3
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000
41,000 years ago and may have been made by
Neanderthals and a team working at another site in
southern France - the caves at Abri Castanet - have
found engravings that are almost as old and may be
even older.
Not only would this put the work at Abri
Castanet among the world’s most ancient cave art but
it would also make it the world’s oldest public art.
For rather than being tucked away deep inside the
cave the newly discovered engravings are outside
the cave on the ceiling of the rock shelter above
where the prehistoric men and women slept, ate and
lived. And this time it isn’t rhinos and lions but what
the archaeologists believe to be female genitalia.
Don’t ask me why I know this because I can’t
remember but the cave image isn’t a million miles
removed from the symbol used for woman in the
earliest known form of writing – cuneiform.
League Tables
The Ancient Greeks who had conquered most of their
known world, along the rim of the Mediterranean Sea,
by the 4
th
Century BC were the first to draw up a
league table of public art for it is to them that we
owe the tradition of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Of the Seven Ancient Wonders only one survives
relatively intact - the Great Pyramid of Giza made in
the 26
th
century BC as part of a vast Ancient Egyptian
Necropolis – a city of the dead. This was the world’s
tallest building for more than 4400 years right up
until 1889 when the Eiffel Tower was built. One of
the stones is inscribed with the timeless instruction –
This end up
.
If King Nebudchanezzar II built the second oldest of
the Ancient Wonders, the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon in 600 BC for his homesick Persian Queen
Amyitis archaeologists have yet to find them.
Dr Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University, one of
the few living people who can decipher Cunieform
writing, (no I don’t know her) has recently published
her theory that the gardens weren’t in Babylon at all
but 300 miles away in the Assyrian capital Ninevah
built by a different King - Sennacherib.
A Thousand Flies
As it happens I rather enjoy the frisson of a group
reacting to challenging works of public art. Each
Christmas it is my job to greet groups arriving at
The O2 on the Greenwich Peninsula to begin an
evening of Cruising into Christmas. The pier sits
beneath a huge piece of public art – a giant grey
Brillo Pad
of chopped up scaffold poles nearly 100
feet tall that, when viewed from the right angle
reveals, in the style of the old C&A bags, the figure
of a standing man. Old George the now retired
London Rose Skipper used to describe it beautifully –
It’s a man
,
he’d say,
on an ‘ot summers day, eating
a beef burger, surrounded by a ‘fousand flies.
This is Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud
commissioned to celebrate the Millennium and
although I’ve only met a handful of people in the
past decade who say they like it, an awful lot of
people stop to take a closer look or its photograph
down on the pier. It’s a talking point, nay even a
giggling point, as people marvel at the millions
we
paid for it to be here.
In The Beginning
Public art has it seems, been an aspect of life for a
very, very long time. Almost, it turns out, from the
very beginning. Modern humans, began the long trek
out of Africa about 40,000 years ago and until fairly
recently archaeologists assumed that, busy with the
challenges of survival, these early men didn’t produce
much in the way of art until about 15,000 years ago
when the breathtaking galleries of cave art were made
at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. This
theory was radically revised when wonderful paintings
of lions and rhinos discovered at the Chauvet Cave in
the south of France were dated to 37,000 years ago
suggesting that these men were building on artistic
skills that they had left Africa with.
Now, in just the past two years, a series of dots and
crimson hand stencils at the El Castillo Cave on
Spain’s Cantabrian coast have been dated to nearly
