Georges Bataille - O Nascimento da Arte

The Lascaux cave in the Vézère Valley, two kilometers from the small town of Montignac, is not only the most beautiful, the richest of the prehistoric caves with paintings; it is also the very first tangible sign of man and of art that has reached us. […] This extraordinary cave cannot fail to unsettle anyone who discovers it; it will never cease to answer that longing for a miracle which, in art or in passion, is the deepest aspiration of life.

We often find this need to be amazed childish, yet we always return to it. What seems worthy of being loved is always what unsettles us — the unexpected, the unforeseeable. As if our essence were, paradoxically, bound to a nostalgia for reaching what we had once deemed impossible. From this perspective, Lascaux brings together the rarest conditions: the feeling of miracle that a visit to the cave gives us today, largely due to the chance of its discovery, is in fact doubled by the sense of an unheard-of character these figures must have had for those who lived at the time of their creation.

For us, Lascaux now belongs among the wonders of the world — even though we are surrounded by the incredible richness accumulated through the succession of ages. But what must have been the feeling of the first humans who found themselves among these paintings, even if they did not, as is evident, draw from them a pride similar to ours (so foolishly individualistic)? They must surely have felt a tremendous sense of awe. The awe that is always tied — whatever we may think — to the revelation of the unexpected. It is above all in this sense that we speak of the miracle of Lascaux: because in Lascaux, youthful humanity measured for the first time the extent of its own richness. Of its richness — that is, the power it held to reach the unexpected, the marvelous.