“The courage and the mastery that reveals the drawing of the contours, as well as the layout of the shadows, demonstrates all this that has been designed in a very recent time.” An expert published this diagnosis about the Altamira cave in 1896, in tune with the denialist that unleashed his discovery. Experts and personalities were extraordinarily incredulous with the paintings and began to discredit them ensuring that they were recent. “There is no doubt, they reveal deep knowledge of modern drawing,” published a newspaper of the time.
At the end of the 19th century, the representations of the bison, deer, horses and hands of this cavity located in Santillana del Mar were considered too perfect. They probably had not awakened so many more primitive and gross images. But, if they had not been made by the prehistoric ancestors, who had painted them? The answer was found within the family perimeter of those who attributed merit, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola and his daughter Maria, although the entrance to the cave had been previously located by the pastor modest Cubillas.
All eyes went to the Paul Ratier brush (1832–1896), who said he was protected and welcomed by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, to the point that he has unfairly passed history as Altamira’s counterfeit. The accusing finger decreed that this French artist was the author. It was the perfect cocktail: he had talent for realistic painting, he was touched by the discoverer and on top of him was deaf -mute. Ratier could not defend himself from the accusations of falsifier which made an even weaker target. The defamation was also based on a statement by the discoverer himself, who said that on the first visit to the cave he had not seen the paintings.
Actually, his biggest problem was the realism that he printed to his painting. An aesthetic that baffled and at that time did not know how to be valued, according to Manuela Lanza and Miguel Ángel Aramburu in an analysis they published about the painter in the 90s of the 20th century. To all this was added another circumstance that exacerbated suspicions. Santuola commissioned him to reproduce Altamira’s paintings in an oil that reflected them with the greatest fidelity. Ratier finished the painting, of accused realism, and was used as proof that the paintings of the caves also came from the same brush.
The one who launched the bulus was then a prestigious Painter Torrelaveguense, Eugenio de Lemus, who as an expert recorder directed an organism called National Calcography. On a visit from Madrid he met the cave and was convinced that the paintings were recent. “Gentlemen, I who examine with interest whenever I have the manifestations of art, I felt only the impression of disappointment when seeing those paintings that I considered prehistoric,” he said. “They have no accent that reveals barbarian art, especially at the ends, which are drawn with dawning, contoured to large lines and ease, even if it is not that of an outstanding painter,” he said.
According to the historian Francisco Gutiérrez, writer of the biography of Ratier, Eugenio de Lemus went further and began to fantasize with who the author could be. It seems that in his opinion there were only two artists in the province with sufficient talent to do so. The two, by the way, experts in portraits. He asked a friend of his and he told him that Paul Ratier was in Puente San Miguel on the dates in which the discovery occurred. Obviously, it was. But what I was doing was not drawing Altamira’s bison, but drawing the copy that Sanz de Sautuola had commissioned.
But, without more verification, he accused Ratier as a falsifier before the Natural History Society. The truth is that, to top it off, those who did not believe it was because they thought the paintings were from the Roman era. Lemus continued spreading that they were apocryphal throughout the country in numerous articles about art and hence the legend continued to circulate and there were other experts of the same opinion.
Another leading prehistorian of the time, Father Carvallo, increased the legend by spreading an erroneous image of Ratier as a wandering wandering that crossed the peoples painting by some coins or a simple plate of food
Another highlighted prehistorian of the time, Father Carvallo, increased the legend spreading an erroneous image of Ratier as a wandering wanderer who traveled the peoples painting by some currencies or a simple plate of food. A deaf -mute foreigner of who did not know their origins or how Cantabria came to prejudices and suspicions.
When, in reality, Ratier – who was 47 years old – was an elegant, educated and affectionate young man who lived in Santander since 1840. He arrived from the Bretonian port city of Lorient (France) with his family, certainly accommodated. In fact, they lived in the same portal of Ruamayor Street as Marcelino’s parents Menéndez Pelayo.
