Feminine messages from the prehistory of art. The female artists of Grotta Chauvet and Grotta dei Cervi

di Maria Laura Leone

Adapted from Marija Gimbutas - Twenty years of Goddess study - Proceedings of the conference of the same name – Rome 9-10 May 2014 – Laima Editorial Project – Turin

What do we deduce when the art and shapes of the walls of two impressive prehistoric sanctuaries, such as the Chauvet cave in the Ardeche in France and Cave of the Deers in Porto Badisco in Italy, do they largely recall, among others, female symbolisms? Certainly that the female universe has long been interconnected to the sacred devices of the decorated caves, and perhaps that these symbolisms were the direct expression of female artists and exponents of the spiritual structure of the time. This is suggested not only by some studies on handprints but also by the results of the investigations that I am presenting here in the comparison between Chauvet and Grotta dei Cervi. The two artistic systems, even if at the antipodes of the epic of the decorated caves, hide important testimonies of the symbology in question.

Handprint studies

It happens that, after more than a century of research on prehistoric art, wide-ranging reconstructions of the female role in the Paleolithic take hold and that there have also been women among the artists of the caves. In December 2012, an exhibition entitled “Arte sin Artistas. Una mirada al Paleolithic”: the poster and the cover of the catalog bore the image of a painter intent on creating the superb bison of Altamira. A woman-artist, therefore, the sole protagonist of that "ancestral" event which produced some of the most beautiful paintings of humanity. But the young painter is also her mother, in fact she is accompanied by a little girl and is holding a baby in a baby carrier to her chest. This setting is a novelty that anticipates a different vision of early art and, albeit vaguely New Age or even sexist, opens a glimpse of a reality close to the truth, especially if the studies on handprints are confirmed and refined. Since 2004, in fact, a new phase of research has begun on handprints left in negative (called stencils) on cave walls, thanks to an identification parameter established a few years earlier by the British biologist John Manning. The latter, with other researchers, made discoveries on the incidence of hormones in the first months of fetal life, from which it appears that testosterone influences the length of the ring finger and estrogens act on the development of the index finger. In addition, Manning performed a long series of hand measurements and found a recurring relationship between the length of the index and ring fingers on men and women in Europe and the Caucasus. Based on these data, he concluded that the index and ring fingers tend to have similar lengths in women, while in men the ring finger is usually longer than the index finger.

In 2004 Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder, specialists in Paleolithic digital tracings, were the first to do research in this direction, followed by Jean-Michel Chazin (French researcher at the CRNS) and Dean Snow (professor at Pennsylvania State University). These studies revealed a significant incidence of female hands in the caves of Gargas, Peche-Merle El Castillo (reviewed by Dean Snow) and Gua Masri II in Borneo (reviewed by Chazin). If we consider that the footprints were also "trademarks", signatures of artists and of those who had a symbolic link with the images on the walls, we can deduce that cave art was also performed not only by women but also by perhaps mainly from these. In particular, Chazin has developed a software, Kalimain, in collaboration with Arnaud Noury, basing it precisely on the ratio 2Digital (index) :4Digital (ring) abbreviated 2D:4D or even Manning index. In 2006, Nelson, Manning and Sinclair published an article in which they consider the results of the studies on Paleolithic footprints positive and promising but add that the 2D:4D method, although useful, remains probabilistic and essentially suitable for measuring hands, from which magnitudes, a sexual statistic can be drawn.

The method of the hands is a way forward, at least to go back to the size and typological incidence of the footprints but it remains, so far, one more procedure to be associated with the results of other disciplines, such as: palethnology, ethnology, archaeo-mythology, archaeo -psychology, sociology, etc. The joint effort of these will produce increasingly reliable results and identikits. Studies of ethnology and sociology, for example, are reconstructing those social mechanisms that could also go back to the Cro-Magnons. Roles, skills, practices of contemplation and transcendence that see women fully protagonists in the social life of the clans with prominent positions as shamans, curandere, artists, hunters, herbal experts, women of enchantment and more. It is not impossible that this also happened among the Cro-Magnons, when kindergarten was free and without timetables and daily chores were far from the tedium of our domestic economy.

