The only hope for dating therefore inhered in the paintings themselves—in the search for an internal
criterion that could order this earliest art into a chronological sequence. Breuil struggled mightily to establish such an order by superposition—that is, by studying paintings drawn over earlier paintings. He succeeded to some extent, but technical problems proved too daunting for a general solution. You cannot always specify the sequence of overlap on an essentially flat surface; moreover, even
if you can, the painting on top could have been executed the next day, or a thousand years after, the one below. Leroi-Gourhan contrasted the ease of dating portable objects found in strata with difficulties for paintings on cave walls: “A reindeer incised on a small plaque, found in a layer that also yielded hundreds of flints, is often easy to date, but a mammoth painted on a cave wall three feet
or more above the ground is cut off from all chronological clues.”
Both scholars therefore turned to the venerable technique of art historians of later times—the analysis of styles. But a problem of circular reasoning now intrudes, for we need a source of evidence separate from the paintings themselves. We can place Michelangelo’s style in the sixteenth century, and Picasso’s in our own, because
we have independent evidence about dates from a known historical record. But nothing either in abstract logic or pictorial necessity dictates that one form of mannerism must be four hundred years old, while another style of cubism could only emerge much later. If we had absolutely no other evidence but Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment
and Picasso’s
Guernica
—no texts, no contexts, no witnesses—we could
not know their temporal order.
In such a context of abysmally limited information—the situation faced by Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan—we must try to construct a theory of stylistic change that might establish a chronological sequence by internal evidence. (If we could say, for example, that realism must precede abstraction, then we could place Michelangelo before Picasso by internal criteria alone.)
I don’t fault these scholars for seeking such a theory of stylistic change—for how else could they have proceeded, given the limitations? But I am intrigued that they fell back so easily and so uncritically—almost automatically, it might seem—upon the most conventional form of progressivist mythology: a chronology ordered by simple to complex, or rude to sophisticated.
I can better grasp Breuil’s
attraction to the legend of progress. He was, after all, a child of the late nineteenth century—the great age of maximal faith in human advance, especially in Western nations at the height of their imperial and industrial expansion (the ravages of World War I ended this illusion for many, though not, apparently, for Breuil). But Leroi-Gourhan’s assent is more puzzling, for his philosophical commitment
to structuralism led him to view the symbolic ensemble of each cave as the expression of an unvarying human psyche, with its dualistic contrasts of male and female, danger and safety, and so forth.
In fact, and in several interesting passages, Leroi-Gourhan addressed this issue directly. He acknowledges that structuralism does lead to a hypothesis of unvarying form and function for caves as sanctuaries
throughout the history of Paleolithic parietal art. But given this constancy of structure, he then argues, how could we untangle chronology except by the hope (and expectation) that styles used to paint the constant symbols will change in a systematic way through time? A bison may always represent the female moiety, and may always occupy the same position within a cave—but artists may learn
to paint bisons better through time. Leroi-Gourhan writes:
The same content persists from first to last. The pairing of animal species with signs appears in the Aurignacian [the first period of cave art] and disappears in the terminal Magdalenian [the last period]. Consequently, the ideological unity of cave art rules out the guideposts that it might provide for us had there been changes in
the basic themes. Only variations in the representation of this uniform subject matter are discernible in the course of a stylistic study.
Parietal art includes a complex array of figures and signs. The figures mostly depict the large mammals of ice-age Europe (various deer, horses, bison, mammoths, rhinos, lions, and several others), but we also find occasional humans (and the more frequent,
and wonderful, handprints, often stenciled by placing a hand against the wall and blowing paint around it with some kind of Paleolithic spray can). In another category, rarely given as much attention but surely surpassing the animal figures in number (and perhaps in interpretive importance), a large variety of signs and symbols festoon the walls—some identifiable as pictures of weapons or body
parts (often sexual), others as geometric forms, and still others quite mysterious.
In the progressivist chronologies of Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan, figures and signs show a superficially opposite directionality. Figures begin with crude and simple outlines and progress to more supple and complex realism, complete with dimensionality and perspective. Signs, on the other hand, become simpler and
more symbolic, with identifiable pictures (of vulvas, for example) evolving to less variable, more symbolic, and often highly simplified geometric representation. Leroi-Gourhan wrote: “The animal figures . . . show a development in form towards a more and more precise analysis. The geometricization of the signs in contrast with the character of the animal figures is one of the interesting aspects
of research into the meaning of the designs.”
But these apparently opposite directions of change for figures and symbols really represent—as Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan repeatedly emphasized—different facets of the same overall theme of progress as the basis of chronology. In painting figures, the artists were trying to do better in representing the animals themselves—and the supposed sequence of
styles marks their continual improvement. But, in drawing signs, the same artists were knowingly developing a system of symbols—and symbols gain universality and meaning by becoming more abstract and reduced to a geometric essence. After all—and the analogy was not lost on these scholars—most alphabets derived their letters as simplified pictures of objects (while the same argument applies with
even more force to the evolution of such character systems as Chinese).
Breuil initially proposed a system of five stages in a single sequence of greater realism and complexity for figures (his papers of the early 1900s make fascinating reading). He later developed his famous theory of two successive cycles, each with a complete history of progress to a pinnacle, followed by late decline. (Breuil
continued to hold, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that the first cycle could be recognized by drawings of animals in “twisted perspective”—that is, with more than one plane represented, as in a bison with a body seen from the side, but with a face pointing forward.)
