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The History of Art Survey
Lecture 6
Aegean
Gardner 76-95
A Cycladic Early 3000-2000; Middle 2000-1700; Late 1700-1200 BCE

B Minoan Early 3000-2000; Middle 2000-1700; Late 1700-1200 BCE

C Helladic Early 3000-2000; Middle 2000-1700; Late (Mycenaean) 1700-1200 BCE

Style Periods: Cycladic ≈ Minoan ≈ Helladic

Style Period: Early Cycladic 3000 - 2000 BCE

1 Female figurine, 18” Syros
2 Male lyre player, 9: Keros

Style Period: Late Minoan 1700 - [1500] 1200 BCE
3 Palace (aerial view), 1700 - 1400 BCE Knossos
4 Palace (plan), 1700 - 1400 BCE Knossos
5 Stairwell, Palace, 1700 - 1400 BCE Knossos
6 Minoan woman, Palace, 1700 - 1400 BCE, 10” Knossos
7 Bull - leaping scene, Palace, 1700 - 1400 BCE, 32” h Knossos
8 Young fisherman with his catch, Akrotiri, c 1650 BCE , 53” Thera
9 Flotilla of Miniature Ships, Akrotiri, c 1650 BCE, 17” h Thera
10 Landscape with swallows, Akrotiri, c 1650 BCE, 7’6” h Thera
11 Kamares Ware jar, c1800-1700 BCE Phaistos
12 Marine style octopus jar, c 1500 BCE, 11” Palaikastro
14 Harvester Vase, c 1500 BCE, 5” d Hagia Triada
16 Snake Goddess, faience, c 1600 BCE, 13 1/2” Knossos

Style Period: Late Helladic 1700 - 1200 BCE
17 Corbelled gallery, 1400-1200 BCE Tiryns
18 Methods of spanning a passageway
20 * Lion Gate, 1300-1250 BCE, 9 1/2’ Mycenae
21 Treasury of Atreus, 1300-1250 BCE, diagram Mycenae
22 * Vault of Treasury of Atreus, 1300-1250 BCE Mycenae
23 Funerary mask, Grave Circle A, 12”, c 1600-1300 BCE Mycenae
* Grave Circle A Mycenae
24 Inlaid dagger blade, Grave Circle A, 9” 1600-1500 BCE Mycenae
26 Warrior vase, c 1200 BCE, 16” Mycenae

Art Historiography
Our framing projects here are [a] history and [b] historiography: studying what happened and interpreting what happened. In fact all history does just this, only most historians tend to bury their historiography or mask it within their story, because it makes the story more convenient to tell. [a] One story is easier to keep straight and interesting than two. And [b] by sticking to the story without reference to the historiography we are able to offer our conclusions convincingly, as if they were what happened, rather than as a best bet based on our personal calculations that needed defending. The story is most effectively and affectingly told offensively. Historiography is a defensive act, it is always inelegant and ungainly. It admits that we don’t actually know, we just believe on the bases of other beliefs.

Still even the hegemonic historian is a historiographer, and in some cases finds the historiography actually so compelling that want to intrude it into their tale. Thus no twentieth century historian of Egypt can leave out the tale of Howard Carter, who spent so many years as a dust dry archaeologist, poking around in the robbed-out subterranean passageways of the Valley of the Kings, and then burst into every newspaper and that new fangled thing the radio, when he turned out to be right and found the tomb of Tutankhamen, the ruler whose things had not been yet found, and so were probably not yet discovered!

One can’t look into that gold death mask with its incredible luxury and beauty without seeing Howard Carter’s reflection. After all, Howard Carter was one of us! He was an art historian who struck it rich, art historically!

Homer’s Iliad was composed c 750 BCE. 19th-century and later archaeologists have yet to get over the success of the amateur classicist, Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of what we have come to accept as the actual Troy of the epic, still pregnant with valuable antiquities, at Hissarlik in Turkey, in 1870. Schliemann was led by the British scholar Frank Calvert, but it was he who had the imagination to believe he could actually locate and retrieve the past. He also excavated at Mycenae “on the mainland of Greece.” However mistaken he may have been about the actual identification of the site, he supposed to be the fortress of Agamemnon, the brother of Menalaus, it still turned out to be a pre-classical treasure throve, buried for over two millennia and still containing treasures of ancient artifacts.

How? He followed the clues in the ancient literature. The same process took others to the Island of Crete. [Between Egypt and mainland Greece.] Crete was the site of Knossos, home of Minotaur, half bull, half man, in the labyrinth. In 1900 Arthur Evans dug up the site of Knossos. These excavations did indeed resemble a maze. The excavations on Santorini (ancient Thera) are more recent. Whether or not it can be reasonably said to be the source of the legend of Atlantis, as many have suggested, it is undoubtedly a rich site of the early Greek, pre-classical Aegean world.

