Lowly mineral pigments and water. Outliving all other forms of recorded human history. Remaining well preserved and safe from harm on the walls of the caves and rocks they were painted on as 30,000 years of human history passed them by.

Imagine the sheer astonishment of the privileged discoverer who first set eyes on them: Awe. Amazement. Speechless emotion. Enough to take one's breath away.

Especially if it were this morning. Or just yesterday...

December 18th, 1994. Just a shy six years from 2000 AD. Three amateur spelunkers at Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, in the Ardèche region of southwestern France stumble upon an awesome spectacle. In an underground cave they suddenly come face to face with the world's oldest watercolours.

Covering the walls in front of them is the most fantastic find of paleolithic art yet found, so old as to boggle the mind.

Whole picture galleries cover the walls for hundreds of meters, all painted with uncanny realism. Hundreds of horses, stags and ibex. Buffalo, bears, and reindeer, their mineral colours of red ochre, yellow ochre and black all masterfully applied.

And even more fantastic animals, so long extinct as to be incomprehensible that their painter could actually step outside and literally watch them. Alive. Walking by. Or stalking their prey.

Lions. A red panther. Herds of rhinoceros. And great, towering woolly mammoths. Painted as they were seen, 30 millennia ago.

All autographed by the creator's own handprints, on the wall of the Chauvet Cave where he had pressed them against the rock, during the last Ice Age. 31,000 years before.

Paleolithic Livestock
Lascaux Cave, France

The warm earth colours were easily found. Grinding them into a pigment ready for mixing was a simple enough chore. And so was the actual application, with lots of drying time with water as the base.

And of messy cleanups - guaranteed centuries later by the introduction of oils - the early artists were blissfully ignorant.

Numerous examples of paleolithic art still dot the world, from the mute testaments of the Bushman, painted on outcrops of rock in the Kalahari Desert, to ancient hunting scenes in the limestone caves of northeastern Brazil, to aboriginal rock paintings at Obiri and Unbalanya hill in the outback of Australia.

Left: Northern Territory Australia: Aboriginal Rock Painting.         Right: Brazil: Oldest Rock Art in New World

The previous record holder for Oldest Paintings are at Altamira Cave in northern Spain, first seen in 1875 by the little daughter of Marcelo de Sautuola, a nobleman from nearby Santandar, who visited the cave with her father after it had been found by a local hunter.

Looking up at the roof of the cave, little Maria called out in wonder at the whole herd of prehistoric animals populating the ceiling. The 15 bison, 2 wild boars, and numerous horses are still there today, all executed vigorously by their unnamed artists, their outlines still sharp and realistic, despite having been painted 190 centuries ago.

Prehistoric Bison: Altamira Cave

.

EGYPTIAN SPLENDOR

Enter the Iron Age. Anything seems possible.

In Egypt, the 18th dynasty rules, and on the banks of the Nile, agriculture flourishes. Shipping and travel to distant lands becomes second nature. Sculpture grows to colossal dimensions. And at Giza, in a flurry of state-of-the-art technology, architecture reaches new heights in the form of the pyramids.

Watercolourists, too, have improvised a new, high-tech method.

Watercolour has advanced to the fresco stage: that of laying the colour on a wet plaster surface before it has dried. Royal painters and scribes preserve scenes of everyday life in the wall murals of their pharaohs' tombs, at least partially achieving their masters ultimate aim of immortality.

From the beginning, dating back to 3000 BC, the Egyptians were ones to employ full, polychromatic painting. No more two-colour artwork with black outlines. Now living colour was the expected norm. And although the Egyptians painted everything, from statues, to buildings, to walls, it was at frescos they excelled.

Fresco (Italian for "fresh") had the advantage of providing larger uninterrupted painting surfaces, both wonderfully clean and flat, free of the hollows and blemishes inherent in any natural rock face. Fresco too, solved the annoying problem of the soft, crumbling rock on the walls of the tombs, many of which were carved into the living rock of the Theban mountains.

To paint in fresco required two teams of craftsmen. The plasterer, who put up the 'canvas', and the artist, who worked his watercolour magic upon subtle backgrounds of light blue, grey, or cream, before the plaster dried. Both craftsmen of such distinction in Egyptian society as to be held on a par with the status of doctors and hairdressers.

