Saving Beauty

For more than 17,000 years, the bestiary of the Lascaux cave in southwestern France has survived the ravages of human history. Anyone entering this time capsule is confronted by 4-m-long bulls that appear to float across the massive vaults like religious apparitions. An enigmatic spotted beast with a round snout and straight, forward-pointing horns, plump horses in brilliant yellow and deer with treelike antlers — all seem in equal part intimates of the present and missives from some distant world. Which they are. Though the draftsmanship is strikingly Modernist — on exiting the cave in 1940, Pablo Picasso said, "We have invented nothing" — these creatures were painted and inscribed on the limestone walls during the Upper Paleolithic age, when everyone was a hunter-gatherer, and Homo sapiens coexisted with Neanderthal man. They are evidence of the quantum leap in neural connections that gave birth to the uniquely human attribute of consciousness. Lascaux is the most fundamental example anywhere of what the iconoclastic 20th century writer and anthropologist Georges Bataille called "the basic desire of all men, of whatever period or region, to be amazed." Like few other creations of the human hand, it is a patrimony not of any one country or culture, but of humankind as a whole.

Yet Lascaux's robust longevity belies a frightening fragility. Five years ago, after the ill-conceived installation of new climatic equipment, Lascaux suffered an outbreak of fungal infection that threatened to destroy in a few years what thousands of millenniums had left largely unscathed. The cave's custodians are still struggling to eradicate this scourge. Since a journalist from French science magazine La Recherche was allowed into the cave three years ago, there has been no independent assessment of how they are faring. As a result, concerns have circulated among prehistorians in France and throughout the world that the rescue operation itself was endangering the cave's delicate equilibrium, and further damaging the site.

Last month French officials admitted to Time that the Fusarium solani fungus has on occasion spread from the floor to the paintings, and that separate fusarium strains have now been identified in the various arms of the 235-m cave complex. Time was allowed to visit the cave because its keepers feel they finally have the outbreak under control. But to keep the fungus in retreat, a team of restorers comes into the cave every two weeks — dressed, as everyone who enters now must be, in hooded biohazard suits, booties and face masks — to remove filaments from the walls. Another team visits regularly to audit the cave's sanitary condition using laser imaging. "They tell us the cave's condition is stable," says one member of the Scientific Committee of Lascaux Cave, set up by the French Ministry of Culture in 2002 to deal with the problem. "But that's what they say about Ariel Sharon." The sad fact is that today's visitors to Lascaux come to look not for wonder, insight or inspiration. They come to look for fluffy tufts of mold.

This is a story about three kinds of culture: the great cultural heritage of Lascaux's bulls and deer and horses; a stubborn mold; and the arcane and insular culture of French bureaucracy that diffuses personal responsibility. The narrative reveals as much about France as the paintings themselves convey about the world that produced them. It raises the issue of whether an irreplaceable World Heritage Site ought to be primarily a place of pilgrimage or one of inquiry. But it begins and ends with the beauty and mystery of Lascaux itself. "It's so spectacular that it boggles the mind; when I first saw it I cried," says Jean Clottes, one of the world's foremost experts on cave paintings. "If Lascaux gets permanently degraded, it's a catastrophe for the world as a whole."

When art restorer Rosalie Godin was urgently called to Lascaux in August 2001, she couldn't believe her eyes. "It was as if it had snowed in the cave. Everything was covered in white," she says. Two of the cave's caretakers, Bruno Desplat and Sandrine van Solinge, had raised the alarm when the white filaments, spotted in isolated parts of the cave months before, spread like wildfire over a matter of days. Desplat, who lives next to Lascaux and has devoted over 15 years to its care, says he became physically ill upon seeing the luxuriant bloom.

That's not to say that he or the cave's curator, the prehistorian Jean-Michel Geneste, could have been entirely surprised. That spring, workers had finished installing a €23,000 air-conditioning system beneath the stairs leading down to the cave. The new machine was a major departure from the way Lascaux's delicate balance of temperature and humidity had been regulated for the preceding 30 years. The old system, installed in 1968 after years of minute studies of the cave's climate, relied on Lascaux's natural currents to pass air over a cold point and make sure that water condensed there, like it does on a beer can, rather than on the walls of the cave. This passive system was only necessary during the wettest periods of the year, when it worked as a functional replacement for the earth that for millenniums had absorbed excess water from the saturated air of the cave, but that had been removed since the cave's discovery in 1940.

The new system was designed to automate the process, but also sought to improve it by using two massive high-powered fans to pull the air toward the cold point. Such an intrusive approach scandalized those who had worked so hard to figure out a more modest solution to earlier problems in the cave. "Our idea was always to be as parsimonious as possible," says Pierre Vidal, a retired researcher who worked in Lascaux for decades. "This thing seemed more like a central air-conditioning system."

In most organizations, an individual or board will have the last word on decisions, especially one this controversial. Yet nobody claims authorship of the decision to install the new machine. Geneste, who as Lascaux's curator since 1992 is effectively the cave's top manager, says that he was always opposed to switching to a new principle for regulating the cave, "but following on our decision to restore a machine that could maintain the cave's parameters, a chain of administrative decisions led to the selection of a dynamic system." Philippe Oudin, the chief architect of historic monuments for the department of Dordogne, who was responsible for planning and overseeing the work, did not respond to a request for comment. Technical advice for the project was provided by Ingéni, an air-systems consultancy firm based near Paris, which had designed systems for supermarkets and museums, but which, like Oudin himself, had no experience with caves. "We proposed a system and that's what they chose," says the firm's managing director, Michel de la Giraudière. "I don't know why they favored an active system over a passive one, but I do know not everyone was of the same opinion. They wanted a certain efficacy, and the discussion was somewhat political."