Steak - Mark Schatzker [28]
Pictures of steak.
The steak was still on the hoof, as it were, in the form of paintings of aurochs and other meaty animals, including horses, bison, reindeer, an enormous deer called Megaloceros, and a variety of large four-legged game. In the most famous prehistoric cave—that of Lascaux—the aurochs are placed front and center. They even have their own room: the Hall of Bulls.
The caves sit so close to the present-day town of Montignac that it’s hard to believe it took until the autumn of 1940 for modern, crop-harvesting humans—in this case, four teenagers and a dog—to have found the caves and those amazing paintings. Montignac sits in a picturesque patch of French countryside called the Périgord that looks tailor-made for aurochs. My train from Paris chugged through dense pockets of forest that opened into spreading valleys carpeted in pasture. Out in the fields, cattle, stooped over and grazing, looked like little lumps.
Finding parking at Lascaux is astoundingly easy considering that, in Europe, the amount of parking is inversely related to the age of a monument. Swaths have been cleared in the woods large enough to accommodate tour buses that lurch through the greenery like mastodons. From the ticket counter, I walked down a ramp, and a left turn took me inside the earth’s crust and sixteen thousand years into prehistory.
The Hall of Bulls was dark and cool, a tranquil refuge from the world above. The sloping cave walls put the paintings right in front of you and connect the viewer to the painted subject more intimately than most art galleries do. It seemed as though Stone Age people were calling out to the natural world, saying, Hey, we can paint you!
The aurochs at Lascaux are so big, the sight of them made me flinch. Their form was both crude and masterful and captured the unnerving heft of these taller-than-a-human beasts. Technically, there are more horses than aurochs depicted, but proportionally the aurochs are three times larger than the other animals. They have the lead role, appearing almost as objects of worship. But in truth, these ancient images that had reached across the chasm of history to touch me were all certifiable fakes, according to the guide. The genuine caves sit two hundred meters away and have been sealed off from visitors, whose moist exhalations infected them with mold.
The guide was a friendly middle-aged Frenchman named Denis Tauxe who described the present caves as “a true reproduction” and felt that, from an experiential point of view, visitors weren’t missing much, other than an always-sought-after sense of authenticity, which is something I hadn’t been missing until I learned the apparently ancient cave I was standing in had been molded out of concrete in the early 1980s.
When the tour concluded, I invited Tauxe out for lunch. We headed down the hill to a little restaurant across the road from a herd of grazing cows. The special of the day was flank steak, which we both ordered, eating marinated mushrooms from the salad bar while the steaks were cooking. Within the hierarchy of Europe’s many prehistoric painted caves, Lascaux is considered the Sistine Chapel, according to Tauxe. It dates from the Magdalenian Period, making it around fourteen thousand years younger than the oldest painted cave in Europe. This makes cave painting—however passé—the world’s longest-lived artistic movement.
In France, discussions of art invariably turn toward the thorny subject of meaning, and Lascaux is no exception. Interpreters have long had a funny habit of asserting that nothing can be known about the beliefs and artistic intentions of an unknown people who spoke an unknown tongue more than ten thousand years before the beginning of history, and then they tell you precisely what the paintings mean.
One of the first theories about Lascaux was that the paintings were an attempt at a sort of hunting magic: depicting lots of animals in caves would cause more to appear out in the