Conventions of portrayal are essentially the rules that standards-setters and influencers in any group agree on in portrayal of accustomed subject matter. For example, ancient Egyptian figure painting usually showed a figure in profile but with the shoulders turned parallel to the painted surface so both arms would be seen in their entirety. This is one of the ancient Egyptian conventions of portrayal.
One convention of portrayal in Native American figurative rock art is that the identity of the person being portrayed is seen in the details of costume, adornment, and accessories. A logical means of identification of you take into account that they did not have mass production. Every item in their lives was handmade and unique, and served as visual clues to the identity of its possessor, from face painting, to the decoration of a shield, from decorated clothing to jewelry, the person was literally recognized by what he wore and carried.
On April 9, 2016, in a column titled Stylistic Evolution - From Realism To Abstraction In Fremont Anthropomorphs - Part 2, I wrote “it still has the pectoral, facial features, and ear bobs, as well as a necklace, headdress, and belt. The emphasis on these figures is less on the details of the human body being portrayed than it is on the items of decorative adornment. In a culture in which all of these items are handmade, and thus unique, such a focus on details of adornment seems to me to betray a concern for the identity of who wore these particular items, in other words it functions as a portrait.” (Faris 2016) More attention is being paid to the headdresses, jewelry and other decorative elements of costume, than to the details of the person himself. This holds true for human figurative portrayals in other media as well, robe and shirt painting, ledger book paintings, etc., and throughout an extended period of time.
During his visit to tribes of the Missouri River from 1846 to 1852, Swiss artist, Rudolph Friederich Kurtz was debated by a Lakota artist about the proper way to illustrate a person. I was introduced to this by David Kaiser (Kaiser 2020) during a webinar he presented to the Colorado Rock Art Association, and was able to get a copy of Kurz's journal through interlibrary loan. I find it remarkable that we can be privileged to be part of a conversation on the proper way to paint the human body between representatives of two cultures in the middle of the 19th century.
“They comprehend quite clearly that the human figure can be represented with a special sort of clothes. They themselves have practice in such hieroglyphics. In their drawings they designate a man by representing the figure with legs; a woman, by a long skirt; in other words a figure without legs. But to paint a face that everybody knows for Minnehasga (Long Knife, Indian name for the bourgeois as Americans), that is most extraordinary.” (Kurz 1970:144)
“For instance, in drawing the figure of a man they stress not his form but something distinctive in his dress that indicates his rank; hence they represent the human form with far less accuracy than they draw animals. Among the Indians, their manner of representative the form of man has remained so much the same for thousands of years that they look on upon their accepted form as historically sacrosanct - . We must take into consideration, moreover, that the human form is not represented in the same manner by all nations; on the contrary, each nation has its own conventional manner. To prove this one has only to examine the different drawings of a man on horseback. In one the man has no legs at all; in another both legs are on the other side of the horse; In another both legs are on that side of the horse which is in view; In one the man has no legs at all; in another both legs are on that side of the horse which is in view; in still another both legs are on the other side of the horse. My manner of representing a rider was, therefore, not at all satisfactory to the Sioux. ‘But you see’ said he ‘a man has two legs’. That the other limb was concealed by the horse’s body was not the question.” (Kurz 1970:301)
Equestrian figure from Writing-On-Stone, Alberta, Canada. Keyser and Klassen, p. 219.
An equestrian figure illustrate by Jim Keyser and Michael Klassen from Writing-On-Stone in Alberta, Canada, shows an early Ceremonial Tradition petroglyph, with both legs seen although mounted on his horse. Additionally, the equestrian petroglyph illustrated by Jim Keyser and George Poetschat shows a horse rider in combat with a pedestrian warrior “mounted on a large boat-form horse with ball-foot hooves.” This figure is mounted on his horse although we can see both legs in what Keyser referred to as “see-through style”. (Keyser and Poetshat 2014:242)
While the examples of Ledger Art illustrated do not show the two legs that the Lakota artist was arguing for, they do show the attention to detail in his dress and accessories that allow the observer to recognize the subject of the picture, especially in the design on their shields. These figures also often tend to show both shoulders, much like the Egyptian figures. “While there are clearly observable male and female aspects of dress, there is a lot of variation beyond gender. We have linked some of this variation to status/ritual roles, but there could be additional aspects of shared identity that we have not identified here (e.g., clan/sodality markers). Some of this variation likely reflects personal, as opposed to shared, identity.” (VanPool et al. 2017:284)
So, to sum up, from the earliest times of Native American art to the Historic Period, the details of personal identity of the individual in a portrayal tended to be expressed by items of clothing and personal adornment, jewelry, headdresses, painted shirts, etc., than by recognizable details of the individual’s physical appearance (i.e. a portrait consisted of recognizable accessories, not facial recognition). This convention, I contend, was reinforced by the fact that these items of clothing and adornment, and their accessories like headdresses and shields, being handmade and unique, are easier to reproduce in a recognizable manner than the actual features of the face and body. Thus this convention of portrayal became encoded in the culture.
NOTE: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.
REFERENCES:
Faris, Peter, 2016, Stylistic Evolution - From Realism To Abstraction In Fremont Anthropomorphs - Part 2, April 9, 2016, https://rockartblog.blogspot.com
Kaiser, David A., Hoofprints and Footprints - The Grammar of Plains Biographic Rock Art, April 30, 2020, Internet lecture for Colorado Rock Art Association.
Keyser, James D., and Michael A. Klassen, 2001 Plains Indian Rock Art, University of Washington Press, Seattle.
Keyser, James D., and George Poetschat, 2014 Northern Plains Shield Bearing Warriors, Oregon Archaeological Society Publication #22, Portland.
Kurz, Rudolph Friederich, 1970, Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz, An Account of His Experienced Among Fur Traders and American Indians on the Mississippi and Upper Missouri Rivers During the Years 1846 to 1852, translate by Myrtis Jarrell, edited by J. N. B. Hewitt, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
VanPool, Christine S., Todd L. VanPool, and Lauren W. Downs2016, Dressing the Person: Clothing and Identity in the Casas Grandes World, American Antiquity, 82(2) pp. 262-287, Society for American Archaeology
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