The Painted Caves of Lascaux

Lascaux is a network of caves near Montignac in the Dordogne, in southwestern France. The interior walls and ceilings carry over 600 paintings, mostly of large animals: horses, aurochs, deer, ibex, bison. The images correspond to species known from the fossil record of the Upper Palaeolithic in the region. Current estimates, still debated, place the paintings between 17,000 and 22,000 years old, in the early Magdalenian period.

The cave was discovered on 12 September 1940. The paintings were made with mineral pigments—ochres for red and yellow, manganese oxide for black—applied directly to the limestone or blown through hollow bone. In some areas the rock surface was scraped or engraved first. The painters worked deep inside the cave system, far from natural light, which means they worked by the light of torches or lamps burning animal fat. Soot marks and the remains of simple lamps have been found in the caves.

What makes Lascaux unusual is not only the number of images but their placement. The painters chose surfaces with care. Where the wall bulged, they used the contour to suggest the curve of a shoulder or haunch. Where the rock receded, they placed a leg or the line of a back. The animals were not drawn onto the wall so much as drawn with it. This suggests a sustained attention to how the image would read in three dimensions, under moving light.

The paintings are not evenly distributed. The largest and most dramatic images are in the Hall of the Bulls, a large chamber near the entrance to the decorated sections. Other chambers contain smaller, more densely packed compositions. Some areas show signs of repeated work over time, with images overlapping or partially obscuring earlier ones. This indicates that the decoration was not a single campaign but the work of many visits, perhaps over generations.

There is no evidence that people lived in the cave. No hearths, no domestic debris, no signs of habitation have been found in the decorated areas. The paintings were made in a place that was visited, not occupied. Why people went to the trouble of working deep underground, in difficult conditions, to paint animals they could have seen outside, is not known. The images may have had ritual significance, or they may have been part of a practice we have no modern equivalent for.

The cave was opened to the public after the Second World War. By the early 1960s it was clear that the influx of visitors was damaging the paintings. Breath, body heat and the introduction of external air were encouraging the growth of algae and calcite deposits on the walls. The paintings, which had survived 17,000 years in stable conditions, were deteriorating visibly. In 1963 the original cave was closed to the public. It has not reopened.

Since then, several replicas have been constructed. The first, Lascaux II, opened in 1983 and reproduces the Hall of the Bulls and another chamber. Later replicas have added further sections or have been designed as travelling exhibitions. The replicas are based on detailed photographic and laser surveys of the original and are painted using the same techniques and pigments. They are as close to the experience of the original as current technology and scholarship can make them, but they are not the original.