The beautifying of any object is due to impulses which are common to all men, and have existed as far back as the period when men inhabited caves and hunted the reindeer and mammoth in Western Europe. The craving for decorative art having been common to mankind for many thousand years, it would be a very difficult task to determine its actual origin. All we can do is to study the art of the most backward peoples, in the hope of gaining sufficient light to cast a glimmer down the gloomy perspective of the past.
There are certain needs of man which appear to have constrained him to artistic effort; these may be conveniently grouped under the four terms of Art, Information, Wealth, and Religion.
Art.—Æsthetics is the study or practice of art for art’s sake, for the sensuous pleasure of form, line, and colour.
Information.—It is not easy to find a term which will express all that should be dealt with in this section. In order to convey information from one man to another, when oral or gesture language is impossible, recourse must be had to pictorial signs of one form or another. It is the history of some of these that will be dealt with under this term.
Wealth.—It is difficult to distinguish among savages between the love of wealth or power. In more organised societies, power, irrespective of wealth, may dominate men’s minds; and it is probable that, whereas money is at first sought after in order to feel the power which wealth can command, later it often degenerates into the miser’s greed for gain.
The desire for personal property, and later for enhancing its value, has led to the production of personal ornaments apart from the purely æsthetic tendency in the same direction. There are also emblems of wealth, and besides these, others of power or authority. The practice of barter has led to the fixation of a unit of value, and this in time became represented by symbols—i.e., money.
Religion.—The need of man to put himself into sympathetic relation with unseen powers has always expressed itself in visual form, and it has gathered unto it the foregoing secular triad.
Representation and symbolism convey information or suggest ideas.
Æsthetics brings her trained eye and skilled hand.
Fear, custom, or devotion have caused individual or secular wealth to be directed into other channels, and have thereby entirely altered its character. The spiritual and temporal power and authority of religion has also had immense and direct influence on art.