Aegean Culture
For our human cultures, the seas have always been as much a passageway as a barrier. If the peoples of the Aegean islands were separated by their distance over the seas from the conquering military civilizations of Mesopotamia on their east and Egypt to their south, these distances didn’t keep them from continual trade and familiarity with their cultures. Cultural traditions are based upon the social unities of language and geographic proximity. In the archaic period they are further marked by the self-conscious awareness of other cultures with differing verbal languages and visual traditions.

The three distinct cultures discussed here as “Aegean” shared a good deal, but can be distinguished by archaeologists in general, despite complex interactions.

The cultures of the Aegean islands were based on trading and fishing as well as farming. They were never as populous as their mainland contemporaries. Historians have divided the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean into three contemporary, parallel sets: Minoan on Crete, Helladic on Greek mainland, and Cycladic on the myriad tiny islands in between. Each is chronologically divided into a conventional archaeological Early, Middle and Late, with the Late Helladic called Mycenaean, after its most characteristic site.

The Cycladic imagery is unknown in the other two regions. Minoan art is known mainly from the first half of the Late Minoan, before 1400 BCE. Mycenean art is known largely from the later half of that period, after 1400 BCE. The division is more or less related to the conquest by Myceneans of Knossos between 1450 and 1400 BCE. It is now controversial what the effect of the explosion of the volcano on Thera and subsequent tidal wave had on this development.

Style Period: Early Cycladic 3000 - 2000 BCE
1 Female figurine, 18”, c 2500 -2300 BCE Syros
There are marble quarries on many of the Aegean islands. Marble is a relatively soft, and so relatively easy to work, stone fabric, which has a fine grain structure that takes fine detail and often displays a handsome and easily polished surface.

The striking style of Early Cycladic sculpture is its geometric simplicity or abstraction. Indeed the style has not left a plethora of forms, but almost exclusively a collection of male and female figures.

The vary in size from a few inches up to several feet. Typically Cycladic images maintain close adherence to a very simple, if highly elegant, style. The images are all figures, flat slab, full-front outlines with linear details and a minimum of internal modeling. As with this one broad shoulders narrow down to less significant legs and feet. Arms are kept largely within the outlines, and as here, largely outlines. Gender is always indicated. The shovel-shaped face with only a ridge of nose raised from its smooth surface is more or less standard. Fragments of paint are found on some.

“Nude” they are called in our books. Thought we don’t know if they were originally dressed or left as simply naked. Some of the painting was used to add decoration such as dots on the face on bracelets. It is possible that features added to the faces and clothing as well.

What we have are not simply successors of the Paleolithic fertility figurines. there are distinct differences. First of all, these come in both male and female figures. Second they have this distinct, flattened geometric forms.

And then there is their meaning. We don’t know what they were used for. In general it is supposed that they were funerary, making graves, but that is not for sure.

They are not simply sculpture. They were not objects for esthetic viewing or living room display. But to know their purpose we would have to know what purpose they were produced for, and the human activities that made use of them are not recorded in Homer or evidence in other materials found with them.

2 Male lyre player, 9”, 2700-2500 BCE, Keros
The lyre player is unusual for developing across a more spatial axis, off the planar silhouette common on the great majority of Cycladic figures. The inclusion of a chair and a lyre and the presence of an activity are also unusual. The style is quite similar. Smooth, barely articulated, simplified, rounded geometry. When raised off the slab we get tubular forms. As gender is important in all these figures we can be sure this is a male, because there is no indication that it is feminine. There is an instance of a lyre player found with a female figure in a woman’s grave, which has led some archaeologists to suppose he is playing for her in an after life. We don’t really know if these are figures of the deceased or of gods or exactly what. The majority being found in intact burials and cemeteries, they seem to have a connection with death. But different ones could have different meanings, depending on how they were used.

The meaning of objects is not implicit in their forms. It is a matter of their social use, or we may say, the context of their social use.

One of the major points we are teaching here is the consistence of style within each culture. Styles of visual imagery [spatial articulation or production] are as consistent as languages (linear verbal articulation). To understand them we need to look at wide swath of production, not just a few of the most attractive pieces.

