FISHY TALES FROM KNOSSOS: A MINOAN LARNAX AND VASE-PAINTER

CHRISTINE MORRIS

The subject of this paper, a painter of fish from Knossos, seemed an appropriate choice for a volume in honour of Nicolas Coldstream for two reasons. First, pictorial pottery (though Mycenaean) and its artists formed part of my doctoral thesis, which he supervised. Secondly, the material presented here comes from Knossos - where I was privileged, as a research student, to work with Nicolas and Nicky Coldstream, and where I subsequently lived and worked for the British School at Athens for six years with my husband Alan Peatfield, our Cretan dog Kirree, and later our son Daniel.

Despite the many depictions of the natural world in other areas of Minoan art - such as wall- paintings and glyptic, pictorial motifs (defined here as human and animal) played a less formalized role in Late Minoan painted pottery than was the case in Mycenaean pottery, where the rows of stately chariots and plump water birds were a well-established aspect of the ceramic repertoire. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the character and development of Minoan pictorial pottery is less well understood. This paper makes a modest contribution to this field by presenting fragments of a bath-tub larnax and of vases. which can be identified as the work of one artist - the Knossos Fish Painter.

The Bath-tub larnax

Lamax, three groups of fragments of bath-tub type (figs. 1-2). Provenance: Royal Villa, Knossos. The large rim fragment, la, was discovered during the removal and reboxing of sherd material from a small storeroom (the 'Earthquake House') to the main Stratigraphical Museum in May 1989. The labels indicated only that this was material which had been originally stored in the Little Palace, where, according to Pendlebury, the pottery from the Palace houses was kept.'

A more precise provenance only emerged later when further fragments (lb-c) of the larnax were identified from a box of Royal Villa pottery in the Stratigraphical Museum (Q I11 1, #lSOl).

la. Rim fragment; upper edge and outer profile of rim, damaged due to fabric flaking off in layers down to darker core. Fabric: coarse, dark grey with orange edges, dense inclusions of white, grey, purplish-red, mica. Surface: lustrous, thick creamy slip. Paint: lustrous, red-brown to dark brown, crackled.

Acknowledgements. I thank Katerina Baxevani for useful discussions about Minoan larnakes. The larnax fragments are published with the permission of the Managing Committee of the British School at Athens.

' J.D.S. Pendlebury, Guide to the Stratigraphical Museum in the Palace of Knossos (London 1933) 2.

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186 K U D O S : ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF J. N. COLDSTREAM

Fig. 3. Amphoroid krater, Knossos: Evans’ reconstruction of diving dolphins.

Fig. 4. Amphoroid krater, Knossos. HM 3599.

Figs. 1-2. Lamax fragments from the Royal Villa, Knossos. Stratigraphical Museum, Knossos (Q I11 1 #1501).

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CHRISTINE MORRIS: FXSHY TALES FROM KNOSSOS 187

Fig. 5. Varkiza basket rhyton, NM 8556: roll-out of main design.

0

Fig. 6. Fragmentary basket rhyton from Knossos. Ashmolean Museum 1910.186.

Dimensions (in cms): rim width c.7; thickness of body wall 1.8-2; maximum pres. ht. 33.5. Form: wide, flat rim typical of bath-tub larnax. Just below the rim on the inside of the larnax are two ridges; while ridging on the outside (usually just below the rim) is known on other bath-tub larnakes, such ridging on the interior seems to be without parallel.2

lb. (Q I11 #l50l) Three joined body sherds, which join the larger rim fragment la. Fabric and paint as la. Maximum preserved dimensions: 17.5 x 12.2

lc. (Q 111 #1501) Small body sherd, non-joining. Fabric and paint as la. Maximum preserved dimensions: 12 x 7.2

Decoration Inside: a wide, solid painted band at the rim from which a tricurved rock pattern hangs (cf. FM 624). Flanking the rock pattern, a pair of incompletely preserved fish swim diagonally upwards, their bodies crossing and their front ventral fins almost touching. The mouth is open, the eye rendered as a large solid circle. The head is marked off from the body by parallel, curving reserved stripes in the gill area, and two reserved stripes run along the ventral side of the body. Of the preserved fins, the front dorsal of the left fish and the rear ventral of the right fish take the form of hatched rectangles, while the front ventral fins of both fish are flipper-shaped.

