FIG. 63.—Conventional representation of an alligator;
ancient pottery of Chiriqui, Isthmus of Panama.
(After Holmes.)
FIG. 64.—Ornamental motive derived from
the preceding design (Chiriqui pottery).
(After Holmes.)
FIG. 65.—Decorative designs of the Karayas
(Central Brazil)—A, lizards (engraved on a tomb);
B, flying bats; C, rattle-snake; D,
other snake (plaiting on a club).
(After Von den Steinen.)
It is interesting to note that the more a people loves ornament, the less it is capable of producing drawings properly so called. Thus the Polynesians, the Malays, the Indians of North-west America, are past-masters in ornamentation, but they draw badly; while the Australians, whose ornaments are rudimentary, paint on the polished surfaces of rocks and grottos, in white, red, and yellow, large pictures representing hunting scenes, “corroborees,” also human faces with a sort of aureole around them (hair?), but almost always without a mouth. The Bushmen, whose tools and arms bear no ornament, have also their great rock-pictures. We can form an idea of them by the annexed reproduction of a picture drawn on the wall of a cave near Hermon, and published by Andree.[226] It represents Bushmen, who have carried off the cattle of the Bechuanas, engaged in a struggle with the latter, who are pursuing them. All the details of the picture are well observed, even to the form and coats of the oxen, the respective colours, stature, and arms of the combatants (the little yellow Bushmen armed with bows, and the tall, black Bechuanas armed with assagais). The Melanesians are as skilful in ornamentation as in drawing, their drawing having a tendency to become transformed into pictography; pictography has almost entirely swallowed up drawing among the Indians of North America, but it reappears among the Hyperboreans (Eskimo, Chukchi, Yakuts, Tlinkits). What all these primitive drawings lack is perspective and relief; we should also look in vain for it in the art of half-civilised peoples like the Chinese, the Hindus, the Persians, the Cambodians.
Sculpture, which like drawing is met with even among the remains of quaternary man in Europe (Fig. [85]), attains little development among uncultured peoples in general. The carved wooden articles of the Melanesians and Negroes, the gigantic statues of the Polynesians of Easter Island, the figures in low relief of the monuments of the ancient Peruvians, Mexicans, and Khmers, the numerous little figures in wood or potter’s clay of the Malays, Negroes, etc., are not superior to the stage of development of Egyptian and Greek art earlier than the fifth century B.C., in which the median or sagittal plan of the human body is always straight, vertical, and never distorted. Even if there is an assemblage of two or more figures, their lines are always either parallel or perpendicular to each other.[227] Needless to say that among many peoples “national art” has been profoundly modified by an adopted religion, which has introduced or created an art of its own (prohibition against representations of human figures by Islam, conventional postures in Buddhist drawings, etc.).