Lascaux Cave Paintings

• Theme: Ritual, nature, shamanism

• Visual: Bulls, horses, handprints

Thinking Through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)’s Philosophy on Art Essence

The Lascaux cave paintings, haunting echoes from the Paleolithic imagination, represent the first triumph of the Dionysian over the chaos of brute existence. In Nietzschean terms, these paintings are not "art" as civilization understands it, but an emanation of life’s will — a primal aesthetic instinct erupting in darkness. They are the first chorus of being, the murmur of humanity awakening not into rationality, but into a song of existence justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche posits that the origin of art lies not in cold mimesis but in the interplay between the Apollonian (the dreamlike, individuated form, clarity, and restraint) and the Dionysian (ecstatic dissolution of boundaries, intoxicated fusion with the primal). These paintings are Dionysian in their core. The frenzied stampede of bulls, the trance-like repetition of forms, the pulsing outlines of horses — all evoke the Dionysian drive to obliterate the self into the rhythm of becoming.

But paradoxically, the handprints mark the birth of the Apollonian illusion: the individuation of the artist. The hand is presence — it is “I am here” — the artist pulling himself out of the universal night of nature and daring to mark identity. In this gesture, the human emerges as a self-aware creature, creating order from instinct and naming himself against the chaos of the universe. The Apollonian begins to shimmer on the dark wall.

And yet, unlike Greek statuary or Renaissance portraits, the Lascaux images are not “pictures” of external beauty but talismans of transformation. They are ritual actions, enacted within the space of ecstatic trance. The art is not for viewing, but for becoming. The bull is not represented — the painter becomes the bull. The artist is not a detached observer but a shaman, merging into the animal and summoning forces greater than himself. The cave is not a gallery; it is a womb of rebirth and re-sacralization of nature.

Here Nietzsche would recognize an art not corrupted by the ascetic ideal — not moralizing, not instructive, not imprisoned in galleries and salons — but free, life-affirming, and irrational in the highest sense. This is art before guilt, before the Fall into morality. It emerges not from alienation but from unity with suffering, from the Dionysian insight that the world is fundamentally pain and flux, and that one must dance into the flame rather than flee it.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes of the eternal return: the affirmation of existence in all its horror and glory, again and again. The Lascaux artists — unknowable, ancient, anonymous — enacted this eternal return through repetition, through drawing the same beasts in endless permutations. These were not just depictions — they were rehearsals of eternal life and eternal death.

The paintings, then, are not primitive art but the primal art: the visual echo of the Dionysian chorus before tragedy took the form of language and drama. They are closer to music than to sculpture — non-linear, rhythmic, symbolic, pulsing. Their meaning is not communicable through logic but suffered through the senses. They touch on what Nietzsche calls the truth of becoming, beyond the veil of individuation, where life justifies itself not through morality or utility, but through beauty as pain.

To Nietzsche, if modernity had retained even an ounce of this raw power, it might have resisted the decadence of ressentiment and the ascetic priest. The Lascaux cave — dark, sacred, dangerous — is a temple to existence. It is not concerned with salvation. It sings of struggle, beauty, and affirmation — not in concept, but in gesture. This is the primordial yes of art: to say yes to death, yes to chaos, yes to nature — and still, to paint.