* I am grateful to Katerina Baxevani and Athanasia Kanta for confirming the unusualness of this feature.

188 KUDOS: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF J. N. COLDSTREAM

To the left is a large ‘anemone’ (FM 27) and the edge of a rock-worwseaweed motif, and the curved edge of an unidentified motif. The small fragment (lc) adds only a solid painted area and a second large ‘anemone’.

Outside: as preserved, the external decoration is rather more enigmatic. Below the rim, two irregular horizontal bands, below which a solid painted rock pattern. The three solid painted motifs could perhaps be the tails of fish (different from those on the inside); the two undulating bands, like those on lc, could be octopus tentacles, and the motif at the lower edge of thick bands enclosing a pair of wavy bands could also be a fish (or less likely, an irregularly drawn horizontal panel).

Identifying the painter

When the larnax fragments came to light their similarity to the fish on other, already published, vases was immediately apparent. The most important and complete pieces, both featuring diving fish, are a fragment of an amphoroid krater from the area of the West Magazines at Knossos, HM 3599 (figs. 3-4) and an intact basket rhyton, NM 8556 (fig. 5) found in a tomb at Varkiza, Attica, but obviously Minoan. In publishing the Varkiza rhyton, Theocharis3 correctly observed its similarity to the fragment of a large vessel illustrated by Evans4 (here fig. 3), but assigned them to the LM IB Marine style. The suggestion of a single hand was re-affirmed by Popham: who identified the Knossos fragment as an amphoroid krater, and amended the date of the pieces to early LM IIIA.

There is not space here to discuss extensively either the methodological issues or the usefulness of attribution studies, which I have treated in detail elsewhere.6 Suffice to say that the identification of hands, while undoubtedly giving us a heightened sense of nearness to the ancient artist, should not, at least for the archaeologist, be an end in itself.

The identification of individual artists, be they vase-painters or sculptors, is seriously dkmode‘ in some circles of Classical art and archaeology. What might be termed the ‘New Art History’ rejects the search for the Beazley style ‘real men’ in favour of new (and indeed, stimulating) thematic approaches.’ But let us resist the temptation to throw the methodological baby out with the bath water! For viewed not as an isolated, aesthetic activity, but contextually, as an integral part of artefact analysis, attribution studies can contribute towards the better understanding of the formation and development of style, the definition of closely contemporary groups of material, and the spatial distribution (and its significance) of the products of individuals and workshops.

But if it is to live up to such a demanding role, attribution must have a firm basis. If, as sometimes happens, several modem individuals confronted with a series of anonymous works produce conflicting lists of what they consider attributable to one ancient individual, we may legitimately reflect on whether this is because the identification of hands is not really doable to any reliable standard, or whether it is more a case of how it is done. A brief foray into attribution studies in Americanist work of the later 1970s served to confirm what Giovanni Morelli (the father of connoisseurship) had articulated nearly a century earlier, that ‘almost every painter has his own peculiarities, which escape him without his being aware of it’,’ or, in scientific parlance, that the expressive movement of every individual is

M. Theocharis, Antiquity 34 (1960) 266-69. PM IV, fig. 239. M.R. Popham, AJA 68 (1964) 350; see also P.-A. Mountjoy, BSA 79 (1984) 167. C.E. Moms, ‘The Mycenaean Chariot Krater: A Study in Form, Design and Function’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis,