Just how characteristic are the two works of Early Cycladic art we have seen here? As I remember them writing up these notes from your book, I am reminded that though there is a museum devoted to Cycladic art in Athens and images widely published around the world, don’t remember too many more than these: dozen or fewer vertical figures. So, to check my own acceptance of the view I’ve just offered, based on my familiarity and your book. I will write the following paragraph after checking more thoroughly in the library. That, of course, will not match the critical look I have been able to give some of the other subjects here, which I have followed for years and in museums and sites around the world. (July ‘03)

So! What did my library survey reveal? I found nearly a dozen books, mostly by the same few writers. One of the more interesting included regularly a diagram showing the development of the series over the period from 4500-2000 BCE. First of all there is a consistency of imagery during the 2700-2000 period that is well reflected in our standing example. If anything there is a slight development in the direction of greater abstraction. The much earlier dated works are more irregular, but largely similar. The flat shovel face with the raised nose ridge runs beginning to end. Eyes to appear once in a while. Somewhat more articulated pieces appear once in a while. But there are also distinctly more abstract violin-shaped pieces, that also appear once in a while.

All the musicians I noticed were male, but there were few male standing figures as compared to mostly female. Among the musicians were a few more lyre players, a flute player and a pipes player. And, oh! The “idols” are not really flat but thin profiles modulated in s curves to separate head, torso, and legs.

The pieces are mostly found in stone-lined tombs. They are tomb goods.

Style Period: Late Minoan 1700 - 1200 BCE
If the Early period on the islands are characterized by stone-lined tombs, the Late period is characterized by palaces on the mainland and the Island of Crete. Late Minoan is measured from the rebuilding of palaces after a natural disaster seems to have damaged most. The superiority of Minoan sailing vessels made the construction of elaborate the fortifications usually associated with such structures unnecessary. It seems there was no reason for protecting them from invasion by either their neighbors or distant powers.

The majority of this work was done before the culture began to decline, after 1500 and was invaded and conquered by Myceneans from about 1450 to 1400 BCE. There is very little after 1400.

3 Palace (aerial view), 1700 - 1400 BCE, Knossos, Crete
4 Palace (plan), 1700 - 1400 BCE Knossos, Crete
The relation between the popular Greek tale of Theseus and the Minotaur and the palaces of Crete is based upon the double-axe signature on the walls (labyrinth), not the rabbit warren of small chambers in the foundations. This palace is apparently built over the remains of the previous one. If you will take time to read through the diagram you will get a sense of the different functions and their locations. The structure was built of field stones placed in clay. The corners, however were finished more cleanly in ashlar: cut stones resting upon each other. Bathing rooms were given drains and in general the palace construction was conscious of drainage throughout. The palace seems to have gone up three stories and to have included staircases built around air shafts.

5 Stairwell, Palace Knossos

There is a great problem with the reconstruction, unfortunately. Sir Arthur Evans, who did most of the early excavations on Crete, was a fairly crude excavator by modern standards, and a more creative restorer than anyone accepts today. Unfortunately this means he destroyed some important evidence which could have been interpreted later, as well as having built up three stories in some places, where only a basement outline existed!

The element of this stairwell you can have faith in is the shape of the pillar, which was found in several different locations, and its coloring, which is also based on good evidence. It is an interesting pillar, quite uniquely widening as it rises and crowned by a bulbous capital (or head). We also see impost slabs above the capital and below the shaft. These columns were constructed of wood with red shafts and black capitals.

6 Minoan woman, Palace, 10”1450-1400 BCE Knossos
Here is a fragment of the painting that covered much of the palace’s walls. Technically the work is fresco, which means it is painted with water based colors in fresh plaster. Fresco is well known in the ancient world, because it embeds its colors in the fabric of the wall it covers and lasts quite well, if the wall lasts. Fresco colors are uniformly soft pastels, however. Brighter colors cannot be achieved in this technique. The Egyptians achieved brighter colors by painting on already dry plaster (fresco seco).

La Parisienne (the archaeological public relations machine knows a happy title). A youthful female, a fragment from a large mural. The style is conventionalized. The enlarged eye is typical. Still it is a pretty face

There is a strange note here on “Minoans used a true (wet) fresco.” “Unlike the Egyptians, who painted in fresco seco.” There is nothing particularly true of false about dry or wet painting. It is only a strange use of terms to call something fresco seco. In any case it is modern art historians who use these terms, however confusingly.

7 Bull - leaping scene, Palace, 32” h 1450-1400 BCE Knossos
Our authors see the justly famous Bull-leaping mural as lively and spontaneous. It does seem to have a playfulness and movement we have not seen in Egypt’s more formal style. Take care as you look. The dark patches, here are the actual fragments of painting surviving. The rest is an interpolation. The subject here seems to be a major ritual activity, in which acrobats actually used dangerous play with a powerful bull to prove their superiority to it. Whatever the actual activity and its meaning are lost to us. Unlike the later Spanish bull bating (referred to in the work’s tourist title) there are no weapon or torture of the animal involved in this image.

