As Europe reopens to travelers, it's more exciting than ever to think about the rich culture that awaits you. For me, one of the greatest pleasures of this trip was the personal exposure to the amazing art and architecture that I collected in my book 100 of Europe's Best Works . Here's an old favorite:
The caveman cave in Lasko surprises with its fashionable décor. The walls are painted with animals - bears, wolves, bulls, horses, deer and cats - as well as some extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth. Homo sapiens is barely visible, but there are carvings of human palms.
All of this was done almost 20,000 years ago in the Stone Age in what is now southwestern France. It is four times older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, before the advent of writing, metallurgy, and agriculture. The caves were carved not by a large, bushy Neanderthal, but by a fully formed Homo sapiens known as the Cro-Magnon.
This is not a raw draft on a charcoal-tipped stick. Rock painting was a complex, expensive, and time-consuming engineering project that was planned and executed around 18,000 BC. dedicated artists, supported by a unified and stable culture. First, they had to move all the materials to a cool, dark, and inaccessible place. (They don't live in those deep limestone caves.) The net is huge—Lasco's main cave is bigger than a football field, and some of the animals are 16 feet tall. Scaffolds are erected to reach high ceilings and walls. They grind the minerals with a mortar and pestle to mix the paint. They work with torches and oil lamps. They create a scene by drawing the main outline of the image with a series of dots connecting the dots. Then this Cro-Magnon of Michelangelo, balanced on the scaffolding, created their Stone Age Sistine Chapel.
The paintings are very realistic. The artist uses black lines to represent moving animals. They use dozens of different pigments to produce different colors. For their "brush", they used something like an animal skin sponge. In another technique, contours are drawn and then filled with spray paint, blown through a hollow bone tube.
Imagine at first. The audience is carried deep into the cave, aided by the light of the torch, into a cold and echoing otherworldly chamber. In the darkness someone lit a torch and a lamp, and suddenly - bam! - the animals come alive, as if they were running through a cave, like in a prehistoric movie.
Why did these Stone Age people, whose lives may have been difficult and dangerous, bother to create the same luxury of art? No one knows. Maybe because as hunters they paint animals to magically increase the number of games. Or maybe they think that if they "beat" an animal by painting it, they can beat it in a later fight. Do they love animals?
Or perhaps the paintings were the result of man's universal desire to be creative, and these caves were the first European art galleries to attract the first tourists. Although the cave is now closed to tourists, a carefully crafted replica of the nearby cave offers visitors a real Stone Age experience.
Today, visiting Lascaux II and IV, replica caves as they are called, allows you to share experiences with the cave dwellers. You may feel connected to those long lost people... or you may be surprised at how different they are from us. In the end, this art remains like the human race itself - a mystery. And miracle