If the originating artist lost something out of his own handiwork, it is no wonder that a copyist should lose more, especially when the latter may not have access to the original, but base his reproductions on copies several times removed from it. A late stage of degeneration of pictorial art, through more or less incompetent copying, is seen in the cheap lithographs which occupy, without adorning, the walls of houses of the country folk, many of which, like the analogous frescoes of Pompeii, are the pictorial echoes of the works of masters of the craft.
II. Information or Communication.
I have already referred to the difficulty of finding a term which will express all that might be dealt with in this section.
In order to convey information from one man to another, when oral or gesture language are impossible, recourse must be had to pictorial signs in some form or another.
Probably one of the earliest of this needs was that of indicating ownership, and it may be that many devices on primitive implements and utensils have this as one reason for their existence, although the nature of the ornamentation may be owing to quite a different reason.
As a matter of fact we know very little about owners’-marks, but it is possible that while an object may frequently be decorated with a clan or tribal device, the particular variety or delineation of that figure will serve to distinguish the ownership of the object.
Allied to owners’-marks are trade-marks; on this subject, too, information is lamentably deficient, but we know that these do occur amongst primitive folk (p. 48, Fig. [23]).
Most savages employ a more elaborate method of conveying information, and this picture-writing, as it is called, has been of such importance in the history of the world, especially in its later developments; that it deserves a more detailed treatment.