GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON AMERICAN ART.
In closing this review of the later art-products of the native tribes of the Western Hemisphere we may profitably take a general survey of their characters, their inspirations, and the position they occupy in the develop ment of the aesthetic faculties of the species.
It will be obvious from what is contained in the preceding pages that in treating of the native Americans we have to do with a race of men possessing marked capacities for artistic culture and great fertility in technical methods. These traits, however, were not equally distributed. There are notable differences both in degree and manner of artistic expres sion. These differences cannot be explained merely by environment or social conditions. They are truly ethnic, and the more accurately they are brought into comparison with other ethnic peculiarities, as language, cranial form, corporeal build, and the like, the higher appears their value as ethnologic criteria. Their worth for this purpose increases as they advance from primitive simplicity to complexity and elaborateness, since it is well known that the very earliest art-productions present a strong sim ilarity from whatever part of the world we take them. So true is this that in one celebrated example the coarse attempts of an awkward school boy at drawing have been laid before the learned world as the mature products of a native American tribe, and this by a widely travelled and experienced observer (Domenech).
Decoration in simplest of all artistic expression is shown in those straight markings which we see on the coarsely manufactured pottery of the Atlantic seaboard. The lines are vertical or oblique, and were produced by scratching the soft clay with the point of a stick. The first step in advance was to break these lines, thus forming simple recti linear designs by the lines meeting at various angles. When two parallel lines were broken more than once at right angles in the same direction, they gave the fundamental type of the meander or Greek pattern. (See
Vol. L p. 122.) So natural a decoration is this that we find examples of it in the coarse pottery of the later New Jersey tribes. Elsewhere on the continent it was developed with great fertility of invention, and applied on a large scale to the decoration of buildings. Thus, on the walls of the celebrated palaces of Mitla, in Southern Mexico, there are more than twenty different designs of these grecques. (See ARCHITECTURE, VOL IV. pl. 19.) The rectilinear scheme of design persisted very long, and maintained a supremacy among several of the most advanced nations down to the time of the Conquest. It is seen in its highest development in Peruvian work, as in the textile materials obtained from the celebrated cemetery of Ancon. These are woven with an abounding wealth of figures of men, plants, and animals, but all are portrayed by straight lines meeting at various angles. As has already been observed (p. 99), Peruvian work in stone betrays the same incomplete method governing the band of the sculptor. The gold images of the Chibchas were evidently fashioned in obedience to the same rules, and examples in North America are frequent.
in Curz.c. —By sonic students of the development of art forms, curvilinear designs are believed to be developments of those in right lines, the medium of transformation being the spiral, which partakes of the principles of both. This theory can scarcely find support in the natural history of American art. Curved lines are indeed more difficult to produce, and their lack of symmetry more readily strikes the eye, and hence they were less frequently employed by the earliest designers; but, independent of rectilinear figures, they have a well-marked series of evolu tionary forms of their own, which deserve the closer attention because the predominance of one or the other system in a nation exercised a potent influence on its progress in all the arts of design.