Minoan art

Since wood and textiles have decomposed, the best-preserved (and most instructive) surviving examples of Minoan art are its pottery, palace architecture (with frescos which include "the earliest pure landscapes anywhere"),[3] small sculptures in various materials, jewellery, metal vessels, and intricately-carved seals.

Sinclair Hood described an "essential quality of the finest Minoan art, the ability to create an atmosphere of movement and life although following a set of highly formal conventions".

While Minoan figures, whether human or animal, have a great sense of life and movement, they are often not very accurate, and the species is sometimes impossible to identify; by comparison with Ancient Egyptian art they are often more vivid, but less naturalistic.

[16] In comparison with the art of other ancient cultures there is a high proportion of female figures,[17] though the idea that Minoans had only goddesses and no gods is now discounted.

[19] The seascapes surrounding some scenes of fish and of boats, and in the Ship Procession miniature fresco from Akrotiri, land with a settlement as well, give a wider landscape than is usual, and a more conventional arrangement of the view.

[24] The frescos include many depictions of people, with the sexes distinguished by a "violent contrast" of colour that is more extreme than the equivalent in Egypt; the men's skin is reddish-brown, and the women's white.

[33] Evans and other early archaeologists tended to regard the wall paintings as a natural way to decorate palatial rooms, as they were in the Italian Renaissance,[35] but more recent scholars link them, or many of them, to Minoan religion, about which much remains obscure.

The figures are large, and include humans, bulls, griffins and a lion seizing prey; the few fragments worked up into the so-called Prince of the Lilies (AMH) are of this type.

[52] There may also have been ceiling reliefs of patterns of ornament; the Minoans also painted some floors with "normal" frescos, and the well-known scene of dolphins from Knossos may have been a floor-painting.

However, this may partly be explained by the lack of suitable stone, as there are smaller sculptures and some "evidence for the existence of large wooden and even metal statues in Crete",[59] which may well have been acrolithic and brightly painted.

The body is made of hippopotamus tooth covered with gold foil, the head of serpentine stone with rock crystal eyes and ivory details.

Stone vases, often highly decorated in relief or by incision, were a type made before the Bronze Age in Egypt and the Greek mainland, and they appear in Crete, mostly in burials or palace settings, from Early Minoan II onwards.

[62] The most elaborate palace vases are rhyta, probably for libations, some shaped into sculptural forms such as animal heads or seashells, others carved with geometrical patterns or figurative scenes round the sides.

[63] A number of these are of special interest to archaeologists because they include relatively detailed scenes touching on areas of Minoan life that remain mysterious, and are otherwise mostly only seen on tiny seals; for example, the "Chieftain Cup" from Hagia Triada may (or may not) be the most detailed representation of a Minoan ruler, the "Harvester Vase" from the same site probably shows an agricultural festival, and a vase from Zagros shows a peak sanctuary.

[70] The Pylos Combat Agate is an exceptionally fine engraved gem, probably made in the Late Minoan, but found in a Mycenean context.

Vast numbers, of both human and animal figures, were made as votive offerings, as all over the Near East, and have been found in the sacred caves of Crete and peak sanctuaries.

The poppy goddess type, with a round vessel-like "skirt", and two raised hands, and attributes rising from the diadem, a late one Minoan example.

Many also have casting defects in places; for example the famous and impressive bull-leaper group in the British Museum seems to have lacked or lost some of the thinner extremities (in part now restored).

North Syria had elephants throughout the period, and imported ivory from there or Africa seems to have been readily available for elite art; uncarved tusks were found in the palace at Zagros destroyed c. 1450.

Early Minoan ceramics (terracotta sculptures are covered above) were characterized by patterns of spirals, triangles, curved lines, crosses, fish bones, and beak-spouts.

However, while many of the artistic motifs are similar in the Early Minoan period, there are many differences that appear in the reproduction of these techniques throughout the island which represent a variety of shifts in taste as well as in power structures.

After new techniques allowed for the development of new styles of pottery in the early Bronze Age, Coarse Dark Burnished class remained in production, and while most wares from the Coarse Dark Burnished class are generally less extravagant than other styles that utilize the technological developments that emerged during EM I, some examples of intricate pieces exist.

[94] From about MM IIIA the quality of decorated palace pottery begins to decline, perhaps indicating that it was being replaced by precious metal on the dining tables and altars of the elite.

The so-called Marine Style, inspired by frescoes, has the entire surface of a pot covered with sea creatures, octopus, fish and dolphins, against a background of rocks, seaweed and sponges.

[100] Minoan jewellery has mostly been recovered from graves, and until the later periods much of it consists of diadems and ornaments for women's hair, though there are also the universal types of rings, bracelets, armlets and necklaces, and many thin pieces that were sewn onto clothing.

Minoan jewellers used stamps, moulds (some stone examples survive), and before long "hard soldering" to bond gold to itself without melting it, requiring precise control of temperature.

These have long thin scenes running along the centre of the blade, which show the violence typical of the art of Mycenaean Greece, as well as a sophistication in both technique and figurative imagery that is startlingly original in a Greek context.

[117] The archaeological record suggests that mostly cup-type forms were created in precious metals,[118] but the corpus of bronze vessels was diverse, including cauldrons, pans, hydrias, bowls, pitchers, basins, cups, ladles and lamps.

[122] Cup-types and bowls were probably for drinking and hydrias and pitchers for pouring liquids, while cauldrons and pans may have been used to prepare food, and other specialised forms such as sieves, lamps and braziers had more specific functions.

[129] Extant vessels from the Prepalatial to Neopalatial periods are almost exclusively from destruction contexts; that is, they were buried by the remains of buildings which were destroyed by natural or man-made disasters.