We can see similar conventions here to those seen in Egypt. Males are depicted darker than females. Indeed, as Slatkin informs us, this convention is so consistent here that the figures on the sides are normally taken to be a woman on that basis alone. There is nothing else in their dress or depiction to make this certain. On the other hand the stylizations are quite different than the Egyptian formulas we have seen. Things here are still in profile views, but there is a bit of perspective in the revealing of the multiple legs on the bull. There is also a lengthening of elements and attenuation of ends here that proves quite elegant, if clearly unrealistic. The wasp waists are striking. We might say the conceptual conventionalization is similar to Egypt’s and Mesopotamia’s, but the actual rendering is distinctly different.

(There is a note in our chapter on recent discoveries of Aegean painting in palaces constructed in Egypt around 1530 BCE. They are evidence of the traveling of artists and so of art styles a long ways back. )

8 Young Fisherman with His Catch, Akrotiri, c 1650 BCE, 4’5” Thera,
Here is a nearly life sized fragment from Thera, the Cyalades island. The figure is naked, otherwise the formula is the same. He walks along with two strings of fishes. When we look at the twist of the figure from the profile hips to the more or less full frontal shoulders and then profile head, we can see something new. Instead of appearing as conceptually twisted as earlier figures, this one seems to have just enough care in the connecting elements to make a believably observed figure of a man turning. Akrotiri’s being buried under pumice, like Pompeii later, has left us a great deal of fine art well preserved. This painting comes from a private house, not a palace.

9 Flotilla of Miniature Ships, Akrotiri, c 1650 BCE, 17” h Thera
The miniature ship mural comes from the same house. Here too we seem to sense a scene, not a diagram. [Though there is too little in our illustration to say much about .]

10 Landscape with swallows, Akrotiri, c 1650 BCE, 7’6” Thera
This is the best preserved mural painting at Akrotiri. Quite unlike all the work we have seen up to now, this one is a landscape, not a picture of people. There are wildly colored and undulating rocks with flowers. It is a largely decorative setting. Titling it Spring, seems warranted. It reveals the interest in the natural world as an attractive place to be, that we haven’t seen before. “Irrationally undulating and vividly colored rocks, ..graceful lilies. soaring swallows...” Its tourist title is “the Spring Fresco.”

After the continuous diet of carefully controlled, symmetrical and formula repetitious images, here is something that appears freely lyric.

11 Kamares Ware jar, 1’8”, 1800-1700 BCE, Phaistos, Crete
Minoan pottery is famous for its playful decorative imagery, mostly of polychrome, sea life. Nothing could be more evocative of a culture based on a oceanic economy: fishing, trading, piracy. The example here has a black ground decorated with white and reddish-brown leaping-fish and net imagery. The sea itself is evoked by swirls and wavy lines.

The lines in horizontal registers are still hand drawn and irregular, conforming to the cylindrical shape of the vessel. The whorls and leaping fish and net bulge with the bulging of the vessel’s body.

The archaic witnessed the technological innovation of the potter’s wheel and more efficiently thrown and regular ceramic shapes it produces. Previously all ceramics, whether round in shape or not were hand-built.

12 Marine style octopus jar, 11” c1500 BCE Palaikastro, Crete
The marine style, octopus jar is one of the most famous survivals of the Late Minoan period. It is reproduced almost universally. The wandering tentacles of the octopus wriggling with what appears to be lyric freedom around its globular shape. Here again we see the painter taking queues from the shape of the vessel to work out the painted decoration. Fragments of seaweed fill in the empty spaces and a pair of cartoon eyes complete the design and hold the viewer’s attention. In this case we have black painting on a light ground.

Unlike most earlier pottery the feet on each of these jars is flat, for standing on a flattened floor. Most previous pottery is pointed at the bottom to stand up in sandy soil, or like the pots shown in the painting from the tomb of Nebamun (3-31), placed into ring shaped brackets.

14 Harvester Vase, 5”d, Hagia Triada, Crete c 1500 BCE
The famous Harvester Vase of Hagia Triada is actually a work of carving in steatite, or soap stone, a very fine grained fabric that can be cut with a knife. Around the top of the jar—the bottom being lost—we find the images of farmers marching off to reap or sew, against a background of sheaves. The figurative formula is the same one we’ve seen right along. What may be a little different is the interest in internal anatomy on the figure with the rattle. It may not be scientifically correct, but it is evocative of direct observation.

