Caves of Lascaux Essay

The caves of Lascaux is a cave with a series of paintings that is said to date back about seventeen thousand years. They were found by a teenager in southwestern France and have been fascinating ever since. What makes these paintings so special is the fact that they depict many animals that were present in the area at the time. This is very unique in the sense that the people who created these paintings were doing this out of freedom of expression. They were expressing how they felt when around these animals, they were expressing what they dealt with on a daily basis. To this day, don’t we as a people still do the same thing?

These people were some of the first to express what they saw through paintings. These paintings have influenced us by giving us an idea of how things were some seventeen thousand years ago. They gave us insight on what they saw and what interested them. People only draw and paint things that are appealing to them as a form of expression. I stress expression because these people clearly did not lack expression and were proud to display their creations openly on their cave walls. There is a strong connection between these paintings and what we see in the modern world today.

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In the modern world, we use various techniques to make sure our creations come out in such a way that is appealing to our liking. This is also the case with the people who created the Lascaux cave paintings. They used a technique known as “perspective painting” in some of their work, and this was considered to be advanced for them. Reason being because this particular technique gives off the illusion of a deeper visual depth that makes the painting “pop” out more. This is remarkable in the sense that they mastered a technique that was claimed after they displayed it, odd isn’t it?

They are so alike us in the sense that they also painted what they knew about, and we do the same. These paintings gave us so much insight on how people years ago lived and they were smarter than what we took them for. The fact that there are hundreds of paintings in the cave that have faded away only tells us that they were creative and there is more that we don’t know about them . These people were also very organized in the sense that these paintings were not randomly all over the place, but they were in different sections.

One area held the hall of bulls, another “the passageway”, the shaft, the nave, the Aspe, and the chamber of felines. Just like in our modern times, they organized their artwork by category and make sure everything was alike the other in the area. Again, this is remarkable because it shows us that these people were smarter than what we took them as. In conclusion, these series of paintings has taught us to respect the past because there are a lot of things we don’t know and we should value and appreciate what we do know.