Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/770

named it dry or powder painting." The pictures produced "are supposed to be spiritually shadowed, so to say, or breathed upon by the gods or god-animals they represent, during the appealing incantations or calls of the rites. . . . Further light is thrown on this practice of the Zuñi in making use of these suppositively vivified paintings by their kindred practice of painting not only fetiches of stone, etc., and sometimes of larger idols, then of washing the paint off for use as above described, but also of powder painting in relief; that is, of modeling effigies in sand, sometimes huge in size, of hero or animal gods, sacramental mountains, etc., powder painting them in common with the rest of the pictures, and afterward removing the paint for medicinal or further ceremonial use."

But the clearest evidence is yielded by the Navajo Indians. Dr. Washington Matthews in a contribution on "The Mountain Chant, a Navajo Ceremony," says:—

"The men who do the greater part of the actual work of painting, under the guidance of the chanter, have been initiated [four times], but need not be skilled medicine men or even aspirants to the craft of the shaman. . . . The pictures are drawn according to an exact system. The shaman is frequently seen correcting the workmen and making them erase and revise their work. In certain well-defined instances the artist is allowed to indulge his individual fancy. This is the case with the gaudy embroidered pouches which the gods carry at the waist. Within reasonable bounds the artist may give his god just as handsome a pouch as he wishes. Some parts of the figures, on the other hand, are measured by palms and spans, and not a line of the sacred design can be varied,"^[1]

Unquestionably then pictorial art in its first stages was occupied with sacred subjects, and the priest, when not himself the executant, was the director of the executants.

 

The remains and records of early historic peoples yield evidences having like implications.

As shown already, there existed in America curious transitions between worshiping the actual dead man and worshiping an effigy

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1. Both great surprise and great satisfaction were given to me by these last sentences. When setting forth evidence furnished by. the Egyptians, I was about to include a remembered statement (though unable to give the authority), that there are wall-paintings—I think in the tombs of the kings—where a superior is represented as correcting the drawings of subordinates, and was about to suggest that, judging from the intimate relation between the priesthood and the plastic arts, already illustrated, this superior was probably a priest. And here I suddenly came upon a verifying fact supplied by a still earlier stage of culture: the priest is the director of pictorial representations when he is not the executant. Another important verification is yielded by these sentences. The essential parts of the representation are sacred in matter, and rigidly fixed in manner; but in certain non-essential, decorative parts the working artist is allowed play for his imagination. This tends to confirm the conclusion already drawn respecting Greek art. For while in a Greek temple the mode of representing the god was so fixed that change was sacrilege, the artist was allowed some scope in designing and executing the peripheral parts of the structure. He could exercise his imagination and skill on the sculptured figures of the pediment and metopes; and here his artistic genius developed.