16 Snake Goddess, faience, 13 1/2” c. 1600 BCE, Knossos
The most famous piece of Minoan art is the faience Snake goddess. It is an imagery known in a number of different pieces. Unlike Egyptian art Mesopotamian art, Minoan Crete has no kings or gods, or monsters. The figure wears a skirt that flows in layers to the ground. She holds a wriggling snake in each hand and a cat sits perched upon her head. But her most striking characteristic is the open bodiced corset from which her two breasts spill. If nakedness is difficult to overlook, such attention grasping displayed nudity stands out even more strongly. Whether these figures represent a goddess or a servant of the goddess is not clear. Her eyes are roundly open.

What happened to Minoan civilization around 1500 BCE is not at all clear. But it is clear that at around this point its flourishing monumental culture came to an abrupt halt.

This would seem to indicate the disappearance of the royal patrons who could support such art, though not necessarily of the society of farmers that supported it.

ART?
This may be a useful place to pause and consider what it is about the pictures and buildings we have been looking at that qualifies them as “art.”

Composition, gesture and pattern are three things we refer to regularly. By composition we mean the general outline and organization of an object’s forms. In the ceramic pieces of the Aegean you can see this well enough. Compositions are measured by things like symmetry and proportion, which make them both readable and thinkable. The human face and body are bilaterally symmetrical and their health is seen impaired if that symmetry is broken. Proportionality is more a matter of familiar patterns and relationships repeating. Again we may relate it to our view of the natural world. We get used to certain relationships and feel secure around them. A person who is too tall or wide or a melon that is elongated rather than the usual suggests a problem of some sort. These aren’t matters of rationality so much as familiarity.

Pattern is repetition or rhythm. Lines of colors are repeated and we enjoy the repetition. This is particularly pleasing when it is something familiar. In any case repetition is a form of familiarity itself. The repetition of shapes is again, readable, thinkable. We know what we are looking at. We can identify the form or its meaning. The repetition of sheaves above the “harvesters” heads, the curling tentacles of the octopus around the belly of its fabric, the repetition of skirts on the snake goddess or the framing patterns around the Bull Leaping mural.

Gesture is a little more unusual and ephemeral. But clearly certain lines or shapes seem to be enjoyable for their resonance in our visual cortexes. A face that we find pretty is one that reminds us lf a real facial type we enjoy. The face on the Snake Goddess is a relatively crude caricature, but the sweep of her apron or way the bodice curves around her breasts is a handsome curve. The breasts themselves may be attractive from our hard wiring appreciation of breasts as sources of sustenance and erotic gratification. But the curve of the bodice may be enjoyable as a resonant curve.

And I will add two more: representation and resonance with the human. What is it about the Young Fisherman with His Catch that we find enjoyable. In part it is the mere fact of representation. I think it is fair to say we enjoy representation for itself. Even stick figures attract and hold our attention. But there is something particularly engaging in the strings of fishes held by the young man, not just the rhythms of their shapes repeating, but the way in which their bodies shown hanging down catches the actual fall of wet, flaccid fish bodies as we have see them, capturing a material reality of the real world. This resonance with reality is compounded when it is human reality. The way the boy’s face approaches the human is interesting. The way his turning gesture captures something particularly human, right let in front, belly twisting and shoulders twisting away catch something particularly engaging.

Did I leave out color? It seems implicit that we all seem to enjoy color, both for itself and in various combinations with the other characteristics I have mentioned.

The great question, in any case, seems to be why do some of these colors, representations, gestures and patterns and compositions prove particularly more enjoyable than others. My own feeling is that it is a combination of familiarity with other a wide variety of related positive associations. There is no single scale or even limited number of limited scales. The importance of the object itself is enough to make it valuable to us, at which point we find its forms enjoyable as we recognize them, like visits from distant relatives.

What we call styles in art are consistent patterns of formal and symbolic representation from a particular culture. Thus what Egyptian or Minoan designs have in common with other Egyptian or Minoan designs is one of the things that make them recognizable and enjoyable.

Style Period: Late Helladic or Mycenaean 1700 - 1200 BCE
The Mycenaean or Late Helladic is chronologically parallel to the Late Minoan in general, but in particular the majority of remains in Mycenean sites post date the decline of the Minoan cultures. The two cultures are closely related by language and trade and a variety of other shared forms. The latest Minoan script, the Linear B, which unlike the other two has been translated, is a form of Mycenean Greek. But they are separate enough in geography and interaction to be distinguishable.

The peoples on the (Greek) mainland were the forerunners of the modern Greek culture and they took a lead from the culture already developed and continuing on Crete. It developed at the time of the new palaces. “By 1500 BCE a distinctive Mycenaean culture was flourishing in Greece. Between 1450 and 1375 BCE Mycenaean Greeks of the mainland invaded and took control of Crete.