University of London 1989) 276-295; eadem, ‘Hands up for the individual: the role of attribution studies in the Bronze Age Aegean’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 3:l (1993) 41-66. ’ For example: J. Elsner, Antiquity 64 (1990) 950-2 (review of D.C. Kurtz (ed.), Greek vases: lectures by J.D. Beazley, and of J.C. Boardman, Athenian redfigure vases, the classical period: a handbook); M. Beard, ‘Adopting an approach 11’, in T. Rasmussen and N. Spivey (eds.), Looking at Greek Vases (Cambridge 1991) esp. 15-18. G. Morelli, Italian Painters: Critical Studies of their Works, I (London 1892-93) 75, quoted in R. Wollheim, On

Art and the Mind (London 1973) 194.

CHRISTINE MORRIS: FISHY TALES FROM KNOSSOS 189

characterized by a unique set of ‘motor habits’.’ The drawback is that the isolation of these subconscious idiosyncrasies or motor habits is by no means a simple task, and that is why intimate knowledge of the material combined with acute analytical observation - in other words, connoisseurship - i s essential.

Before returning to the specific artefacts presented here, some guidelines may be suggested which have general application. The feasibility of attribution depends in part on the character of the material. Confident attributions arise from groups of material where there are numerous details to use as criteria, where the same details are repeated many times, and where those details are executed in varied and distinctive ways. The identification of hands in writing is successful precisely because scripts meet these criteria - a reasonably large but repeated data set.” When we lament the limited number of works assignable, for example, to prehistoric vase-painters,” we should bear in mind the relatively small corpus and its often fragmentary nature,I2 and the problem of the lack of directly comparable criteria between objects. It is also important, though admittedly difficult, to attempt to disentangle overall style from individual style.I3 One effective means of doing this is to separate out the three main components of any design: 1) the choice of motifs, 2) how those motifs are put together (their structure), and 3) their execution. These distinctions are significant because choice and structure can be shared or copied, while execution is the exclusive domain of the individual. The amphoroid krater from the Palace of Knossos and the Varkiza basket rhyton share many distinctive features in all three design components: choice of motif, structure and execution. In both cases the overall shape of the fish is similar, as are the double reserved stripes on the ventral side, the reserved stripes in the gill area, the dotted circle eye (on three of the four Varkiza fish), the tapering head ending in an open mouth, and the opposed pairs of hatched, rectangular fins. The structure of the design is identical too - the diving motion with the arching tails sweeping over touch their neighbour’s backs. Common also to both works are the choice and location of the subsidiary or filling motifs: tricurved rock pattern along the upper edge of the design, and between each fish and mirroring their diving motion, a distinctive seaweed with bilobate fronds, from the ends of which flow triple undulating lines (FM 28: irregular rock-work). There are differences too, in particular, the flippers on the small, non-joining fragment of the krater, but more of that below.

A shallow bowl (not illustrated) from the North-West House, KnossosI4 may be added to the group. Though fragmentary, the two fish on the interior of the bowl share many of the same features outlined above: open mouth, dotted circle eye, reserved stripes in gill area and along body, hatched, rectangular fins, and within the circular field perhaps even the fluid diving movement of the fish on the krater and rhyton. Present too are the rock-work or seaweed fronds at the upper edge of the design, in this case just below the bowl rim.

J.N. Hill and J. Gunn, The Individual in Prehistory (New York 1977). lo In the Aegean Bronze Age the generally agreed attribution of 70% of the Knossos Linear B tablets to specific hands: J.-P. Olivier, Les scribes de Cnossos (Rome 1967) 101. Compare the experiment performed by James Hill (op. cit. n. 9) 85-94, in which not only was the writing of four individuals distinguished, but also each individual’s earlier and later writing - and this using only the quantitative data from one commonly repeated data set (the word ‘the’).

