Cave Art and the Theory of Art: The Origins of the Religious Interpretation of Palaeolithic Graphic Expression

Abstract

This paper explores the origins of the symbolic-religious interpretation of Palaeolithic art. We analyse the relationship between the explanations that were given of the 'primitive' mentality in the second half of the nineteenth century and the birth of the religious interpretations of Palaeolithic art and we try to show how this union does not express a direct cause-effect relationship. In order for the union to take place, an intellectual change that would generate a new way of understanding the origins and the nature of art was necessary. an ongoing debateSince the late 1960s, there has developed the idea that the recognition of the age of Palaeolithic cave art was closely linked to the 'conceptual discovery' of the symbolic and religious world of primitive peoples.Indeed, the existence in the nineteenth century of an over-rigid idea of progress has been the corner-stone of the explanation for the slow process of the acceptance of cave art. In that way, a very simplistic form of evolutionism, which denied any hint of symbolic and intellectual complexity amongst hunter-gatherers, made it impossible to fit such art within a 'savage' society. It was only when this idea of progress became more flexible, in parallel with the discovery and more precise definition of the symbolic-religious world of primitive people, that the prehistoric chronology of the parietal depictions could be accepted (Ucko and Rosenfeld

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