ABSTRACT
In its beginnings and for long centuries afterwards art was everywhere the handmaiden of the supernatural. Even before he thought of decorating and beautifying his person and his abode, or of giving concrete form to his aesthetic emotion for the delectation of himself and others, man knew the urgent need to satisfy his instinctive feelings where those mysterious forces were concerned which surrounded him in his terrestrial life as in his death and future existence— forces against which he had to protect himself, which he desired to bend to his own desires and which he reverenced because he feared them.
