be quoted. No maker is named, and there were several.
The work scored is the body of paintings and drawings of the Aurignacian campaign, about 36,000 years ago as the record dates it, taken as one work in the cave as it now stands. The parts weighed most are the Panel of the Horses in the Hillaire Chamber; the Lion Panel in the End Chamber and, facing it, the hanging rock with the Venus and the composite bison; the rhinoceros figures; and the red figures, dots and stencils of the front. The later Gravettian visits, which left torch wipes, charcoal and footprints, belong to the cave’s life as a place of image and are weighed where they bear, which is little. The cave bear skulls, the block on which one skull was set, and the facsimile are context, not the unit.
Movement II
The way into the image is by the front chambers, where the marks are red: figures in ochre, dots made with the palm of a hand, and hands stencilled on the rock. They are the human mark at the threshold, presence set down at the edge of the dark. From there the cave runs inward and the marks change as it goes: the red gives way to black, and at the back the figures are densest and the composite stands. The progression is itself an order, a passage from the threshold to the deepest point, which anyone who meets the images has to make in sequence, by light carried in.
What the makers inherited survives in pieces: the portable carving of the Aurignacian, the ivory animals of the Swabian Jura and the lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, and signs engraved or painted on rock and blocks in southwest France, vulvas and simple outlines of animals. Against that the cave turns: drawing and painting on the walls of a deep cave at large scale, form modelled by smudged charcoal, recession by staggered contours, motion by repeated outlines, the wall scraped pale as a ground, the relief of the rock taken as the body of the animal. It is a turn of the first order in what an image on a surface could do. What it cost cannot be read with certainty. The labour and the danger are plain, deep in a cave the bears used, but what was risked socially, or what tradition was broken, is not known, and the immediate predecessors may simply be lost.
One law runs from the red at the front to the black at the back: the mark made by hand on the living rock in the dark, in relation to the wall’s form, and the animal in profile, from knowledge, with no ground line and no setting. The range it holds is wide: many species, single figures and great panels, signs and stencils, painting, drawing and engraving. It does not hold everywhere. The field was laid down by several hands over a span the dates cannot close to less than centuries; not every figure keeps the law of the great panels; and the signs and dots cannot be shown to share the law of the animals. Between the panels the subtractive test gives: lone rhinoceros heads, partial outlines, a bear here, a mammoth there. Remove many and the cave stands.
Movement III
In the Hillaire Chamber four horses’ heads are drawn in charcoal on a convex wall, staggered down and back, each placed against the last, so that they recede. They are shaded by smudging, the muzzles darkened, and the nearest has its mouth open, drawn with a single sure contour. Below them rhinoceroses face off. Take one head away and the recession goes; the panel does not give to the subtractive test. No later drawing of a horse surpasses it. The horses are known from long attention, with open mouths and laid ears, in their moods and not as signs.
The making carries the meaning. Before drawing, the wall was scraped clean in places, so that the surface became a pale ground and a black line could read on it. The horn of a rhinoceros is drawn as a series of repeated arcs, read as motion or as several animals; a bison is drawn with many legs as it runs. The bulges and edges of the rock are used as volume, a head set where the wall swells. At the height of the cave the command is complete. It is not carried through the field: the hands are uneven, many figures are summary, partial or stiff, and the red figures of the front chambers are simpler. Command at the top in the great panels, realisation uneven across the cave.
The work knows the animal as emerging from the rock in the dark, and no other form would know it so. The images were met by moving flame, far underground, and in a moving light the repeated outlines move: carried flame makes the many-legged bison run. Whether the effects were meant for flame is one of the cave’s open questions; the form gives them either way. Put the same animals on portable panels, or light them evenly, and what goes is the emergence, the motion and the passage inward, which are what the cave knows. Not every figure uses the relief so, and the form’s full knowledge is in the great panels.
Movement IV
The Lion Panel runs along a long stretch of the End Chamber: a pride in profile, the heads stacked and overlapping in a line that moves one way, toward bison. The males are drawn without manes, as cave lions were. The shoulder and the line of the head go down in one stroke, as economical as any brush drawing, and in a moving light the line moves. It is the most sustained passage in the cave and among the most powerful images of predators in any art: the hunt of lion on bison, predator and prey, given its earliest monument. The line is the hunt, and to break it is to lose it.