There is a striking contrast between the utter lack of fortifications on Crete, and so around the Minoan palaces, and the heavy fortifications that have survived on the mainland. It seems clear that their navies alone were enough to protect the great Minoan cities and even their elites, where the people of the mainland were threatened with invasion wherever they gathered wealth.

17 Tiryns, 1400 - 1200 BCE
Mycenae is the most famous site of the period and as such has had its name taken to identify the whole, but there were many centers of this culture spread across the mainland. Tiryns, 10 miles away, is the other large fortress site to be recognized and excavated. Like the fortress at Mycenae, it was a fortress constructed of large stones upon a defensible hilly position, overlooking a fertile valley, where the farming villages that supported its occupants created the economy they protected. And like Mycenae it was destroyed around 1250-1200 BCE by invaders from the north, who were themselves Greek speaking.

Homer mentioned “Tiryns of the Great Walls.” Pausanias, who wrote a guide book to Greece for the Romans in the second century CE, refers to its towering fortifications with awe. People of the region in later times were so amazed by the size of the structures that they attributed them the mythical race of one-eyed giants, the Cyclopes, and we still refer to such work in very large stones as Cyclopean.

19 Plan of the Palace and southern part of the citadel
Read the plan the archaeologists have reconstructed on the citadel and you will see a number of forms we can identify. The main structures are the defensive elements and those of regal gathering. Our text points out in particular the Megaron (darkened on the plan), the royal reception hall. It is a large set of rooms, based upon a progression from a pillared portico, connecting it to the open courtyard, to an inner room with a great hearth at its center and a throne to one side. On four sides of the hearth were great Minoan-style wooden columns, that supported its roof. Here we see one of the major sharings with the older culture on Crete. The later form of the Greek temple take this room entered through a pillared portico as its basic form.

18 Corbelled gallery, Tiryns, 1400 - 1200 BCE
Our close-up of cyclopean masonry comes in a narrow passage built of huge, roughly quarried stones in the form of a corbelled vault. A corbelled arch is o structure where a space between two walls or pillars is bridged by extending stones out from either side in horizontal rows, each higher level reaching out a little further until they touch. It is an alternative to a lintel of a single stone bridging the gap. A running series of such arches form a vault. This is trabeat masonry: stone piled upon stone held together by gravity. No mortar or other adhesives are used.

20 Lion Gate, 1300-1250 BCE, 9 1/2’ Mycenae
Mycenae’s Lion Gate introduces a more refined element into both the cyclopean masonry itself and monumental entrance. As elsewhere the approach to the citadel forces those approaching to keep their right sides toward the fortifications. This is a means of keeping enemy soldiers somewhat off guard and more vulnerable. The bastion mixes its created structures with the natural forms of the site. It is on a hillside, beside an even taller, but inaccessible height.

The gateway here is a post and lintel structure, with a large triangular space above it roofed by a corbelled arch that relieves some of the weight it must support. This space is filled with a bas relief sculpture in a heraldic design. The center of the triangle is held by depiction of a Minoan style pillar on a thick, rectangular base and supporting a second capital or impost block of three layers. The outer layers are horizontals, the inner one is made up of round dowels seen end on, or decorated with circular shapes. To either side of the pillar stands a lion, its back legs on the ground and its first raised up on the pillar base. The heads of the confronted lions are lost (they were cut in separate pieces), but they would have faced the impost block. From its striking symmetry and regal lions we are led to see it as a symbol for the site or its occupants. The presence of lions at an entrance also has a possible guardian reference.

As much as the cyclopean wall expresses the protective use of the entrance, the figurative decoration serves to give it an aura of symbolic importance. We are entering not just a protected site, but one possessed by people with pretentions to cultural grandeur.

21 Treasury of Atreus, 1300-1250 BCE Mycenae
Like the citadel and the Lion Gate, the Treasury of Atreus is considered to be more or less the moment of the Trojan War, described in Homer’s epics. This is the best preserved and largest of a set of contemporary tombs with a beehive interior shape, called therefore tholos tombs. Its famous title [what I have been calling a tourist title] is a mistaken attribution of early historians. The type may have distant antecedents on Crete, but it is quite different from anything found there.

The point of the structure is a monumental tomb with an interior quite as impressive as its exterior. The structure is a beehive shaped, domed interior chamber 44’ high and 48’ in diameter at the base, constructed of corbelled rings, held in place by the piling of earth around it. This interior is an awe inspiring monumental space off of which is a smaller chamber intended for actual burial. Estimate is that the structure was built with relatively rough blocks, that were finished after they were laid in place. The engineering involves corbelled levels set in rings. No centering was necessary. It is the largest interior domed space in all antiquity, up to the construction of the Pantheon, 1500 years later at Rome.

