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De Sautuola and his adult friends had walked beneath them a dozen times and never looked up. Before that afternoon they had perhaps not been seen by human eyes for 15,000 years. They would have been drawn by men or perhaps women (several of them: the styles vary widely) by the light of burning torches that were vital not only for light but for heat. It was the end of the Ice Age in Europe and Homo sapiens would have been living and hunting—and painting, of course—in a very cool world indeed.
On that warm day in 1879 I imagine de Sautuola shivering with the premonition that this might be the greatest ever discovery of ancient art so far. Yet I wonder whether anything forewarned him that it would also spell his own ruin. He died just nine years later at the age of fifty-seven, a broken man accused of fraud and forgery because the paintings of bison created with charcoal and red ochre were deemed simply too beautiful to have been made by “savages.”
It is curious how artifacts often seem to be found just when history is almost ready for them. Since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories had swept through Western thought. Many people were suddenly open to the notion that humans may have been on earth for longer than the 4,000 years or so the Bible allowed them to be, and fossils and prehistory were even more of a fad among scholars than dinosaurs are among schoolchildren today. Yet this was in the years before carbon dating, and after publishing his amateur pamphlet on the findings at Altamira, de Sautuola had to live with what an English-language guidebook to the caves described as “a veritable shower of misunderstandings,” as well as taunts and accusations. Some gossips even suggested the paintings had been executed by a mute painter called Retier, who had been de Sautuola’s houseguest some time earlier. The artist’s inability to express his denial verbally would no doubt have been agonizing both to himself and his host. Twenty years later the academic world was forced to eat its archaeological top hat, and admit that the paintings were not forgeries. Maria, by then an adult, would no doubt have taken some pleasure in that, although having seen her father’s suffering before his death she would almost certainly have had mixed feelings about the whole episode.
In the twentieth century the French found other caves—most famously Lascaux in the Dordogne in 1940, when some children were caught in a storm and stumbled across the ancient pictures by accident. The Russians, not to be outdone in the Cold War, discovered their own painted caves in the Urals in 1959—complete with a 14,000-year-old depiction of a now-extinct mammoth, with tusks and a trunk and what looks rather like a bowler hat on its head. All of these caves were painted with charcoal and ochres, although occasionally more unusual pigments were used as well— the Magura caves in Bulgaria were apparently painted deep brown with a thick application of bat guano.5
Then in 1994 an extraordinary discovery by three cave explorers in the Ardeche Valley in southern France revealed paintings that were at least twice as old as those in Lascaux or Altamira or anywhere else in Europe. They were the oldest European cave paintings known to modern science, and the Panel of the Horses represents one of the most astonishing uses of charcoal ever seen in prehistoric art. In his book, Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings, Jean-Marie Chauvet described the breathless moment of discovering the cave that would later be named after him6—of walking up a steep slope of stone blocks and suddenly coming across a monumental frieze, covering 10 meters of one wall. “There was a burst of shouts of joy and tears. We felt gripped by madness and dizziness. The animals were innumerable, a dozen lions or lionesses, rhinoceroses, bison, mammoths, a reindeer,” he wrote. And then, to one side, he said, they saw on an overhang a human figure with a bison’s head—which seemed to them to be a magician, supervising the entire painting.
Even from photographs you can understand the explorers’ excitement. The rocks look even more dramatic because of the natural yellow color all over the walls, which creates a swirling caramel effect. Other paintings in the Chauvet cave include ochre, but the animals in the Panel of the Horses are entirely in charcoal. In one place four horses seem to rear up, ready to gallop; their heads are skillfully shadowed in charcoal while their bodies are just sketched roughly. This tendency to concentrate on the fronts of the animals gives the sense not just of movement but of stampede. On a wall near the horses Chauvet saw what he described as “engravings of animals and stylized vulvas (one of which seemed to have a phallus drawn on it).” He or his publisher decided not to include an illustration of this example of Paleolithic sexuality, but perhaps Pliny was right after all, and he was merely being coy when he suggested it was the beloved’s face that was being drawn on that ancient wall in Greece.
IMPERMANENCE
Would the maid of Corinth have gazed at her painting often after her lover’s ship had left? If so, then I wonder whether it could have lasted until his return. On their own, without human observers to wonder at them, these ancient charcoal cave drawings—especially if mixed with glue or fat or blood or egg—can last for an ice age and through another 10,000 years of summer rains. But as soon as people find them and pay them any kind of attention the drawings start to fade, almost as if too much looking wears them out. Keeping one’s work permanent is a perennial problem for all artists, but few people dare hope that the marks they have made can last for 15,000 years. And these paintings of the past, unprotected by varnish, but protected by their own stable environment, are vulnerable as soon as that environment changes. They were painted with ashes and they are returning to dust.