A portraitist who did not know Sautuola
He started selling lithographs of animal reasons to six reais, through advertisements in the local press, before forming as a painter in Paris for two years. Upon his return he began to receive orders especially to make portraits although he also offered himself to “reform, retake and compose the old paintings of some merit.” He also represented still lifes and landscapes, although none have been preserved.
His work will be in all likelihood in private hands, since he worked on his commission. To this is added that on many occasions he did not sign his paintings. An 1884 newspaper published that he had painted two hundred portraits in the Laredo area. He also had students whom he taught to paint. The only two works that made the copy of Altamira and another painting for the church of Santa Lucía de Santander.
Ratier was not welcomed by Sautuola. In fact, they did not even know the commission of Altamira that was carried out by mediation of a brother -in -law of the discoverer of the cave, whom he asked for a letter to seek an expert painter in reproducing animals.
“My dear Agabio: I need a boy, boy or man who can copy with all fidelity and accuracy a portion of animals painted in the vault of a cave that is half a league from here, it is a very remarkable thing, because in its kind you cannot qualify as a mamarracho, because the animals are made with all the perfection that allows the fine canvas that contains them,” he wrote in the letter, he continued to Any accuracy to make very pretty animals, do me the favor of seeing that to see if it provides us with what I want and to say it looks with my butler to know in what conditions it will come to it ”.
Other painters from Altamira
In favor of choosing Ratier, he weighed his discretion, for the fact of being deaf -mute, and that he was relatively young, 47 years, and agile to descend to the cave. The commission was made in December and months later another painter, José de Argumosa, remained ten hours in the cave “with great difficulties of light and posture” and in its reproduction completed some of the mutilated figures.
In his study on Ratier, Francisco Gutiérrez adds that in 1902, Henri Breuil made another reproduction, an episode that he left written the following: “I could not think about getting traces from the great figures painted on the roof of Altamira. The color in the state of porridge would have adhered to the paper and this would have been to destroy the paintings. ” “It was only possible a copy of the geometric type, which, working eight hours a day lying on your back on sacks of ferns, occupied me approximately three weeks,” he said. “It was not a short visit, but a true residence in the cave.”
The complete replica was Ratier’s, ‘animals of the vault in the cavern of Santillana’, which was used to illustrate the brochure ‘short notes on some prehistoric objects of the province of Santander’ published by Sautuola in mid -1880 and which were subsequently reproduced in the newspapers of the time.
The painter worked on an adhered paper posterged to a brown cardboard and this, in turn, to a canvas of white tissue. As Gutiérrez explains, Ratier drew carboncillo the profiles of animals and roof cracks and used the cake technique to apply the colors. The oil in which he copied the ceiling of the cave is a large picture (110 x 289 centimeters).
Work exhibited at the Altamira Museum
The painting of discord is part of the collection of the Museum of Art of Santander (MAS) and a few years ago it was lent for an exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris on ‘Prehistory and Modernity’. The painting was kept by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola and then his widow, until his daughter Maria and her husband Emilio Botín López donated him to the Municipal Museum of Santander, and in the 40s he became part of the funds of the Prehistory Museum of Cantabria.
Currently, after being restored, it is exhibited in the National Museum and Research Center of Altamira, where in 2001 an artificial replica of the original caves were built, which have restricted visits and cannot be visited massively to avoid deterioration.
The artist who has unfairly in history as Altamira’s falsifier, unable to shake that stigma although he never had a relationship with Sanz de Sautuola, died of tuberculosis with 64 years, in 1896, on his floor of Mendez Núñez de Santander street where he lived in the care of a sister, also deaf.
Lemus’s accusing finger of Eugenio never repaired his mistake. When other experts retracted publicly from their crazy diagnosis, he wrote an article in the newspaper El Cantabrico reaffirming that Ratier was the counterfeit. Countered, he wrote: “Can you give greater award to the works of the savage of Altamira?”
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