Composing, Framing, Sequencing: How Palaeoart Directed the Viewer's Eye

Rock Art Research, cilt.42, sa.2, ss.122-140, 2025 (Scopus)

Abstract. Research on Palaeolithic imagery has largely asked what its figures depict and

what they might have meant, less often how they were organised to be seen. This paper

argues that a decorated Palaeolithic panel is not a collection of separate images but an

organised visual experience — an arrangement that directs the viewer’s eye through space

and time. It reads that organisation through three lenses drawn from the visual professions:

composing, from graphic design, the grouping and ordering of marks into a shape of

reading; framing, from photography, the vantage and light the rock imposes on the viewer;

and sequencing, from cinema, the order in which a moving viewer and a moving light

disclose the surface over time. Three well-documented panels — the Panel of the Lions at

Chauvet, the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux, and the dated ceiling scene at Leang Karampuang,

Sulawesi — are read through all three. On each, the three readings converge on a single

organisation of the gaze: a drive at Chauvet, an immersion at Lascaux, an arrest at Leang

Karampuang. Grounded in the evolutionarily ancient mechanisms of human vision, the

account describes an observable structure of seeing rather than the intentions of the makers:

the convergence is a fact about how the panels are seen, not about how or why they were

made. Its reach is limited to representational imagery — wherever marks depict a

recognisable object — and stops where non-representational signs begin.