For example, with reference to Mycenaean pottery, E. Vermeule and V. Karageorghis, Mycenaean Pictorial Vase Painting (Cambridge, Mass. and London 1982) 9 express surprise that ‘most pictorial vases do not easily lend themselves to attribution’. I 2 Compare the total number of LH IIIA-B1 chariot haters (c. 300, including small fragments) with the number of works (c. 200) assigned to a single Classical vase-painter, the Berlin Painter. l 3 The varied and confusing meanings of style have been discussed by Morgan, who distinguishes between idiom (overall style) and style (individual style or microstyle): L. Morgan, ‘Idea, idiom and iconography’, in P. Darcque and J.-C. Poursat (eds.), L’iconographie minoenne (Paris 1985) 9-10. l4 M.R. Popham, The Destruction ofthe Palace at Knossos. SIMA 12 (Goteborg 1970) 102 with fig. 8:3 (drawing of interior and exterior of bowl, the latter with a zone of stylized stemless flowers).

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190 KUDOS: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF J. N. COLDSTREAM

A second fragmentary basket rhyton (fig. 6),15 also from Knossos, but now in the Ashmolean Museum, may be used to explore the question of how similar two works need to be for us to judge them the work of one painter. Like the Varkiza vase it is a rhyton with an off-centre hole in the base. And the main motif - diving fish - is the same. But is it the work of the same artist? Whereas on the other pieces the head was longer and tapering, here it is shorter and the eye relatively larger. In addition, a notable difference is the irregular (not to say, untidy) execution of the eye and the gill stripes.

The filling ornaments too are different and simpler; tricurved arches, and not between every fish, and one set of three dots. It could be argued that this is the same painter on an off-day or doing a rush job, or it could be that commonly vaunted art historical figure, the ‘less talented imitator’, or simply a product of the same general tradition. My point here is not to come up with a magic answer to these possibilities, but to illustrate the difference between strong stylistic similarity based on the combined features of choice, structure and especially execution of design, and what we have here - shared con- ventions, but apparently not shared execution.I6

The new fragments, published here, from the bath-tub larnax do not share the design structure of diving fish, nevertheless, the details of the actual fish and certain aspects of the subsidiary motifs support its identification as a work of the Knossos Fish Painter. The significant features are: the tapering heads with open mouth, the large disc eye (shared by one of the Varkiza fish), the stripes in the gill area and along the lower body, hatched rectangular fins behind the gill area and near the tail. Important, too, are the flippers (rather than fins) which occur also on the krater. Neither the tricurved rock-work nor the large ‘anemone’ appear on the other works, but at the lower edge of fragment Ib, immediately behind a fin, is the edge of a now familiar element in this painter’s repertoire ~ the lobed fronds of seaweed.

Having characterized a group of artefacts as the work of an individual, what else may be learnt? First, the contemporaneity of the pieces on an archaeological timescale is established as LM IIIAl/early LM IIIA2, primarily on the basis of the use of the amphoroid krater form, which is a typical LM 111 shape,17 and the context and other decorative details of the bowl from the North-West House.

Second, it provides an example of one potential way of gaining a better understanding of the ceramic industry; here are a group of vessels identifiable as having been painted by one individual, and found at one site (except for the Varkiza vase, which stood out immediately as an import), revealing a single person working on a range of shapes, and adapting a given motif to the morphological needs of those shapes. In addition, each piece has a visually distinct fabric - suggestive of the use of clays of specific character as appropriate to the size range and/or function of the vessel - an archaeologically meaningful data set which might be usefully investigated further by physico-chemical study.

