306 PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS. 



them erase and revise their work. In certain well denned 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 hand 

 some 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.&quot; * 



Unquestionably then pictorial art in its first stages was 

 occupied with sacred subjects, and the priest, when not him 

 self the executant, was the director of the executants. 



717. The remains and records of early historic peoples 

 yield facts having like implications. 



As shown already there existed in America curious transi 

 tions between worshiping the actual dead man and worship 

 ing an effigy of him cases in which a figure was formed of 

 portions of his body joined with artificial portions. The Nile 

 Valley furnished other transitions. Concerning the Macro- 

 brian Ethiopians, Herodotus tells the strange story that 



When they have dried the body, either as the Egyptians do, or in 

 some other way, they plaster it all over with gypsum, and paint it, 



* Both great surprise and great satisfaction were given to me by these last 

 senlences. When setting forth evidence furnished by the Egyptians, I was 

 about to include a remembered statement (though unable to give the autho 

 rity), 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 repre 

 sentations, 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. 