Facing it, at the deepest point of the cave, hangs a rock on which a woman’s lower body, the pubic triangle and the legs, is joined to the head of a bison. Either alone would be a different thing. It is the one place where myth is built in the cave beyond doubt, the composite of human and animal set at the back of the passage inward, opposite the hunt. Elsewhere the archetypal reading is brought by its readers. Clottes and Lewis-Williams read the cave as shamanic, an argument and not a finding, and the cave as a whole has no structure that can be shown to be mythic rather than accumulated. One skull of a cave bear was set on a block; whether people of the Aurignacian set it there is not settled.
What the walls disclose holds without the makers’ meaning. The animal is known in its behaviour: horses with laid ears, lions in a group, rhinoceroses locking horns, a bison running. The dangerous animals are the subject, and the human being stands as the watcher of powers greater than itself, present in a hand, a palm mark and a woman’s body, never as a whole figure. What the animals were for is lost, and much of what the cave now gives a viewer is awe at the dark and the age, a state rather than a meaning. The natural order, death and violence, the human mark, the sacred at the back, and motion and time are held in one passage; labour, the family, the community, the state and history are not shown.
Movement V
The cave was sealed by rockfall and its air left still. That is why the walls and the floor survive as they were left, bear prints and all, and why, after about 36,000 years, the images are legible, many as fresh as when they were drawn. The losses are calcite veils, the scratches of bears over some figures, and faded or flaked passages; none takes a principal panel. Few surviving images in any medium are older, and none of comparable achievement. Since 1994 the cave has been closed and its fabric watched constantly, after the warnings of Lascaux. What it has kept is the form.
Presence is another matter. For many millennia the work was out of all human sight; it has been known for thirty-two years, and in that time a handful have seen it. Its public presence is carried by photograph, by Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and by the facsimile. In its own field and age no reach can be shown: no line runs from these walls to Lascaux or Altamira, and the later visitors left marks, not answers. Since 1994 the reach is particular. The cave showed a full art at the start of the record and broke the chronology of Leroi-Gourhan, in which art advanced by stages; it shaped the shamanic theory of Clottes and Lewis-Williams, published in 1996; it set the model of the full facsimile. Its dating was attacked as too early on grounds of style, and it has held. On the practice of image-makers since, the reach is thin, and most of it lies in scholarship.
The desk sets the cave a tenth below Lascaux at 8.6, a cave younger by about half the span, drawn larger and in more colour, and less new; and above the Ajanta Caves at 8.4. Newgrange at 8.7, Stonehenge at 8.8 and The Epic of Gilgamesh at 8.9, the oldest work on its own desk, stand above it: works whose built myth or stated meaning survives with them, where here the makers’ meaning is lost. On the visual desk Water Lilies at 8.6 and Broadway Boogie Woogie at 8.4 stand on either side. Deep in the cave the lions still move toward the bison along the wall of the End Chamber, and opposite them, on the hanging rock, the woman and the bison are still one.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged panel by panel, since the cave is not one composition but a sequence of panels laid down by several hands across a span the dates cannot close to less than centuries. In much of it the subtractive test gives: lone animals, single rhinoceros heads, partial outlines, a bear here, a mammoth there; remove many and the cave stands. The panels do not give. On the Panel of the Horses each of the four heads is placed against the last, and to take one is to lose the recession. On the Lion Panel the overlapping heads move one way, and the line is the hunt. The pendant is a woman and a bison on one rock, and either alone is another thing. Necessary in the panels, permitted in the field around them.
