The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, June 23, 2025

Notably: In The Arts, Hendrick van Loon’s wonderful history of the subject from 1937, he tells the story of the Marquis de Sautuola out on a stroll in the Cantabrian Mountains in 1879, with his 4-year-old daughters. He liked to wander into caves to look for fossils. He went into one at Altamira. His daughter was even more interested in adventuring. She wandered off, sneaking through places where only her lithe body could. She had a candle. She “crept into the lower part of the cave and lifted her candle,” van Loon writes. “But when she looked up, to her great horror she was staring right into the eyes of a bull! Thoroughly frightened, she called for her father, and that is how the first of our famous prehistoric paintings happened to be discovered—by a small girl looking for something to do.” The Marquis was initially denounced as a fake when “professors who came to examine the pictures on the premises insisted that such magnificent paintings could never have been the work of prehistoric savages and openly accused the discoverer of having hired a Madrid artist to cover the walls of this cave with products of his brush, thus enabling the Marquis to pose as a great archaeologist,” but soon after that other caves, including the magnificence of Lascaux in France’s Dordogne region, were discovered (Lascaux, too, was discovered by children). Van Loon doesn’t give us the name of the girl because his internet connection wasn’t working as well as mine is:  Maria Justina, according to one website that put her age at 8, not 4. When the cave was originally examined, the age of the paintings was put at around 17,000 years ago. X-ray technology allowed the discernment of previous paintings beneath, pushing back the earliest such to 35,000 years ago. What I find just as sublime is that moment when Maria looked up and saw the eye of the bull staring at her. To say that there has only been one moment like this in history would be a stretch: we don’t know the dozens, maybe the hundreds, of Marias who had wandered into that cave over the centuries, let alone the many who had lived there over the millennia, though the deep recesses were reserved for very few people. That’s why they were recesses. The paintings, we have learned, were not meant as art, and definitely not for what we today call the general public, but as some sort of sacred projection, a Platonic phenomenon so much older and deeper than Plato’s cave. Still, the story of Maria rattles in the brain with all its evocations of wonders in that moment. How many of us could ever have a moment like this? Maybe we do every day and don’t realize it, simply by looking skyward at a cloud formation or at the way evening light drenches an ordinary scene, but as we’ve never seen it before. It’s not because human hands painted those bulls that the wonder should be limited to Maria’s experience in the cave. But it is a wonder when the human hand’s beauty has been preserved for these thousands of years, and when we are able to see and feel what it did as if it were yesterday. You can’t replicate that, nor the sense that for all these thousands of years, we remain at heart the same, holding that hand across the millennia as if it were kin. And there is something to that moment. As Gide put it in his journal: “No; it’s a useless thing. We can see the same place twenty times, never again with anything new. We look more; we see less. We understand better perhaps… but the delightful astonishment is no longer there.”

—P.T.

 

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All these creatures are drawn in profile with a fine point, and some of their silhouettes have been filled in with a brush or a stumping cloth. I looked for a little ibex, twenty-one inches long, that Clottes had described to me as the work of a perfectionist, and one of the most beautiful animals in a cave. When I found him, he looked so perky that I couldn’t help laughing. Alard was patient, and, since time loses its contours underground, I didn’t know how long we had spent there. “I imagine that you want to see more,” he said after a while, so we moved along. Every encounter with a cave animal takes it and you by surprise. Your light has to rouse it, and your eye has to recognize it, because you tend to see creatures that aren’t there, while missing ones that are. Halfway home to the mortal world, I asked Alard if we could pause and turn off our torches. The acoustics magnify every sound, and it takes the brain a few minutes to accept the totality of the darkness your sight keeps grasping for a hold. Whatever the art means, you understand, at that moment, that its vessel is both a womb and a sepulchre.

–From “First Impressions: What Does the world’s oldest art say about us?” by Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, June 23, 2008.

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.