Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. 1st American Edition. Hardcover. 4to - over 9¾ - 12" tall. Fine / Fine. Item #008862
Full brown cloth. 135 pp. Ninety-four illustrations in full colour + 1 map. Fine. In December 1994, in the Ardeche Valley of southeast France, three explorers chanced upon the hidden entrance to an underground cavern. Digging away the rubble, they made their way through a narrow passage into a vast cave, and there made one of the most thrilling discoveries of modern times: The Chauvet cave, which had been untouched for thousands of years. It was filled with Stone Age bear skeletons and footprints, the blackened remains of fires, and, most importantly, walls covered with more than 300 extraordinary paintings and engravings of animals. These staggering images proved to be doubly remarkable, for not only have radiocarbon tests established them to be over 30,000 years old - the oldest known paintings in the world, nearly twice as old as those found at Lascaux - but they are powerful, sophisticated works of art rather than crude sketches. Dawn of Art is the first book in English on the images that have, as the French Ministry of Culture declared, "overturned the accepted notion about the first appearance of art and its development."
Price: $125.00