Ph.D. university of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities (Art History), 2012 / Pictorial copies play an essential role in the creation of rock art knowledge, forming a bridge between the art and theories of interpretation. My thesis traces a ‘pictoriography’, that is, a historiography of the practice of recording rock paintings in pictures. I begin with the earliest examples dotting the shifting edges of the Cape Colony from the mideighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Thereafter, the focus shifts to the Maloti-Drakensberg, where two case studies bring this disciplinary history into more recent times. The first is the rainmaking group from Sehonghong Shelter (Lesotho). One of the first rock paintings to be published, it became one of the most iconic in southern Africa. I relate its various copies to one another and to wider views of Sehonghong, revealing how it has been decontextualized and reproduced in diagrammatic form. I develop a ‘digital restoration’, whereby copies circulating independently in the world are returned in digital images to their place of origin. I develop this process further in a site-wide study of eBusingatha Shelter (AmaZizi Traditional Authority Area, KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg). Once an impressive painted gallery, eBusingatha has been severely damaged by vandalism, removals and collapse, while documents tracking its demise accumulated elsewhere. I reunite scattered records, enabling copies to be contextualized and lost visual qualities of the originals to be restored. Throughout these pictorial genealogies, I explore the distance between the way the rock paintings are illustrated and the way they actually look. While recording strategies are diverse, one dominant convention has emerged in recent decades. Meticulous tracings converted into monochrome redrawings effect a translation of complex and ambiguous painted occurrences into clean forms ‘peeled’ from the rock and projected like shadows onto paper. The are more like text than picture. Colour for instance is considered an integral part of painting traditions worldwide, yet is expunged from the study of San rock paintings. A reintegration of such pictorial attributes into their study may encourage a return to the material world of the imagery and a contextualization of the semantics of its symbolic constituents.

This study investigates copies of silk-embroidered linen cloths from the 16th and 17th century, created by the Danish Handcraft Guild during the period 1928–1980. The originals are most often embroidered with stem stitches in red silk with motives generally based on contemporary graphic prints. The Danish Handcraft Guild was founded in 1928 with ambitions to bring to life national textile traditions. The aim of the study is to find out which aspects of the historical textiles that were adopted in the copies, and possible reasons for these choices. Based on this case-study, the usage of historical originals for copies in relation to general understanding and development of cultural heritage is discussed. From a theoretical viewpoint, material culture is understood as having both physical and practical properties, related to memories and identities of individuals and societies. The study consists of two parts, one explorative study and one text analysis. In the explorative study five original textiles and nine copies are documented and compared. The text analysis deals with 77 texts from the Danish Handcraft Guild journal 1934–1980. The results show that the Danish Handcraft Guild practiced two approaches to historical originals. The mayor one was to find originals suitable for adoption on present-day products, often in simplified versions. A second approach is represented by big copies of silk-embroidered linen cloths. These were made as splendor display objects, related to a fine and noble national history. The tendency in this case-study is that copies of silk-embroidered linen cloths used for exhibitions seem to be closer to the original’s motives than those made for personal use. A conclusion of the study is that copies from historical originals do have potential to gain understanding and to develop cultural heritage. Which collective memory, history and value they convey depends on the context in which they were created, and to the story they mediate.