Cave Painting
Deep in a cave, beyond the reach of any light, someone drew cattle and horses. No name survives. The paintings in France's Chauvet Cave are about 36,000 years old, found in 1994. Lascaux was found in 1940, when a boy chasing his dog fell into a hole in the ground. Spain's Altamira has a slightly longer story. In 1879, Sanz de Sautuola found the paintings there, led to them by his daughter Maria. But the scholarly world would not accept them: too well preserved, they said, no primitive person could have painted this, it must be a fake. He spent ten years defending himself, and died in 1888 still under suspicion. The paintings were finally accepted in 1902. Cartailhac, the very scholar who had led the rejection, wrote a paper titled "Mea Culpa of a Skeptic," visited the cave, and apologized to Maria in person. It arrived twenty-three years late. This map holds one more story just like it, see Hilma af Klint. Taking a long time to arrive, it seems, is not the same as never arriving. And now, the present. This map keeps saying see the real thing at the museum — except in this band, where it cannot. Lascaux opened to the public in 1948; the breath and humidity of 1,800 visitors a day grew algae and lichen on the walls, and it was closed in 1963. Altamira and Chauvet keep people out as well, to preserve them. Nobody can meet the originals any more. What people did about that is, I think, the best story in this band: they dug another cave, exactly like it. Altamira opened its Neocueva, the new cave, in 2001; Chauvet opened a replica in 2015, less than a kilometre from the original; and Lascaux opened Lascaux IV in December 2016, copied to the millimetre, the Hall of the Bulls and its five-metre aurochs included. Incidentally there is a second story about copies standing right beside this one in the origins zone. The great Greek works lost their originals and survive only as Roman copies. Here the original survives, but nobody may enter, so a copy was made. Opposite directions, and the same ending: thanks to a copy, you can still go and look.