ROMANELLI CAVE

The wall art of Romanelli Cave is one of the first examples discovered in Italy of this human activity.
Besides the wall art, the Romanelli Cave shows one of the clearest examples of "arte mobiliare" of the mediterranean area. The difficulty to establish a certain correlation between the figures and the deposit’s stratigraphy, determines some problems in the wall art chronology. A chronological order is reached only by a comparative stylistic evaluation.
The dating of the figures carved in the Romanelli Cave is determined both by the presence in the upper deposit of carved rock fragments which, detaching from the walls, remained in the ground, and by the undoubted resemblance between some of the geometrical, movable figures and at least one of the walls’. We are in he last cold fluctuation of the Würm, between the 14.000 and 12.000 years.

Except for a seminaturalistic cattle summarily sketched, a figure similar to an elx’s head complicated by some signs and some fusiform figures which Paolo Graziosi ascribes to highly stylized representations of women and, in some cases, to fishes and vulvas, most of the graphical representations in the cave are completely incomprehensible. The Romanelli Cave discovery immediately caused researches and studies which, up today, have not been concluded. The casts in the exhibition are part of a group belonging to this museum and are the result of the work of Prof. Carlo Conti, who executed them in the ‘40s. Since 1980, in consequence of a donation of Prof. Conti’s family, they belong to the Municipal Administration. This is the first time they are exhibited to the public. The collection includes both positive and negative casts. Among the positive, some are painted or, more simply, have pencil lines in the graffiti. In the arrangement of the casts they decided not to intervene on the signs left on the plaster, as they consider them a prove to respect, too.

Made of plaster, iron wire and paper, they witness a technique that reached high levels, even if its result was not extraordinary. However, thanks to it, the figures of the art of Romanelli Cave, could be moved from the difficult places to reach where they previously were located and later made available to anyone, both to the researcher that wanted to measure them and to the simple visitor.

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