Egyptian Banquet: Tomb of Nakht (detail)

Watercolour pigments now covered a veritable rainbow from red ochres to green frit to the royal blues of lapus lazuli. Ground as before, and mixed with water and a small amount of binding agent - to provide uniform adhesion - the fresco unfolded, from the bristles of a whole family of twig and papyrus reed brushes.

With an eye for detail that even reproduced the subtle variegation of granite or the growth rings and grain in wood, the pharaohs' biographers left for posterity a complete panorama of everyday life, from royalty to common fishing scenes, in the lush, vibrant colours we see today. Painted on the walls of their burial chambers and entombed for 35 centuries.

Hunting and Fishing Scene: Tomb of Horemheb, Thebes (detail)

.

.

.

.

CARRYING THE FRESCO FLAME

Farther north, the Minoans were also using fresco in 1500 BC for paintings in the palace of Knossos on present day Crete. Some evidence even suggests an earlier use, some 500 years before the more stilted forms of Egyptian painting.

The Minoan style is bright and cheerful, almost impressionistic in execution, with its animated figures exuding a vibrancy and sparkle unseen before. Painted in what one could only call a tongue-in-cheek manner, they remain today, as full of the spirited fun and humour as they were painted with, centuries ago.

Left: Minaon Beauty: Knonssos         Right: Vibrancy in Motion: Bull and Acrobats, Knossos
Archeological Museum, Heraclion, Crete

.

.

Dancing, hunting, sports, plants, birds and foliage, all painted in fresco on the walls and ceiling, and in watercolour on the terracotta urns and vessels found within.

Tomb of Etruscan Nobleman (detail)
Tomb of the Augurs

.

Mars and Venus. Cupid and Vesta. All manner of gods and goddesses grace the walls of their villas and homes. And quite ordinary mortals too. Most often portraying the very inhabitants who lived there. And whose tranquil eyes peer out at us still, with such quiet, steady gaze as to make us wonder what is on their minds...

Attorney Terentius Neo and His Wife
Museo Nazionale, Naples

THE NEWEST INVENTION: TRANSPARENT COLOURS

It is 300 AD and European painting and watercolour will lie dormant for the next three centuries.

But not in the East. Art thrives. In China the Han Dynasty has just ended, under which, for 400 years, a great revival in learning has flourished. Watercolour has come into its own, having first appeared around 200 BC.

In the hands of Chinese artists watercolour has entered a pivotal point in its history. The introduction of the clear, transparent watercolour we know today achieves a delicacy never before seen. Especially in combination with the newest painting surface, invented in 105 AD. Paper.

.

.

Japanese art, like its predecessor in China, is marked by sensitive interpretation, delicate colour and simple design, devoid of confusing complexities. Fans, panels, screen paintings and, after 700, horizontal scroll paintings as long as 30 feet document early deities, as well as everyday themes.

During the Fujiwara Period, beginning in 782 and continuing for the next three centuries, a time of extended peace descends gently over the Japanese countryside. In the presence of such a climate, free from wars and foreign intervention, a distinctly Japanese style of watercolours takes root and flowers prolifically.

Trees, animal life, flowers and romantic landscapes flow forth from the brushes of artists the like of Kanaoka, by tradition one of the Japan's greatest painters.

And in some of the earliest examples of actual book production, graceful watercolours are used for illustrating the retelling of ancient legends. Painted end-to-end on long scroll paintings accompanying the text, these early works represent some of the world's earliest illustrated manuscripts.

Sutra Painting c. 750 AD
Atami Museum, Kanagawa Prefecture

As early as the fifth century painting of frescos moves east, far from the arid climates of its birthplace surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Making inroads on the Asian subcontinent, it appears in India at the Ajanta caves near Hyderabad, and in Ceylon on Sigiriya Rock, the already 400 year old palace of King Kasyapa.

Incredibly lifelike murals in fresco in both locations include deities, nymphs and life-sized dancers, which still cover large galleries with their warm, bright colours.