l5 Illustrated also by Theocharis (op. cit. n. 3) 269 with fig. 3; Mountjoy (op. cit. n. 5 ) 175, fig. 4 (Kn 6). l 6 Likewise, there are number of other fragments, all from Knossos, which share some of the features of the Knossos Fish Painter, and could be his (or her) work. In these cases the same conventions are used, but the sherds are too fragmentary for similarity of execution to be confidently assessed. The relevant pieces are: 1) Closed vessel sherds from the North-West Treasure House (A I1 5, #101) with a diving fish and very similar seaweed, but also tricurved net: Mountjoy (op. cit. n. 5 ) 181, fig. 10, Kn 46; 2) Body sherd of a rhyton (North-West House), part of a fish: unpublished; 3) Body sherd of large, closed vessel ( S I 7, #1605 -in pencil), diving fish, to the left of which triple undulating lines (the central one thicker), perhaps growing out of a seaweed frond: unpublished; 4) Body sherd, flat (?lid, tray) from west of the House of the Frescoes (P I1 4 #1467) preserving head of fish with large dot eye, reserved stripes at gill and on body, and hatched fin; concentric bands on reverse side: unpublished; 5) Small body sherd from the Royal Villa (#1498), fish with ventral stripes and hatched rectangular fin: unpublished. l7 For detailed consideration of the origins and ceramic development of the Minoan amphoroid krater see Morris (op. cit. n. 6 ) 49-99. I do not accept the identification of a LM I1 sherd from Kommos as a plausible prototype amphoroid krater, nor that it is in origin a Mycenaean rather than a Minoan shape: see, P. Betancourt, The History ofMinoan Pottery (Princeton 1985) 153 with fig. 113:K, and 170.

CHRISTINE MORRIS: FISHY TALES FROM KNOSSOS 191

Last, but certainly not least, the common authorship of pottery and larnakes is here demonstrated, thus explicitly documenting the long-suspected link between these two ceramic media.”

Identifying the fish

Having discussed the similarities between the Knossos Fish painter’s works, I want to turn now to some of the differences between the works. Not as perverse as is sounds, for similarity and difference are both fascinating aspects of stylistic variability, and are crucial for evaluating how meaningful differences in details are in otherwise mute depictions. Beginning with a very simple example, three of the Varkiza fish have a dotted circle eye, the fourth a solid disc eye; since the fourth fish is not otherwise differentiated from its companions, it is not unreasonable to conclude that this is not intended deliberately to distinguish the one fish from the others, but represents two equally acceptable ways of showing the fish’s eye in that artist’s mental template. This is further confirmed by the dotted circle eyes of the fish on the krater and the bowl, but the solid disc eye on the larnax. The same principle may be applied to the way the fins are shown, which brings us to the question of what kind of fish was intended.

When Evans illustrated the krater fragments, he not unreasonably reconstructed the creatures as dolphins (fig. 3) probably because of the flipper-shape of the pectoral fins on the small lower fragment, and perhaps because of the diving motion, so typical in Minoan depictions of dolphins. Publishing the Varkiza vase, which clearly depicted fish not dolphins (no flippers, no beaked snout), Theocharis remarked that Evans’ restoration was most probably incorrect, and suggested instead that tunny fish are intended.” Certainly, the additional evidence of the North-West House bowl and now the bath-tub larnax consistently show a head of a fish, not a dolphin’s beak. Why then has the artist provided the fish on the krater and the larnax with a pair of flippers rather than his preferred hatched, rectangular fin form?

Taken in isolation the overall appearance of these creatures is fish-like with perhaps a touch of dolphin (the flippers). Yet examination of depictions which are more obviously ‘dolphin-like’, though not, in common with much Aegean iconography, anatomically accurate,” suggests a closer connection with conventions used for dolphins. A rare depiction of a dolphin on a pair of Marine Style (LM IB) ovoid rhyta from Pseira?’ shows a creature with a beaked snout, pectoral flippers, and the fluked tail separated from the body by a globe (a well-established convention with no apparent basis in reality). Distinctive too, and shared by the corpus of works under discussion here, is the set of reserved stripes separating head and body, and the reserved stripes along the body (these latter being wavy on the Pseira vase like those on frescoes). Two pottery fragments published by Mackenzie further indicate the link.’2 Here the dolphin has become more generalized, its identity revealed in one case only by the distinctive globe between tail and body, and in the other by the beak and pectoral flipper. The curved gill stripes and the pair of ventral stripes are identical to those of the Knossos Fish Painter. It seems unlikely the presence of flippers, when combined not with a dolphin’s snout but with a fish-like mouth, and with hatched fins, would have been read as standing for ‘dolphin’. However, it can be suggested that this hybridized form arose as a development or transformation out of increasingly conventionalized ceramic depictions of the dolphin.

l8 e.g. L.V. Watrous, ‘The origin and iconography of the Late Minoan painted lamax’, Hesperia 60 (1991) 303-4.