Anthropologist Desmond Morris described how he had first been entranced by the cave paintings at Lascaux a few years after their discovery, but when he returned four decades later he was disappointed. At first he wondered whether his memory was playing tricks with him, but later he learned from a report that it was not his memory but the paintings themselves which had faded, because so many people were entering the caves to see them. 7 Shortly after that report was written, in the mid-1990s, the authorities closed Lascaux, and spent many millions of francs creating replica chambers to enable tourists to get an idea of the paintings without damaging them with the moisture from their breath. The trouble is, the true wonder of all of these caves is not really in the accurate charcoal shapes of the bison, or even the shade of the ochres. It is that one day or night by torchlight, 15,000 years ago—or, in the case of Chauvet, 30,000 years ago—those rocks were once touched by artists. They were talking to each other in tongues we could not understand today, their minds were full of images and rituals and rules that we can hardly guess at, yet their messages from the other side of the Ice Age stretch toward us through their drawings. A reproduction of a cave in even the most tasteful of concretes and newly burned charcoals cannot even begin to reproduce that magic of communication across time—and the reminder that wherever and whenever men and women have lived, they have also painted.
CHARCOAL
As the Corinth couple realized, charcoal can be found almost anywhere there has been a fire. But in my own initial search for this early pigment I decided to be more discerning than simply looking in the nearest grate. One of the finer versions of this drawing material is willow charcoal, which Cennino Cennini had recommended his fourteenth-century Italian readers use for drawing, “for there are no better coals anywhere.” And indeed the highly detailed Leonardo da Vinci cartoon I saw in the National Gallery in London shows how the best charcoal can be soft and spontaneous, yet precise enough for making outlines for frescos. (That cartoon was incidentally never used for a fresco—if it had been, it would be full of little holes where the artist had “pounced” or “pierced” it, and then rubbed charcoal powder through the holes to transfer the design.) Today this same kind of charcoal is found, among other places, in the land of the cider apple—the flatlands of south-west England, where I discovered a compelling story of biscuit tins, burned crops and a sick man’s fierce determination to fight bankruptcy.
The charcoal willow is quite different from the weeping willow of
ancient Chinese paintings, or the tree on which the Jews hung their harps by the Babylon river, just before they sat down to weep for their homeland. That tree was an import to Europe and America in the eighteenth century at a time when most oriental things were in fashion. Instead, this is the ancient plant that Viking women wove into useful containers while their men were out exploring and pillaging. They called it “viker,” from which Old English derived the verb “wican,” meaning to bend, and modern English gets the adjective “weak,” even though the baskets are remarkably strong. When it is growing in the fields, willow looks more like a cereal crop than anything resembling trees; after it is first cut it looks like the thickest of orange hay, taller than a man but only as wide as a twig. It is planted in springtime, and the early growth is controlled by letting cattle graze on it. Without this, the early plants would be stunted by frost, and the rods would be curled and unusable.
Charcoal is an ancient drawing material, but Britain’s main supplier—PH Coate’s—has only been producing it for just over forty years, and only, astonishingly, because of an accident. Or rather because of two accidents, the first one being a slipped disk, when the late Percy Coate fell over one autumn day in the mid-1950s. He spent two months lying on the floor, as weak as his own wicker and worrying about money. Once upon a time willow was good business—it was the bubble wrap of its time, and almost every merchant ship leaving Liverpool or London had its valuables secured in wicker hampers. But then, between the wars, it went out of fashion. Old-fashioned baskets had no role in the post-nuclear world of plastic, and the company was about to go bankrupt. But it was hard to know what they could turn to instead. The Coate family’s land was perfect for this one crop—this particular part of Somerset is below sea level, and willow loves water—but not for much else.
One morning Percy was lying in front of the fire, fretting, when he saw among the ashes something that would change his life. It was a piece of burned willow, slim and perfect. The person who had lit the fire had used willow for kindling, as the family had done for generations. Usually it dissolves into cinders and merges with the ashes. “But for some reason this little piece had survived, and rolled out of the fire on its own,” his daughter-in-law Ann Coate told me.
Percy picked it up and started to scribble, and suddenly a new venture was born. He would burn his business, in order to survive. He spent the rest of his convalescence experimenting by roasting little bits of willow in biscuit tins. In his Craftsman’s Handbook, Cennino Cennini had advised fourteenth-century charcoal-makers to tie up the willow sticks in bunches, put them in a brand-new airtight casserole, “then go to the baker’s in the evening, after he has stopped work, and put this casserole into the oven; let it stay there until morning and see whether these coals are well roasted and good and black.”
Six centuries later, Percy Coate’s first experiments were similar: he would leave his willow stubs in an old oven for different amounts of time, and check how good the results were for drawing. It wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds, though, and sometimes those biscuit tins would end up in the courtyard, thrown out in anger at a failed experiment. Artists’ charcoal is tricky; it has to be charred uniformly right through in order for the artist to draw a consistent black. But eventually Percy got it right, and today there is scarcely a classroom in Britain without its box of PH Coate’s charcoal.8
SEDUCTIVE MASCARA
History—or at least Pliny—does not relate what happened to the young woman of Corinth after her man left. She had, after all, played out her mythical role in the Roman’s legend. But then one day, missing my own lover who was far away in distant lands, I got to wondering about the maid, and what could have happened next. Having invented, in a fit of passion, a whole new form of human expression, she was suddenly on her own. She was evidently a creative person, and I imagined her whiling away her now too-spare hours with other art experiments. She may, I fancied, have sketched her beloved’s image over the wall until it was full of him, then the floor or the ceiling. Then, as the hours stretched into days and weeks, she may have become accustomed to his absence enough to extend her boundaries. Perhaps she added her own self-portrait, or played with her young nephews and nieces by drawing around their feet or hands (as I saw in those early Aboriginal caves in Australia) to entertain them. She may then have tried to draw trees and dogs and horses and little two-story houses to represent her dreams for the future.