The help of exact sciences such as statistics, chemistry and physics, the study of DNA are instead providing considerable details on datings and burials, confirming a prevalent number of women buried in caves and restarted with art (Cap Blanc, Coussac, Balzi Rossi, clowns, Cave of the Venuses, S. Maria of Agnano), followed by children, adolescents and teenagers (Coussac, La Madelaine, Balzi Rossi, Paglicci) and then by men (Coussac, Villabruna, Arena CandideBalzi Rossi). There Coussac cave is, in this sense, the most interesting, discovered in 2000 is still protected in its palethnological integrity and, so far, has returned at least seven burials dated to 25.000 years ago. Depositions were made inside cave bear kennels and DNA testing revealed the bodies of at least a couple of infants and a teenager.
The frequentation of very young individuals is often attested in the decorated caves, we know it both from the handprints and from the footprints and the two caves in question here are worthy representatives. Grotta dei Cervi contains about a hundred positive little hands of children of about four years, while in Grotta Chauvet there are about twenty footprints of an eight-year-old child (Graziosi P. 1980; AAVV 2010).

Chauvet Cave and Deer Cave

It can be said that Grotta Chauvet and Grotta dei Cervi in Porto Badisco chronologically enclose the entire cycle of decorated caves in Europe, the first dates back to 34.000 years PEC and the second to 6.000 PEC Twenty-eight thousand years separate their art, their worship, their liturgy.
Chauvet's naturalistic paintings are mainly dedicated to animals with an extraordinary bestiary, rich in felines and rhinoceroses, bison, mammoths, horses, megacerus and abstract signs (including two pseudo-butterflies and an insect-like, as also happens in Badisco), with both male and female handprints.
Grotta dei Cervi, on the other hand, has an abstract-geometric graphic of psychedelic, hermetic, confused, enigmatic origin. Nonetheless, according to my analysis, they share a similar ideational and metaphysical system. In both, the paintings are placed in close relationship with the rock conformations, that is to say near walls with dramatic undulations that reproduce humanoid beings and fissures similar to female genitals. If the style of the art is excluded, various symbolic elements are related. The two cavities would therefore be samples of a prehistoric conceptuality still to be explored, from two different eras but evidently connected to each other and belonging to dark, humid and rocky universes, never again exploited to the same artistic extent after the end of the Neolithic.
When I studied the art of Grotta dei Cervi it emerged that the most sacred and venerable point of the underground, concentrated at the end of the central corridor in two adjoining rooms (zone VIII and zone IX), is dedicated to the feminine sphere (Leone, 2001 , 2009). In this point hovers not only the painting of a dancing sprite, the same one that continues to magnetize the attention of the observer (erroneously defined as the sorcerer of Badisco), but there are the only footprints of infant hands and the presence of pubic incisions . In addition to this, the only descriptive panel present here seems to evoke themes of origins: two kissing lovers, a symbol of mating (lingam-yoni), an anthropomorphic butterfly, an idol-form giving birth, a woman with a bucranium in her right hand, two astral figures. Very close to this panel, on a rocky protuberance, I identified the presence of two Paleolithic-type pubic incisions. In this Zone VIII the recurring theme of the rest of the cave is missing, an ithyphallic hunter intent on hunting a sacred deer conducting hierophanies. I will not go into the specifics of this metaphor, but it should not be overlooked that it retains one of the interpretative codes of the art of the underground (Leone, 2009). The feminine indications of this sort of gynaeceum continue in the adjacent room, Zone IX. Here there are two, and perhaps three, painted pubic indications and a scene in which a hunter aims his arrow at an anthropomorphic deer in close semantic relationship with a woman who is about to soar upwards. The feminine references of Grotta dei Cervi do not end here but it is appropriate to examine the feminine peculiarities of Grotta Chauvet.
Initially, I was interested in Grotta Chauvet for the exceptional nature of its artistic production but then certain aspects of it made me find unexpected similarities with Grotta dei Cervi (Leone ML 2010 ab, 2011). Here too, at the end of a lateral branch of the cave, called the Sala del Fondo, a "gynaeceum" is kept, together with an impressive painted wall.

