The cradle of Minoan and Mycenaean art

April 302014

The bold, spare contours of the marble sculptures created five millenia ago in southern part of the Aegean, had inspired modern artists from Picasso and Modiglani to Henry Moore. Painted pottery, finely wrought metalwork, and carved stone seals, figurines and jewerly survived to document the ingenuity of the craftmens of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece, the very first great civilization of Europe. The artistic strives of these socities were descendants of the remarkable achivements of later Greek art. .

There are no known written records left so, the art of these ancient civilizations is the only source which can give us information about them. Both Minoan and Mycenaean cultures were strongly influenced by Egypt and Near East, which was reflected through their architecture and art. The main reason was expanded overseas trade with these civilizations: they had easy access to the same materials Egyptian had used...

Minaon civilization (culture) represented people of the island of Crete, after the reign of legendary King Minos from 18 to 15 century B.C. Their way of living was similiar to nowadays ideas of life in heaven: they had no worries except basic concerns of neccesities for life. In conrast, Mycenian civilization (has been known) had been famous for their martial nature, which was persisted through ages in tradition of war faught by people all over the Greece against Troy.

Minoans were closely attached to the nature and had attempted to live in harmony with natural world. The sea and the creatures that inhabit it also inspired the Late Minoan from Palaikastro (new palaces at Knosos) and elsewhere.

No temples or monumental statues of gods or monsters had been found in Minoan Crete except some small figurines and sculptors. The gods they awe were associated with powerful Rhyton, a vessel used for pouring animals.

Liquids during sacred rituals

The statue had been found known as the Snake Goddes was presented like woman holding snakes in her hands and supporting a felineon her had. They also had strongawe for a lion and a bull. Those sources witness their affection for mortality rather than deity.

Minoan architecture was based on their palaces which concentrated political and economoic power as well as the artistic activity.The first, Old Palace, period came to an abrup end when fire destroyed these grand structures. Rebuilt buildings had become a cynonim for the golden age of Crete. Cretan palaces were well constructed, with thick walls composed of rough, unshaped field stones built in clay. The builders used stone madonry at corners and around door and window openings. The painted wooden colums had capitals and shafts. The spheroid, cushion like Minoan capitals resembled those of the later Greek Doric order, but the column shafts tapered from a wide top to a narrower base, the opposite of both Egyptian and later Greek columns.

Stairwell in the residential quarter of the palace at Knossos, ca. 1700–1400 BCE.

Major palace, which they are known for, was built on Knosos. The name of this culture came from the legend of a king who ruled the palace of Knossos, which was home of king Minos. According to the myth the hero Thesus was said to have battled with the bull-

mad Minotaur. After defeating the monster, Theseus found his way out of the mazelike complex only with the aid of the king’s daughter, Ariadne. She had given Theseus a spindle of thread to mark his path through the labyrinth 1and thus to find his way out safely again.

Mural paintings liberally adorned the palace at Knosos, constituiting one of its most striking features. The brightly painted walls and the red shafts and black capitals of the wooden colums provided rich effect. The paintings depicted many aspcects of Minoan life (bull-leaping, processions, and ceremonies) and nature (birds, flowers, and marine life).

The love of nature manifested itself in Crete on the surfaces of painted vases even before the period of the new palaces. Cretan potters fashioned sophisticated shapes using newly introduced potters „wheels“ and decorated their vases in a distinctive style. The painter seted creamy white and reddish brown decoration against a rich black ground. The central motif was a great leaping fish and perhaps a fishnet surrounded by a host of vurvilinear abstract patterns including waves and spirals. The swirlining lines evoked life in the sea, and both the abstract and the natural forms complement the shape of the vessel. The tentacles of the octopus reached out over the curving surfaces of the vessel, was embracing the piece and ephasizing its volume. This was a realization of the relationship between the vessel’s decoration and its shape, which was always problem for the vase painters.

This Mycenaean octopus pottery from reflects the influence of Minoans.

From 1500 B.C. onward, Crete was under the increasing influence of Greek mainland, in fact, the Mycenaeans may have occupied Crete after an island-wide destruction about 1450 B.C. The Mycenaeans connection with Minaon Crete played a decisive role in how they shaped and developed their culture, especially arts. The craftsmen of the Early Mycenaean period tried to imitate the products of the Cretan art creating real works of art which were distinguished, as the Minoan ones, for their elegance and magnificence.

Rareness of the raw materials played a very important role in demonstration of social prestige. That is the main reason why Mycenaean kings imported precious materials from countries of the East. That alloweded manifacture to flourish and Mycenaean art began to change.Although Mycenaean’s architecture had been strongly influenced by Minoan, it seemed to be different because of Myecnaean martial nature. Their architecture represented the expression of a powerfull society: Mycenaean palaces proved the wealth of kings who ruled them. Major classes include the palace, the city planning, fortifications and their immense tombs. For the large meeting hall, called a Megaron, they used extremely large blocks of 1 The English word labyrinth derives from the plan and scores of rooms of the Knossos palace. Labrys means „double ax“, and it is a recurring motif in the Minoan palace, referring to sacrificial slaughter. The Labyrinth was the „House of the Double Axes.“

stone as well as large fortification walls built around the cities and corbal valuting. The use of such bolders in construction testified their engineering prowes. Later Greeks thought that giant Cyclopes must have built them, so they called the great walls Cyclopean walls. Physical evidence of their architecture was the citadel of Mycenae with its impressive Lion Gate.

Lion The Gate was the outer getaway built on a natural rock outcropping and on the right by a projecting bastion of large blocks. Any approaching enemies had to enter this 2o feet wide channel and face mycenaen defenders above them on both sides. The gate itself consisted of two great monoliths capped with a huge lintel. Above lintel, the masonry courses formed a corbeled arch, leaving an opening that lightens the weight the lintel cerries. Filling this relieving triangle was a great limestone slab where lions carved high relief stand on the sides of a Minoan-type column. Similar groups appeared in miniature on Cretan seals, but the idea of placing monstrous guardian figures the entrances to palaces, tombs, and sacred places had its origin in the Near East and Egypt.

Just inside the Lion gate, archeologist found Grave Circle. It had predated the Lion Gate and the walls of Mycenae by some three centuries. Grave Circle enclosed six deep shafts that had served as tombs for kings and their families. The Mycenaeans laid their dead to rest on the floors of theese shaft graves with masks covering their faces, recalling the Egyptian funeraly practise. They buried women with their jewerly and men with their weapons and golden cups.

The Mycenaean made masks, which had often been compared to Tutankhamen’s 2gold mummy mask. It was not known whether the Mycenaean masks were intended as portraits, but the goldsmiths recorded different phyisical types with care. They portraited youth faces as well as mature ones. This was one of the firs attempts in Greece to render the human face at life-size.Large-scale figural art was very rare on the Greek mainland. The trianglar relief of the Lion Gate atis exceptional, as is the painted plaster head of a woman, goddes, or, perhaps, sphinx found at Mycenae. This head may be a very early example of a monumental cult statue in Greece.

The immportance of pottery, architecture and artwork of these two cultures is reflected trough their influence to civilizations that existed after them. They established presendence for Classical Greece and western civilization as a whole and participated in creating civilizations that we live in.

2 The treatment of the human face was more primitive in Mycenaean mask, whereas Tutankhamen’s mask stood in a long line of monumental Egyptian sculptures going back more than a millenium.