From 19 April 2024 Monaco’s Musée d’Anthropologie Préhistorique is hosting the international touring exhibition about one of the world’s most celebrated prehistoric sites. Lascaux à Monaco, open until 21 November 2024, offers visitors the chance to see reproductions of some of the cave art in Lascaux, a 1/10 scale model of the cave, interactive digital experiences as well as original objects recovered during excavations.
- Thomas Dowson
- Last Checked and/or Updated 19 April 2024
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- Exhibitions
From the First Replica to the last
From then on entry to Lascaux was severely restricted and is now off limits to all but the conservation team monitoring the preservation of the Ice Age art. Given the importance of Lascaux the French Government pledged to fund the creation of a replica. In 1983, after about 11 years of painstaking work Lascaux II opened to the public. Far from putting visitors off, the facsimile has proved to be every bit as popular as the original was; with over 10 million recorded visitors since its opening.
Only a part of the cave, however, was recreated in Lascaux II, namely the hall of bulls and what is called the axial gallery, which has that wonderful image of the upside down horse – said by some to represent a horse falling off a cliff. In the autumn of 2012 Lascaux III was launched in Bordeaux. An extraordinary temporary exhibition that has toured the world since. An additional five parts of the cave were reproduced for the touring exhibition, including the exquisite frieze of swimming stags and the oft-repeated scene of the bison and wounded man.
On 15 December Lascaux IV was opened in the Centre International de l’Art Pariétal Montignac-Lascaux. All the while, Lascaux III has continued to tour the world.
Lascaux III
The idea to create an exhibition to tour the museums of the world came about in 2011. After conducting a feasibility study for such a venture, Olivier Retout was appointed by the Department o the Dordogne to design and manage the Lascaux International exhibition. For more background to this venture, read the interview with Olivier Retout in the online magazine Teo – all about touring exhibitions.Â
Lascaux III is designed to take up at least 1,000 m2 – made up of 40 tons of materials that comes in 95 wooden crates. The subject matter covers the following elements, that include interactive components and hyper realistic anatomical models of prehistoric humans :
- History of the cave’s discovery in 1940
- Scale and virtual models of the cave
- Reproducing the cave and its imagery
- Dating the art in Lascaux
- Actual size replicas of selected panels
- Interpretation of the art
One of the more interesting and engaging aspects of the exhibition are the various models of the cave. There are 1:10 scale models, fibre glass ‘tubes’ that replicate those parts of the cave with the most well known panels of paintings and engravings. As I have been fortunate enough to get entry into Lascaux, these models really do give a good idea about the physical space inside the cave. A map relates these portions one to another.
I saw the exhibition in Chicago, and included there was a digital 3D reconstruction of the entire cave that brings the cave alive. It was not interactive, but it started with the physical space, and lead to the art, ending with what the cave might have looked like in the past. In 2021 this was replaced with a 12 minute, immersive virtual reality experience. This is even more spectacular than the original digital video. You can view a two-minute clip in the following video from YouTube.
As Olivier Retout explains, with an exhibition of this size, no two installations have been the same. At each venue something different has been added that is not part of the standard exhibition ‘package’. At the Field Museum in Chicago, for example, upon entering the exhibit, the first object displayed was a fine-lined engraving of a horse on a small rock from the Dordogne (now in the Logan Museum of Anthropology, Beloit, Wisconsin). An obvious and good choice for getting the exhibition off to a good start, this clearly visible outline of a horse gives visitors an excellent idea of the stunning beauty of Palaeolithic art. A skeleton of a woman, and the reconstruction of her face, then introduces the people who made the cave art of the Dordogne. The skeleton, from Abri Cap Blanc and now in the Field Museum’s collection, is dated to the same archaeological period the imagery in Lascaux is dated to.
For Lascaux à Monaco there is an exceptional loan of artefacts from Lascaux from the collections of the Institute of Human Palaeontology in Paris and the National Prehistory Museum in Les Eyzies (Dordogne). The Institute, the third oldest research foundation in France, was founded in 1910 by Prince Albert I of Monaco.
Where has Lascaux III Been?
- CAP Sciences, Bordeaux 13 October 2012 to 6 January 2013
- Field Museum of Natural History – Chicago 19 March to 8 September 2013: Scenes from the Stone Age: The cave paintings of Lascaux
- Houston Museum of Natural Science – Houston, 18 October 2013 to 23 March 2014
- Le Centre des Sciences – Montréal, 16 April to 14 September 2014
- Musée du Cinquantenaire – Brussels – 13 November 2014 to 12 April 2015
- Parc des Expositions – Paris, 19 May to 30 August 2015
- Palexpo – Geneva, 2 October 2015 to 17 January 2016
- South Korea – Gwangmyeong Cave, 16 April to 4 September 2016 Review in The Korea Herald | Review & Photographs
- National Museum of Nature and Science – Tokyo, 1 November 2016 to 19 January 2017
- Museum of History of Tohoku – Sandei, 25 March to 28 May 2017.
- Kyushu National Museum – Fukuoka (Japan), 10 July to 3 September 2017
- Shanghai Science & Technology Museum – Shanghai, 1 November 2017 to 28 February 2018.
- Sci Bono Discovery Centre – Johannesburg, 17 May to 30 September 2018.
- Olympic Park – Munich, 3 February – 9 September 2019.
- Museum of National Archaeology – Naples, 1 February to 5 July 2020.
- Prehistomuseum – Flemalle, 4 December 2021 to 4 June 2022 Website
- MUSE Museo delle Scienze – Trento, 24 July 2022 to 8 January 2023.
- Bristol Museum & Art Gallery – Bristol, 1 April – 10 September 2023.
Currently:
Musée d’Anthropologie Préhistorique – Monaco, 19 April – 21 November 2024: Website | Review in Monacolife
There are no details available for where the exhibition is headed next. As soon as we have these, we will update this page.
Cave Art in France
From the World famous cave of Lascaux to one of the most recent discoveries – including Cosquer and Chauvet, France has some of the most spectacular prehistoric cave art in the world. Painted and engraved images, as well as bas relief sculptures, were made by Homo sapiens and probably also Neanderthals between about 36,000 to 12,000 years ago, a period that coincides with the end of the last Ice Age. In this is a guide to the caves, replicas and museums of Ice Age art in France we provide all you need to know to plan your trip.
Archaeology Travel Writer
