A mammoth mystery: was accuracy sacrificed to romance in the Museum's mural of Font-de-Gaume?

Charles R. Knight is best known for his large-scale paintings of dinosaurs and extinct mammals, some of which are on display in the American Museum of Natural History's fourth-floor Hall of Vertebrate Origins. Recently, the Museum unveiled a restored Knight mural with a human theme. Cro-Magnon Artists of Southern Frame, which he completed in 1920, depicts a group of Ice Age artists decorating the walls of a cave with a frieze of woolly mammoths perhaps some 14,000 years ago.

This painting, which originally hung in the Museum's Hall of the Age of Man, marvelously captures the atmosphere of the limestone cave of Font-de-Gaume, located in southwestern France near the village of Les Eyzies, on the Vezere River. But Knight had never seen the cave's paintings, and vertebrate paleontologist and the Museum's then president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, wanted the artist to get the details right. So he consulted with the great French archaeologist Abbe Henri Breuil, who dominated scholarship of Ice Age cave art during the first half of the twentieth century. In a letter to Osborn dated January 1919, the Abbe responded to several questions posed by Osborn concerning a preliminary sketch Knight had made in 1914. Among other things, Osborn wanted to know if the cave artists could be shown using reindeer shoulder-blades as palettes for their pigments and holding simple stone lamps that burned animal fat. The Abbe's answer to both these questions was yes, but he expressed reservations about portraying clothed figures in a cave. A few animal-skin garments appeared anyway, possibly as a nod to 1920s sensibilities.

The enigma of the mural, however, lies not in the accoutrements of the Cro-Magnon artists themselves but rather in the subject matter they are painting: In Knight's 1914 sketch, published the following year in Osborn's book Men of the Stone Age: Their Environment, Life, and Art, the artists were shown in the act of creating the frieze of bison for which the cave of Font-de-Gaume is justly renowned. But in Knight's final mural, they are shown depicting a parade of woolly mammoths. In 1912, before the mural project got under way, Osborn had visited Font-de-Gaume in the company of the Abbe and had admired the powerful, if faded, polychrome images of bison there. On the wall opposite the most famous bison group are other bison paintings with some images of mammoths engraved on top of them. Since these mammoths are extremely hard to see, it is rather odd that they became the subject of the final mural, intended to represent Font-de-Gaume.

Perhaps part of the answer is that Osborn was entranced by the idea of Ice Age men as hunters of woolly mammoths--creatures on which he was, moreover, an expert. Perhaps he felt that mammoths were a worthier subject for Ice Age artists than were mere bison, which would have been a fairly humdrum choice for all American audience. After all, until relatively recently, buffalo had teemed on the central plains of the United States, whereas woolly mammoths, here as in Europe (where bison are somewhat more exotic), are more suggestive of the distant Ice Age past.

In a monograph on the cave published in 1910, the Abbe had acknowledged the superimposition of the most striking Font-de-Gaume mammoths on preexisting images of bison. And Osborn had also acknowledged this in an article of his own, published in The American Museum Journal (the precursor of Natural History) in December 1912. Yet in Knight's mural, the cave is being freshly painted with mammoths, with no traces of bison underneath. We suspect that Knight himself was somewhat taken aback when, in the company of the Abbe, he finally visited Font-de-Gaume in person some seven years after completing the mural. For in 1939 he created another picture, depicting a scene similar to his Font-de-Gaume mural, but in this one a Cro-Magnon artist is shown superimposing a mammoth over a previously painted frieze of bison.

Whatever the case, Knight came away with vivid impressions when he finally saw the cave. In his 1949 book, Prehistoric Man: The Great Adventurer, he wrote that the mammoths "were to me intensely romantic," for he pictured the artists breaking off their work to see "the actual living specimens of the great brutes ... an inspiration for a personality now buried forever in the mists of time." He pronounced himself "awed and slightly shaken [by his] glimpse into that long-past world of life."

Despite the mystery of the mammoths, Knight's mural has worn well. The best part of a century later, we still cannot quarrel with most of its details. The scapula palettes, the simple stone lamps illuminating the cave walls, the man grinding pigments on a rock at the far left, the dramatic chiaroscuro of the lighted human figures set against the dark cave walls: all of this accurately and magically evokes the ambience of the cavern and the concentration of the artists within it, caught in the creative process. Whether or not the clothing is at all accurate--something we will never know for sure--this painting is still about as close as we will ever come to re-creating the lives of those long-vanished but gifted ancestors.