ABSTRACT
Most writers viewed almost all the forms of what is termed here the Ideational style as the "primitive" style, which results from the inability of the artists to draw or to paint or otherwise to reproduce the object properly. Ideational and primitive were often taken to be identical, while any competent rendering in the Visual style was regarded as a manifestation of artistic skill, maturity of technique, progress in art and in aesthetic genius. The fault of such theories consists in their identification of Ideational with immature, of Visual with mature. During the seventh and as late as the first half of the sixth century, the Ideational wave seems to have been rising higher. The reason for such a gravitation of each of these forms is evident: since the sacred and hieratic compartments of social life deal with "superempirical," "transcendental," ideational abstract, complex values they cannot be expressed in any adequate Visual form.