Score: 8.0 / 10
What can be stated and held. The animal is known from long attention, in its behaviour and its moods, not as a sign: horses with open mouths and laid ears, lions in a group with the males drawn without manes, as cave lions were, rhinoceroses locking horns, a bison drawn with many legs as it runs. Particular to this cave, the dangerous animals are the subject, lion, bear, rhinoceros and mammoth, and the human being stands as the watcher of powers greater than itself. And the image is full at the start of the record, not tentative. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate: the meaning the makers held is lost, and much of what the cave now gives is awe at the dark and the age, a state rather than a meaning.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Height and frequency. The Panel of the Horses: four heads in charcoal, shaded by smudging, the nearest with its mouth open, in a beauty no later drawing of a horse surpasses. The Lion Panel in the End Chamber: a pride in profile, heads stacked and moving, the most sustained passage in the cave and among the most powerful images of predators in any art. The rhinoceros whose horn is drawn as repeated arcs. The red hand stencils and palm dots, the human mark in the dark. The setting adds terror to beauty: images met by moving flame, far underground, among the hollows and bones of bears. Held below 9.0 because between the great panels lies a field of lesser figures, and because part of the transport is the age and the dark, which belong to the circumstance more than to the image.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Built in one place beyond doubt: the pendant in the End Chamber, where a woman’s pubic triangle and legs are joined to a bison on a hanging rock, the composite of human and animal at the deepest point of the cave, facing the Lion Panel. The hand stencils and palm dots mark presence and threshold. The hunt of lions on bison is the archetype of predator and prey in its earliest monument, and the particular stays particular: these lions, these horses, this rock. Against a higher figure: much of the archetypal structure is read in; the shamanic reading of Clottes and Lewis-Williams is an argument, not a finding; and the cave as a whole cannot be shown to be mythic rather than accumulated. Myth built in the pendant, evoked elsewhere.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance, as far as it survives: Aurignacian portable carving, the ivory animals of the Swabian Jura and the lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, and signs engraved or painted on rock and blocks in southwest France, vulvas and simple outlines of animals. The departure: drawing and painting on the walls of a deep cave at large scale, modelling by smudged charcoal, recession by staggered contours, motion by repeated outlines, the wall scraped pale as a ground, the relief of the rock used as the body of the animal. That is a turn of the first order in what an image on a surface could do. The stake cannot be read with certainty: the cost was labour and danger in a cave the bears used, by carried light, but what was risked socially is unknown, and the immediate predecessors may simply be lost.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Another form would change almost everything the work knows. It knows the animal as emerging from the rock in the dark. The figures are placed on bulges and edges that give them volume: the horses’ heads on a convex wall, the lions along a long stretch of the End Chamber, where in a moving light they move. Carried flame makes the many-legged bison run. Scraping the wall turns the surface into a ground on which a black line reads. The depth orders it: red and dots at the front, the densest black figures and the composite at the back. Put the same animals on portable panels, or light them evenly, and the emergence, the motion and the passage inward go. Held below 9.0 because much of the cave’s figuring is placed without that use of relief.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the evidence is short and intense: thirty-two years since discovery, a closed and continuous programme of study, and questions that have not closed. The dating, attacked as too early on grounds of style, and held; the relation of the first campaign to the later visits; why the predators dominate; the shamanic hypothesis and its critics; the composite on the pendant; whether the bear skull was placed; whether the motion was meant for flame. Each return to the walls has yielded new figures, techniques and sequences of overlap, and the panels reward long looking even in photographs. Against it: one generation of study, much of it on dating and context rather than the images, and a meaning largely beyond recovery, so that return yields more questions than readings.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Force and reach are scored together. The force is very high: the cave shows that drawing with modelling, recession, motion and composition existed in Europe about 36,000 years ago, at the start of the record, and that reorganised the account of what early art could be. Reach is the difficulty. In its own field and age none can be shown: no line runs from these walls to Lascaux or Altamira, and the later visitors left marks, not answers. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: since 1994 the cave broke Leroi-Gourhan’s chronology of art advancing by stages, shaped the shamanic theory of Clottes and Lewis-Williams, published in 1996, is the subject of Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), and set the model of the full facsimile at Pont d’Arc. On image-makers since, the reach is thin.