Breuil’s two schemes are not so different as they appear—for his first notion of five sequential steps included a period
of decline in the middle. I was particularly struck by his adjectives of judgment in supposedly objective descriptions of the stages. In an early article of 1906, he marks the animals of Stage 3 (later to become the decline at the end of the first cycle) as “of a deplorable design, and with a disconcerting lack of proportion.” He then praises the recovery of Stage 4 as one might describe a Renaissance
artist trying to re-create the lost glories of an ancient Greece: “The artists sought to rediscover the model lost in the preceding stage. They obtained this result by polychromy [figures of more than one color]. These paintings are timid at first . . .” Breuil concluded his paper by stating: “Paleolithic art, after an almost infantile beginning, rapidly developed a lively way of depicting
animal forms, but didn’t perfect its painting techniques until an advanced stage.”
Leroi-Gourhan, in contrast, developed a theory of four successive stages in a single series. But his sequence of progress scarcely differed from Breuil’s—though the older scholar wanted to run the story twice. Both schemes began with immobile animals stiffly carved in crude outlines with no interior coloration,
and moved on to ever more accurate images, drawn with a much better feel for mobility, rendered in better perspective, and more richly colored. (The later artists, Leroi-Gourhan believed, reached such a state of perfection that their art stagnated a bit at the end, becoming rather academic in replication of excellence.)
Mario Ruspoli, a disciple of Leroi-Gourhan, epitomized the theory well in
his 1986 book
The Cave of Lascaux.
“From the earliest images onward, one has the impression of being in the presence of a system refined by time . . . The development of Paleolithic cave art may be summed up as 15,000 years of apprenticeship followed by 8,000 years of academicism.”
Leroi-Gourhan recognized the essential similarity of his view with the earlier theories of Breuil. After a detailed
(though respectful) critique of Breuil, and an extensive compendium of their particular differences, Leroi-Gourhan acknowledges the fundamental similarity in their common concept of progress as the key to a chronology of Paleolithic art:
The theory . . . is logical and rational: art apparently began with simple outlines, then developed more elaborate forms to achieve modeling, and then developed
polychrome or bichrome painting before it eventually fell into decadence.
This progressivist theory of increasingly complex and supple realism in Paleolithic painting dominated the field for decades. Writing of Leroi-Gourhan’s four-stage theory, Brigitte and Gilles Delluc (in Ruspoli’s book, cited previously) state simply: “The classification was fairly soon adopted by everyone.” And yet, I
think everyone now realizes that the hypothesis of progressivism in Paleolithic art cannot hold. The march to greater and more complex realism doesn’t make any sense theoretically, and has now been disproven empirically at Chauvet and elsewhere.
Theoretical dubiety.
I don’t want to use this essay as one more rehearsal for my favorite theme that Darwinian evolution cannot be read as a theory of
progress, but only as a mechanism for building better adaptation to changing local environments—and that the equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought. Still, I can’t help pointing out that this prejudice must underlie the ready proposition and acceptance of such
a manifestly improbable notion as linear progress for the history of parietal art from thirty thousand to ten thousand years ago.
But why do I label the progressivist hypothesis of Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan as “manifestly improbable”? After all, humans did evolve from apish ancestors with smaller brains and presumably more limited mental capacities, artistic and otherwise. So why shouldn’t we
see progress through time?
The answer to this query requires a consideration of proper scale. The twenty-thousand-year span of known parietal art does not reach deep into our apish ancestry (where a notion of general mental advance could be defended). The earliest parietal art lies well within the range of our current species,
Homo sapiens.
(By best estimates,
Homo sapiens
evolved in Africa some
200,000 years ago, and had probably migrated into the Levant [if not into Europe proper] by about ninty thousand years ago.) Therefore, the painters of the first known parietal art were far closer in time to folks living today than to the original
Homo sapiens.
But a progressivist critic might still retort: “Okay, I now understand that we are only discussing a sliver of human history, not most
of the whole story since our split from the common ancestor of chimpanzees and us. But the trend of the whole should also be manifest within the shorter history of individual species, for evolution should move slowly and steadily to higher levels of mentality.” Herein lies the key prejudice underlying our uncritical acceptance of the progressivist paradigm for the history of art. It just feels “right”
to us that the very earliest art should be primitive. Older in time should mean more and more rudimentary in mental accomplishment.
And here, I think, we make a simple (but deep and widespread) error. Apparently similar phenomena of different scale do not become automatically comparable, but often (I would say usually) differ profoundly. Changes
between
species in an evolutionary sequence represent
a completely different phenomenon from variation (spatial or temporal)
within
a single species. Humans have bigger brains than ancestral monkeys; these monkeys have bigger brains than distantly ancestral fishes. This increase in brain size does record a great gain in mental complexity. But a correlation of size and smarts across species does not imply that variation in brain size among modern
humans also correlates with intelligence. In fact, normal adults differ in brain size by as much as 1,000 cubic centimeters, and no correlation has ever been found between size and intelligence (the average human brain occupies about 1,300 cc of volume).
Similarly, while evolution obviously produces change between one species and the next in a sequence of descent, most individual species don’t
alter much during their geological lifetimes. Large, widespread, and successful species tend to be especially stable. Humans fall into this category, and the historical record supports such a prediction. Human bodily form has not altered appreciably in 100,000 years. As I stated earlier, the Cro-Magnon cave painters are us—so why should their mental capacity differ from ours? We don’t regard Plato
or King Tut as dumb, even though they lived a long time ago. Remember that the distance from Plato to the parietal painters spans far less time than the interval separating these painters from the first
Homo sapiens.
But defenders of progressivism in parietal art might still fall back upon one potentially promising argument: cultural change differs profoundly from biological evolution. We can
admit biological stability and still expect an accumulative and progressive history of art or invention. The road has been both long and upward from Jericho and some scratch farming to New York City and the World Wide Web.