The earliest surviving cave and rock art was created in the Paleolithic period (40,000-10,000 years ago) in locations that were not sites of human habitation. Some Paleolithic artwork was ephemeral-only six examples of open-air engravings survive-but the fine-art engravings and paintings that decorate caves were made to last and did last, in some cases for hundreds and even thousands of years, during which they were available for delight and use. Big cave galleries thus contained work done over a long period. available for comparison to people who had some notion of historical time and were developing a sense of their ancestry. The best Paleolithic art, especially the polychrome paintings, was the work of professionals.

We can say this with some confidence, for cave art at its best was difficult and expensive to produce. In the first place. it required lighting. Some 85 certain and 31 probable examples of Paleolithic lamps have survived, but less than one-third of them were found inside caves. The conjecture, therefore, is that artists usually worked by torchlight. Both lamps and torches consume animal fats in large quantities. Second. while it is true that some of the best cave paintings, especially at Altamira in Spain, were painted by artists standing up or in some cases lying down or squatting. others required elaborate scaffolding, no different in principle from that used by Renaissance artist Michelangelo when he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Some of the paintings were done on a gigantic scale or at heights many feet above the cave floor. The sheer scale of the art is daunting. The big cave vault at Lascaux known as the Picture Gallery, is over 100 feet long and 35 feet wide Caves were especially chosen for their size as well as for their security. Niaux in the Pyrenees Mountains in Europe is over half a mile in length, and this is by no means unusual. The big cave at Rouffignac runs over 6 miles (more than 9 kilometers) into the mountain, and some of its huge collection of drawing-engravings are nearly 7 feet (over 2 meters) long.

Professional cave artists, then, needed not only platforms and scaffolding, whose existence at Lascaux. for instance. is betrayed by sockets cut into the walls. but assistants. They mixed the paints some of which had to be used quickly before they dried; filled the lamps or held the torches: put up and secured the scaffolding: and made the brushes from twigs, feathers. leaves. and animal hairs. to the satisfaction of the master. These assistants probably graduated into masters themselves. It is not going too far to speak of a studio system as the basis of Paleolithic cave art. After all, there is positive evidence that art studios. where important works were fabricated and artists trained. existed in Egypt at least as far back as 3000 B.C. That still leaves a gap of 7.000 years from the end of the Paleolithic period, but the quality and consistency of the best painted work in caves, and the evidence of the time, expense, and skill required to produce them, does suggest that artists needed the collective support of something very like a studio. The probability is that the leading cave artists were important persons.

This brings us to quality. To modern eyes, accustomed to 5,000 years of continuous development in the depiction of living forms, the best of the Paleolithic paintings are magnificent. Indeed, seen in depth and in the total silence of the caves, the images are awesome. Human forms are rare and often quite unsophisticated, but the variety of animal forms is impressive. In the eight galleries of the great cave at Les Eyzies, there are multiple examples of mammoths, reindeer, horses, stags, bison, and wolves, as well as humanoids and abstractions or signs. These interlocking galleries, unfolding one by one, are meant to impress and they do. The art is both detailed and monumental, oscillating designedly between simplification and elaboration, between stasis and extreme dynamism. Some Paleolithic artists clearly understood both the anatomy of the animals they depicted and their principles of motion, the result of intense observation over many years and of a self-discipline in rendering that suggests a long apprenticeship and extensive study.