PRESIDENT Hollande stepped into a time machine this month when he opened the Grotte Chauvet painted cave replica at Caverne du Pont d’Arc – with millimetre-perfect reproductions of hundreds of prehistoric drawings dating back 36,000 years.
He was the first of an expected 300,000 visitors a year to see the facsimiles, with the Ardèche cave hailed as one of the world’s natural wonders last year when it was added to the Unesco World Heritage List. It joined the Grotte de Lascaux in Dordogne, which is half its age.
A landmark in civilisation, the cave has more than 1,000 paintings and drawings in its 400m length, with 425 animals including cave bears, lions, mammoths, rhinos and horses.
What makes it unique is the advanced artistry involved: using cave contours to give life and movement to the animals’ bodies, smudging charcoal to get different tones, scraping off excess paint to give finer features – and even using perspective.
Paleologist Jean Clottes, one of the first scientists to see the paintings, realised its importance immediately.
He said: “When I saw the Horses panel for the first time, I felt the most beautiful emotion of my life. This was nothing scientific. I realised that I was in front of a great work of art”
Costing €55million and taking 30 months of work by hundreds of artists and builders, the facsimile reproduces the underground atmosphere of the original Aurignacian cave: the smell, moisture and silence – as if men and bears could return at any moment.
One of the key artists was Toulouse paleolithic art historian Gilles Tosello who has worked on the cave since 1998. He recreated the key Horses panel and the Lions fresco.
He said: “When I first went into the cave and saw the paintings I was astonished. They were so fresh and so well preserved they looked as if they had only just been painted.
“It was as if time hadn’t passed.
“There were fingerprints, or little bits of material stuck to the strokes or, where, for example, they used a finger to draw a stroke in the clay at the end of the line there was a little bit of clay sticking up – as if just finished.
“They used their fingers to ‘stretch out’ the charcoal mark to get a grey colour that they used to show the volumes of the animal bodies. This is the oldest example of this we have found – possibly the origin of this technique.
“There are not many human traces in the cave but there are plenty of signs of bears: prints on the ground, scratches on the wall. Men and bears did not share the cave at the same time, because some of the paintings cover older scratches and other paintings have bear scratch-marks.”
Gilles Tosello, celui qui refait la grotte de Chauvet: un travail au coeur du mystère de l'humanité @RoseauKarachi http://t.co/t0qHKYF18K— Sylvain Rotillon (@SRotillon) September 4, 2014
Before he could start work the cave was 3D scanned with the scan accurate to 0.3mm to reveal the tiniest bump and crack and creating a “cloud map” of 16 billion points. Next more than 6,000 high-definition photos were taken and superimposed on the 3D scanned image, fitting round the imperfections. In all, the work took two years.
Mr Tosello said: “This was especially important as one of the main difficulties recreating this is that the cave wall is very uneven. It is impossible to get a drawing in exactly the right place without the scan and photos.”
Paleologists also found the 3D scan invaluable as they could examine it in the finest detail. Before they had had to use binoculars to view parts of the cave.
Get details for the Caverne du Pont d’Arc on its website and see videos of the work in progress at
The Cavern of Pont-d’Arc project 6′ and The Cavern of Pont-d’Arc (creation) – 4′
You can also see Gilles Tosello at work and see an interview – in French – with prehistorian and Chauvet project leader Dr Jean Clottes
(You will need QuickTime installed on your computer to view these videos).
Visitors havebeen bannedin Chauvet cavesince 1994
The replica is 2km from the original, which is on a cliff above an old meander of the river Ardèche and looking down on the famous Pont d’Arc.
The Caverne du Pont d’Arc has taken 30 months of work by artists and builders and will allow millions of visitors to see the remarkable paintings as the cave has been closed to visits since its discovery in 1994.
The government wanted to avoid the mistakes made at Lascaux, where the breath of thousands of visitors damaged the paintings.
Grotte Chauvet’s own in-built protection system has preserved the paintings down the centuries: as outdoor temperatures rise, carbon dioxide and radon are released in the cave: very unpleasant for humans but toxic for the bacteria causing damage in Lascaux.
Covering 3,000m2, the replica is less than half the size of the real cave yet is 10 times the size of the Lascaux replica. It has been condensed down from the original 8,500m2 but includes all the main drawings.