But what if she became tired of using just one variety of paint material? Perhaps, I thought, she may have tried out new blacks and browns. Would she, given the chance to try out charcoal’s successors, have preferred lead pencils or Indian ink? Would she have dyed her clothes deepest black, or was it only in the palest of classical robes that she wanted to be seen? And if her boyfriend ever returned to Greece between voyages, would she have used her new knowledge of pigments to decorate her own face for the occasion?
I imagined our heroine experimenting idly with mascaras and liners. First she may have used her own painting material, charcoal, but she would have found it stung a little, when brought too close to sensitive eyes. So then she may have tried an alchemical metal called antimony or “kohl.” It is the traditional component of many Middle Eastern eyeliners, and is still used today by cosmetics companies. The word “kohl” comes from the Arabic word kahala, meaning to stain the eyes. Today in Europe kohl is usually seen as an ornament, but in Asia it has often been used as both spiritual protection and health cure. In Taliban-run Kabul you could always tell the fundamentalist soldiers because their eyes were lined with black. It made them look as pretty as girls, but it was worn explicitly to show that Allah was protecting them. I once saw an Afghan father painting his small son’s eyes with kohl. He was doing it to protect the boy from conjunctivitis, he said. But that was because he was a modern thinker, he told me. For other parents it was sometimes an attempt to charm demons away. Allah, incidentally, may not have approved of what the Europeans did with the word “kohl.” In 1626 Francis Bacon reported in his book Sylva that “the Turkes have a black powder, made of a Mineral called Alcohole; which with a fine long Pencil they lay under their Eyelid.” Seeing the purity of the dark gray powder, they had associated it with something else that had been refined and sublimed, and so found a name for alcohol, the bane of Islam.
If my almost imaginary maid was as interested in the dark arts as in the art of making dark pigments, she may well have tried a little black love magic of her own. Among a myriad of pieces of advice for lovers contained in the Kama Sutra is the tantalizing recipe for the ultimate sexual mascara. It recommends taking the bone of a camel, dipping it into the juice of the Eclipta prostrata (which is also called the tattoo plant because of the dark blue dye that comes from it) and then burning it. The makeup-maker should then store the black pigment in a camel-bone box, later applying it to the eyelashes using a camel-bone pencil. The reward, promises Richard Burton’s unexpurgated 1883 translation of the Indian love manual, is not only that the pigment will be “Very pure and wholesome for the eyes,” but that it also “Serves as a means of subjugating others to the person who uses it.” Let us hope, though, that the woman’s boyfriend hadn’t read the same text. One section recommends that men make a powder out of certain sprouts mixed with red arsenic, then mix it all with monkey excrement. If an ardent lover throws this “Upon a maiden, she will not be given in marriage to anybody else,” the good book promises. Probably fairly accurately.
PENCILS
The woman was primarily an artist, and she would surely have liked the idea of trying out alternatives to charcoal as a drawing material. There is a popular anecdote to the effect that NASA scientists in the 1960s spent millions of dollars developing writing instruments that would work in zero gravity. “What have you done?” they then asked their Russian counterparts, who looked bewildered. “We have the common pencil,” they said.
Nowadays we can call the lead pencil “common” with impunity, but once this stuff was valued so highly that pe
ople risked their lives to find it and steal it. The maid of Corinth would probably have had to wait until the sixteenth century before she found anything like lead pencils in Europe—up until then artists tended to sketch using what they called “silverpoint”—pens with tips made of silver wire, which made dark marks on surfaces covered with chalk or bone ash. However, had she been a maid of Copacabana or of Colombia then she might have had a chance to use them in her own classical world several millennia before that. When Hernando Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519 he recorded that the Aztecs used crayons made of a gray mineral, 9 although he did not say what they were for.
The first curious discovery—for me—was that pencil “lead” had no lead in it at all. The rules I remember from my schooldays about not chewing our pencils were not misplaced (pencils are not the healthiest of snacks) but they were not life-saving either. At several points in history real lead was used for drawing—Pliny refers to lead being used for ruling lines on papyrus, perhaps to keep junior scribes from making unsightly notes, and in fourteenth-century Italy early artists’ pencils were sometimes made of a cocktail of lead and tin which could, apparently, be rubbed out using bread-crumbs, just like charcoal. But ever since the middle of the sixteenth century “lead” drawing materials have been made of a very different material, a material that is scarcely metallic at all.