90g Picasso Jasper Skull – Altamira

In 1879, an eight-year-old girl in a cave near Santillana del Mar lifted her eyes to the ceiling and cried: “Mira, papá, bueyes!” – Look, Dad, oxen! Above her crowds of bison in red and black, painted with ochre and charcoal, from more than fourteen thousand years ago. Her father, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, made the Altamira cave known, yet the scholars did not believe him. Too vivid, too artful were these pictures to be from the Stone Age, and he was accused of forgery. Sautuola died in 1888, without anyone giving him his due. Even this skull is hard to believe that nature alone painted it. Over a bright, grey-speckled ground run dark, wavy lines like confident brushstrokes. One of them runs vertically across the forehead and bears small, oval inclusions like a string of pearls. At the occiput, sharply entwined bands swing in white, cream, and gray. Across everything flows earthy iron oxide in rust and ochre, sometimes as a fine vein, sometimes as a broad stream over the right side of the skull. This iron oxide came last. Iron-rich water seeped through the finest cracks and pores, and where it met oxygen, iron precipitated as rust. Thus it laid itself over the older patterns like a final glaze. It is the same substance with which the bisons in Altamira were painted. In 1902 Émile Cartailhac, one of the loudest doubters, published an essay titled “Mea culpa d’un sceptique,” the confessions of a skeptic. The pictures were real. No brush had worked on this skull either, only the earth itself. Material: Picasso Jasper (trade name; not genuine jasper, but a marble-like rock) with a grey-speckled ground, dark, wavy bands, sharply banded portions and earthy iron oxide Origin: Utah, USA Dimensions: 5.0 x 3.7 x 3.3 cm Weight: 90 g Special features: Light grey speckled ground with dark, wavy band lines, including a vertical line across the forehead with small oval inclusions; sharply entwined bands in white, cream and gray, especially at the occipital region and the underside; abundant earthy iron oxide in rust and ochre tones, flowing over the other patterns, particularly on the right side of the skull and at the occiput; fine, partly iron oxide-tinted natural hairlines, including across the forehead and the left side of the skull; polished

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