The approach to the tomb (the dromos, visible in the diagram, and in the pictures of Plato’s Cave) is quite impressive on its own. It is a 20 foot wide, 120 foot long corridor up to a monumental doorway, lined with well finished stones. The doorway is relatively bare today, but taken with those of other tholos tombs can be used to reconstruct a design featuring jamb pillars somewhere between the form of the Minoan type and the later Greek Doric. There is a relieving corbel arch above the lintel.

The giant stones that act as the lintels covers the tombs entrance passageway weigh in together at 120 tons. Some reconstructions suggest a triangular tympanum panel here like the one we see on the Lion Gate.

What is most interesting today is the awe inspiring space of the interior. Here is one of the type reasons for understanding why elaborate architecture is created. Here is a space that it is elevating, or awe inspiring to move within. So striking is this in such rooms, and in particular this one, that it is difficult to conceive of it being created with any other purpose other than being used for just that. Why put great cultural effort into creating a structure that no one will be able to enjoy. Of course we might suppose the tomb was for the deceased to enjoy. That was certainly the plan in an Egyptian tomb. There the majesty is focused on the outside where it can be seen by those ministering to the deceased. They have no interiors of significance.

But here is a tomb with the majority of its expression on the inside. Why? It doesn’t seem that it was because there were activities of some sort continuing here. The actual burial being in a room off to one side leaves this hall for the glory of the deceased when occupied by those coming to pay respects. But these structures were sealed up, the dromos being filled in, after the burial. So their awe inspiring purpose was for the momentary event of the funeral itself.

And what is so special about a domed room? The proportions of this room are such that we can feel, standing within it, the dimensions themselves with some insistence. And then there is the shape. Domed interiors are featured in a good number of the worlds most striking works of architecture. And because I particularly enjoy them I have been visiting many. I find it enjoyable to stand within a structure whose shape I can understand so thoroughly. The spatial pattern is pleasureful. It surrounds regularly on all sides. This is a surrounding symmetry of 360 degrees and expands possibly on the enjoyment of bilateral symmetry. The narrowing as the curve rises is also measurable. That seems to be the source of pleasure to me. I can feel the dimensions of the finely crafted, geometrical shape I inhabit. And its proportions feel just right. Within the measurable, thinkable, space I am left to admire the elegance of the angle of the walls and the fine craft of their finish. Originally there were metal rosettes in registers that articulated the surface. The ensemble of material devices is pleasing to experience.

There is a soaring feeling in that space, that is very deftly constructed, so that I am lifted enjoyably by observing it from a position, standing within it. That’s the best way I can explain it. Like a piece of music I enjoy, I can replay the visual and sensuous experience in its visible themes and carefully modulated rhythms. Would any circular, domed interior be as pleasing or impressive? No. What make this one, work so well is the particular proportions, which make the perception of surface and space so immediately sensible from any where within. You can continue to read and so to feel these distances with great precision or conscious awareness.

An wild (?) hypothesis that occurs to a specialist of Indian art who has studied a rock-cut temple room with a unique open hole in its ceiling surrounded by a special set of imagery, is that the original design was in part the result of the burning of the body on its pire that took place within the tomb, just prior to the burial. The capping stone could have been placed after that moment. Someday I’ll have an archaeologist from the region to ask.

22 Vault of Treasury of Atreus, 1300-1250 Mycenae
We’ve now seen two sorts of vaults: the longitudinal, corbelled-tunnel vault at Tiryns and this parabolically circular, beehive vault. The tholos vault is a centralized rather than longitudinal one, and so it is called a dome.

23 Funerary mask, Grave Circle A, 12”16-1300 BCE Mycenae
and Plato’s cave: Grave Circle A
The treasures that accompanied the deceased into the tholos tombs were looted as soon as their original creators were out of site or conquered. But some “treasure” has survived to be excavated and preserved, in more out f the way places. The rulers of the citadel at Mycenae were buried in shaft tombs that were apparently inconspicuous enough to avoid detection. So whatever elements of treasure there which were found in ancient times, some did survive to be found by modern archaeologists.

At the bottom of the 6 shafts of Grave Circle A, just inside the Lion Gate at Mycenae were bodies, whose faces were covered with gold masks. Here is the most interesting. It is a bearded, mustachioed male, with closed eyes, manufactured by repoussé, pushing out a relief from behind in a metal foil or plate.

