Note: It must be the beginning of summer that turns my fancy to blogging. I notice that my last post was about this time last year. Also, a few of you loyal readers kept asking me when I would write. So the blog returns.
A few weeks ago, I saw a documentary showing the Chauvet Cave in southern France. Discovered in 1994, the cave contains paleolithic era wall paintings estimated to be 30,000 years old. Avoiding the disaster of the Lascaux cave paintings, which have been damaged by tourism and closed, the French strictly limit access to archaologists and scientists.
One film crew has been admitted and produced a 3D documentary film so the experience is available to the rest of us. Current high tech brings us prehistoric low tech. I have thought of 3D as a gimmick, but not in this instance. The value of technology is in the application perhaps.
The impressive thing about the paintings is not only their age but their beauty. The painters produced sensuously curved lines and employed shading to create a sense of form.
The painting might have been a religious ritual or other ceremony. Paleolithic people necessarily would have devoted most of their time and energy to survival. Yet they still devoted some of that scarce time and energy to spiritual and aesthetic pursuits. Does this tell us something about being human?
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
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