Lascaux

Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone. In any case, forty thousand years ago, we left painted handprints on the cave walls of Lascaux, Ardennes, Chauvet.

The black pigment used to pain the animals at Lascaux was made of manganese dioxide and ground quartz; and almost half the mixture was calcium phosphate. Calcium phosphate is produced by heating bone four hundred degrees Celsius, then grinding it.

We made our paints from the bones of the animals we painted.

No image forgets this origin.

The future casts its shadow on the past. In this way, first gestures contain everything; they are a kind of map. The first days of military occupation, the conception of a child, seeds and soil.

Grief is desire in its purest distillation. With the first grave – the first time a name was sown in the earth – the invention of memory.

No word forgets this origin.

(Anne Michaels: The Winter Vault)

I have begun to read this book today morning and just this introduction has put me in good mood. The recollections at my loved France have jumped out of my memory. I have not been there for so long time. I have to go there this year.

I have also remembered Lascaux. I was there, but no in this original one, because it is inaccessible for public due to paint damage by carbon dioxide from visitors breathing. In year 1983, a replica of Lascaux was created, so-called Lascaux II. Here, there are two replicas of cave halls from original Lascaux – The Great Hall of Bulls and Painted Gallery.

Even if they are accurate replicas, they look fully fascinating. One asks oneself, how could prehistoric men paint it? And what conditions like, lack of light, only under a shine of an oil lamp, which was found there too.

The picture, which I have attached, does not affect so monumentally as these ones in the cave, but at least you can make some vision about Lascaux. Second possibility is, of course, to visit France. And surprisingly, Lascaux does not miss even in Second Life.

(Source: Wikipedia)