The men here were buried with their weapons and cups, the women with their jewelry.

Our text points out that the Mycenaeans would have been aware of Egyptian practices of the same period, which a gold death mask resembles. Indeed the Greeks always saw the Egyptians as the greatest civilization of their day and traced many of their cultural developments, rightly or wrongly, to them. In this case the crudeness of the Mycenaean mask, when compared to the Tutankhamen’s of a little later, tells us something about the level of craft available in the two places. Indeed it can lead us to ask whether the Mycenaean work is of very high art [quality!] at all. I’d say it is a pretty crude construction. Its presence in our survey is based on its being in gold and being a rare survival, not on being a significant work of craft skill or design sensitivity.

24 Inlaid dagger blade, Grave Circle A, 9” 1600 -1500 BCE Mycenae
The inlaid dagger is a work of very fine craft in bronze, with inlays in gold, silver and niello (a black metal alloy). It is the most elaborate of several related pieces to survive. It is a work of ceremonial display, not for combat. Along the shaft are depicted four hunters attacking a trio of lions, who have already felled a fifth hunter. We see three hunters behind shields moving with spears toward our right. A fourth has a bow and arrow. They are opposed by a lion, and we notice a fallen hunter below their feet. Further along to the right a pair of lions escape. We should note that the entire composition is framed by the narrowing wedge of the blade, and fit into it with care, narrowing down to fit its frame. (The four circular grommets to the left were for attaching the blade to its handle.)

“The slim-waisted, long-haired figures are Minoan in style, but the subject is borrowed from the repertoire of the ancient Near East. It is likely a Minoan metalworker made the dagger for a Mycenaean patron who admired Minoan art but had different tastes in subject mater than his Cretan counterparts.” (95)

It is valuable to take the above interpretation apart, for it includes a number of important hegemonic bourgeois ideological biases we should remain skeptical of. The aristocratic and imperial tendencies of bourgeois culture regularly attributes creativity to most powerful centers rather than recognizing local creativity. One of my goals in understanding art history is to recognize where indigenous creativity is being covered up with a claim of elite influence. Why? Because despite our continuing development of democratic forms in bourgeois culture, we are still today laboring under a set of aristocratic practices we haven’t yet gone beyond. And chief among these, in the realm of the arts, is the idea that only a few “special” people can make or even appreciate art, and that most people are not creative.

It is reasonable to see the “The slim-waisted, long-haired figures” as of “Minoan in style” since they have the same distinctive figure style and there is nothing else similar know in Mycenaean culture from the date that these are attributed to.

So why not consider the piece simply a Minoan import? The marshal, hunting imagery is not know in Minoan culture. It is know in Mesopotamian culture, but also in Egyptian and nearly every other archaic culture. But nothing here looks like anything manufactured in Mesopotamia.

This could be a work of Mycenaean artists with familiarity with Minoan styles and Mesopotamian themes. It could be the work of a Minoan artist based on imagery from other cultures. We don’t know. And it would be a great mistake, of the sort we will consider further later called survey fetishism, to put together an answer that sounds convincing if all we know is what we’ve covered in our book. So why do our authors offer it to us, despite its tenuousness? Because it fits their presuppositions about creativity’s limited sources.

Should we be spending so much of our time looking at ideology?

Of course that is one of the premises of this course. To understand history you need to understand the ideology of those telling the story. There is not writing that is non-ideological. I’ve just been giving an important example of aristocratic ideology holding on in today’s developing democratic thought. Slatkin avers, in her short chapter on the Aegean, to another bit. Some modern feminists have pointed out, as she makes clear, that our great cultural periods have been patriarchal: ruled by men. Is this important? We will see in the coming sections on Greece and Rome better what that has meant.

What she offers in her study of the archaic Aegean is to point out that the period of matriarchy, a culture ruled by women, sometimes supposed for the Minoans, has never existed. Not even there. Indeed one may find Feminist writing of a certain sort that takes as an ideological underpinning that the Neolithic world and some subsequent ones were matriarchal. We have records, for instance of lines of descent being traced through the women rather than the men of families. All of this discussion reminds us of the importance of all our cultures being male dominated. And it presents us with questions for a culture seeking democracy. Can women be given equality in society? This is one of history’s major questions.

26 Warrior vase, 16” c 1200 BCE Mycenae
The ceramic shape is a krater, a large bowl for mixing wine and water. The subject of the painting rendered on it is a set of soldiers marching in a file. At the beginning of the line is a woman waving them off in departure. It is a pretty crude set of repeating figures with no setting at all. The figures are happy caricatures revealing not too much skill, but an enjoyable decoration all the same.