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: about 36,000 years, and the images are legible, many as fresh as when drawn, because rockfall sealed the cave and left its air still. The losses are calcite veils, the scratches of bears over some figures, and faded or flaked passages; none takes a principal panel. Few surviving images in any medium are older, and none of comparable achievement. Presence is the charge. The work was out of all human sight for many millennia, has been known for thirty-two years, and since its discovery has been seen by a handful, its public presence carried by photograph, film and facsimile. Fabric is under constant monitoring. The figure sits low in the upper range: form whole across an unmatched span, presence charged.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Command of charcoal, ochre, engraving and wall, read to the same anchors as every medium. At its height the making is load-bearing: the horses’ heads modelled by smudged charcoal, the muzzles shaded and the open mouths drawn with one sure contour; the lions in a line as economical as any brush drawing, shoulder and head in a single stroke; the rhinoceros horns in repeated arcs; the ground prepared by scraping; the convexity of the rock used as volume. Against a figure at 9.0: the unit is a whole cave and the hands are uneven. Many figures are summary, partial or stiff, the red figures of the front chambers are simpler, and the command of the greatest passages is not carried through the field. Command at the top in the great panels, realisation uneven across the cave.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the red palm dots and hand stencils near the front and the black Lion Panel at the back. They obey one law: the mark made on the living rock in the dark, by hand, in relation to the wall’s form, and the animal in profile, from knowledge, without ground line or setting. The progression from red at the front to dense black at the back is itself an order, a passage inward. The range is wide: many species, single figures and great panels, signs and stencils, the composite, painting, drawing and engraving. Two things resist. The field was accumulated by several hands over a span not closed, and not every figure keeps the law of the great panels; and the signs and dots cannot be shown to share the law of the animals.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: the natural order, in the many species of the Ice Age fauna, predator and prey, in behaviour and in season; death and violence, in the lions’ hunt and the rhinoceroses’ combat; the human presence, in hands, palm marks and the woman’s body; the sacred, in the composite at the back and the passage into the dark; motion and time, in the many legs and repeated outlines. The cave integrates them, holding them in one passage. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the family, the community, the state and history are not shown, and no human figure is whole. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3, The Sublime and The Living Form at 8.9, then The Made at 8.8. Images legible across about 36,000 years, sealed by rockfall and left still, with no principal panel lost; four horses’ heads and a pride of lions that no later drawing surpasses, met by moving flame far underground; a form that knows the animal as emerging from the rock in the dark; and charcoal smudged into modelling, with lines that hold a shoulder and a head in one stroke.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: the fauna, the hunt, the human mark and the sacred at the back are held in one passage, and labour, the family, the community, the state and history are absent, with no human figure whole. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.0: necessary in the panels, permitted in the field around them. Then The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 8.4: the makers’ meaning is lost, myth is built in one pendant and read in elsewhere, and return yields more questions than readings. They are one fact: the image survives whole and what it was for does not.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.3, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5 meet the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 each fall a tenth short, the first because the makers’ meaning is lost and much of what the cave gives is awe, the second because myth is built in the pendant and only evoked elsewhere. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable at 8.0, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. The aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case: the twelve sum to 102.4, an average of 8.53 that displays 8.5, in the Canonical tier.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the cave as recorded, in its published photographs, its scientific literature and Herzog’s film, and not of the original, which only a small scientific team sees; no source was opened for the reading. Nothing is quoted: the makers left no words and no inscription, and the names of the chambers and panels (the Hillaire Chamber, the End Chamber, the Panel of the Horses, the Lion Panel, the Venus) are names given since 1994, used as labels and not as readings. The work scored is the body of paintings, drawings and engravings of the Aurignacian campaign, about 36,000 years ago as recorded, as one work in the cave as it now stands. The later Gravettian visits are part of the cave’s life as a place of image and are weighed where they bear; the cave bear skulls, the block on which one was set, and the facsimile of 2015 are context and are not scored. The author is recorded as Anonymous; the several hands are not charged. Whether the skull was set on its block by people of the Aurignacian is not settled, and the shamanic reading is stated as an argument. Figures that could not be verified are not given, among them the length of the galleries, the number of images, of animal figures and of species and the share of each, the radiocarbon dates of the two phases and their number, the date of the last rockfall, and the members of the scientific team.