Font-de-Gaume

▪ cave, Dordogne, France

      cave near Les Eyzies, in Dordogne, France, known for its lavish prehistoric wall paintings (mural).

      First discovered as a locus of art in 1901, the cave has a high, narrow main gallery and several side passages. It contains about 230 engraved and painted figures, including 82 bison, horses, mammoths, reindeer, a woolly rhinoceros, and a wolf. Its most famous images are a leaping horse and a scene in which a male reindeer licks the forehead of a female.

      As is often the case in ice age art, the artists who created the figures at Font-de-Gaume extensively incorporated the cave's natural relief so as to give their paintings a three-dimensional quality. The animals were painted in monochrome and polychrome, usually in shades of red, brown, and black, and were sometimes superimposed on earlier pictures, making it possible to discern a chronological sequence of artistic development. Most of the paintings probably date to the mid-Magdalenian (Magdalenian culture) Period of Paleolithic (Paleolithic Period) art (about 14,000 years ago), though some may be older.

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