Justify in which caves of France and Spain, Painting of animals have discovered and also find out why we're this painting made.
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Answers
The cave paintings of Altamira were discovered in 1879 by the nine-year-old daughter of a Spanish nobleman named Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola. She was exploring the cave with her father—who was enticed by recent excavations of prehistoric artifacts in Spain and France—when she spotted a herd of bison grazing overhead. The sophistication with which they were drawn was astonishing. They showed a sureness of line unlike anything known from the Ice Age, a realism eons apart from the engraved mammoth tusks familiar to archaeologists. Invited to visit Altamira, King Alfonso XII was so impressed that he crawled on his knees to view the deepest caverns. The archaeological establishment had the opposite reaction. With the exception of a couple of Spaniards, experts dismissed the cave paintings of Altamira as a hoax: While “crude” ivory fetishes could be reconciled with Ice Age “primitives,” the notion that a Cro-Magnon could draw as well as Ingres simply didn’t fit accepted ideas of human progress.
Over the following decades, more caves were explored, and more paintings were found, some as nuanced as those in Altamira. Gradually scholars came to accept Cro-Magnons’ artistic prowess, and modern artists assimilated it. In 1905–06, Henri Matisse used cave painting as a source for his Fauvist masterpiece Le bonheur de vivre. In 1908, one of Sanz de Sautuola’s most virulent critics, the French archaeologist Émile Cartailhac, published a monograph on Altamira in which he confessed to having been “blinded by some dangerous spirit of dogmatism.”