Here the five pubic triangles of the whole cave are concentrated, including a very singular "Venus" painted on a pendant. It can be deduced that the large wall also saw the artistic hand of a woman, both for some of its themes, and because the imprint of a female hand is actually attested in the basement. The identification of this hand and another of the male gender did not arise from the application of Manning's index but from the size of the characters, also deduced from the gestures they would have made in decorating a couple of panels with the palm of their hands (Baffier D. Feruglio V. 1998; AAVV 2010).
Among the natural undulations of the large painted wall you can admire lions, bison, rhinoceroses, horses and mammoths running from the bottom of the cave towards the entrance, while they have been associated with the suggestive shapes of the rock. I insist on the question of the forms of the rock since the due importance has not yet been given to its impact on the artist's creative process, a parameter which I consider essential for the interpretation of art and which has given me surprising results in the studio of Grotta dei Cervi. On the left of the wall in question, near the list of multiple rhinoceroses, the wall has a strange plasticity and a particular "M"-shaped recess in which a horse is painted. Alongside, after a bison and an elephant, the wall forms a pair of eyes similar to those of an owl (bird engraved in the Hillaire Room, prior to the Fund Room) plus, towards the bottom, a sort of mouth formed by a natural niche with a rhinoceros design inside. Further to the right the wall forms a large triangular recess with an oblong cavity similar to a vagina in the centre. Still further to the right, the rocky conformation outlines a gigantic anthropomorphic head seen in profile, with the forehead, the line of the head (equipped with hair or a hood), the eye (perhaps highlighted with the same brown substance that stains a part of the walls) the nose and the chin. This impressive natural head is at the transition point to the so-called Sacristy, the most recondite area of the entire basement. Other completely natural anthropomorphic and humanoid conformations combined with pictorial panels are present inside the Grotta dei Cervi (Leone ML 2009).

The interesting thing is that the paintings never casually invade the natural forms just described, but support them, frame them or exploit them. In fact, the chin of the gigantic head, formed by a rocky pendant called (here again erroneously) panel of the Sorcerer, houses the drawing of a composite being formed by a Venus, a bison and a feline or a lioness (the size of the figures is close to True).
Yanik Le Guillou studied the pendant with telescopic equipment which gave back the total view of it. From this he discovered that Venus was initially isolated and only later, through some cancellations, was she connected with the feline and the bison. The latter, thanks to some unreadable details, would be male.
Of the Venus you can see the pelvis, the pubic triangle and the legs, of the bison there is the head, the shoulder and a paw which, at the same time, is the woman's left leg. The lioness, represented only with the head and part of the neck, constitutes an extension of the bison-woman to the left and it seems to me to be the same anthropomorphic feline painted in the nearby Hillaire Room. Here, in fact, exactly in the Alcova dei Leoni, there is a lioness who emerges from a cut in the rock and at the bottom there is a vaginal-type fissure from which water comes out during the rains. The whole alcove has a shape that seems to recall a maternal womb. It is no coincidence that this point has already been declared by scholars as one of the holiest in the underground, without however relating it to the symbology displayed here. It is certainly a significant point that anticipates the Galleria dei Megaceri, where three pubic triangles announce the spectacle of the theory of lions and the Venus-bison in the background. A topographical ideational system not unlike certain symbolic devices that we find inside the Grotta dei Cervi.

Conclusions

All prehistoric art has profound meanings and remarkable expressive power, but the one produced in caves is special, even disconcerting, because it sometimes shows unexpected expressions. And it has added values compared to the one dedicated to everyday objects. It is more visceral and closely connected to the place, its heat, its humidity, the shapes of the walls as well as the burials placed there and the skeletal remains. In this regard, an unclear aspect of the relationship between art and burials should be highlighted. It is not clear, in fact, in what shape and extent they are linked. Obviously, these places must have been the last homes of special characters: shamans, priests, curandere, acolytes, victims of holocausts and perhaps even special parents. As the mother of Ostuni, a pregnant woman buried in the cave of S. Maria di Agnano in Puglia, placed with a hand on her belly still holding an unborn baby. She was found like this, in her ancient home, after twenty-five thousand years, asleep in the cave-house now consecrated to the Madonna. These female incidences, handprints, burials, pubic forms, are proof of the direct presence of female protagonists. Evidently authors, creators, promoters of a religious universe still to be reconstructed. With these data we cannot exclude that the woman has had a direct role with the arcane statements of the caves, with the myths, the animals and the otherworldly. That she herself was the author of that prototype which we call “Venuses”; the simulacrums of the queen, of the mother, of the fat Lady of beauty, of a link between humans and wild beasts. Nonetheless, for years, all this was considered pure male ideation but if we continue with this uniqueness we will not add anything else to the vastness of the ideation of our species, which instead has always been fervent in both sexes.

Maria Laura Leone

Adapted from Marija Gimbutas - Twenty years of Goddess study - Proceedings of the conference of the same name – Rome 9-10 May 2014 – Laima Editorial Project – Turin

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