2o As noted by L. Morgan, The Miniature Wall Paintings of Thera: A Study in Aegean Culture and Iconography (Cambridge 1988) 60-6 1. 21 Mountjoy (op. cit. n. 5 ) 196: Pseira 3-4; Betancourt (op. cit. n. 17) pl. 20:A. 22 D. Mackenzie, JHS 23 (1903) 198 with fig. 14.

Theocharis (op. cit. n. 3) 269. 19

192 KLADOS: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF J. N. COLDSTREAM

Meaning and Context

The suggestion that the small group of ceramic works presented here is the work of an individual painter is based on the high degree of similarity in the form and execution of the primary motif (the fish), combined on occasion with common design structure, and the shared use of subsidiary motifs. By definition, therefore, our knowledge of the range of shapes and motifs painted by this (or any other prehistoric artist) remains partial and limited. The identification of common authorship of different main motifs (fish, birds, octopus etc.) is possible only under particular circumstances, for example, where a bird and fish occur together in one work, revealing the style and execution of both, or where distinctive subsidiary motifs are repeated.

Is it possible, as we are offered only a restricted window onto the work of this painter, to say anything more about the design itself? Although Minoan pictorial pottery seems a less standardized product than its Mycenaean counterpart in terms of the favoured designs (chariots, bulls, water-birds, goats/deer) and shapes (especially amphoroid and open kraters), some preferences and special relationships can be discerned. First, birds and fish are by far the most common designs, while animals occur less often, and human figures only rarely. Second, there is a correlation between choice of main motif and shape; birds in floral settings appear especially on alabastra, pyxides, cups and Fish appear on conical rhyta, basket r h ~ t a ? ~ an amphoroid krater, and on the inside of cups and bowls. Obviously, the choice of motif may be related to its syntactical suitability for a particular shape. Birds fit more neatly into a rectangular field, while the diving motions of fish can be best exploited in a less confining space, such as the deeper, curving fields offered by rhyta or kraters.

As archaeologists, we strive to understand the significance of the motifs and designs which comprise ancient art, yet designs on pottery are typically dismissed as ‘purely decorative’. Recently, for example, WatrousZ5 has readily acknowledged the shared currency of motifs on pottery, bath-tub and chest lamakes - a point borne out by the common authorship for the pottery and bath-tub lamax presented here. He also argues that many of these designs are part of an elaborate iconography of death, where the numerous marine elements represent a watery journey to an Otherworld, but only when they occur on chest larnakes: the same motifs elsewhere are held to have a different meaning or none at all.

It may be argued otherwise. First, the Late Minoan chest larnax, whatever its origins, is a form used exclusively for burial; it is a funerary object. It is reasonable, therefore, to interpret the motifs painted on it as having a funerary frame of reference. But before drawing the conclusion that the motifs on chest larnakes refer exclusively to death and the beyond, it is relevant to consider the general question of how images operate as visual symbols, as well as the use of the specific motif, the fish, within a contextual framework.

The idea that motifs have one meaning in one context, but quite a different one (or none at all) elsewhere, is at odds both with anthropological work on how symbols work, and with what we know of Minoan iconography. Much of the potency of visual symbols lies in the fact that they are polysemic, that, within a given cultural context, they have a co-existing, multiplicity of meanings which reverberate on the senses on the viewer.26 Context - the object on which the motif occurs, the place in which that

23 Examples of birds on pyxis, Alatsamouri: Betancourt (op. cit. n. 17) fig. 120b; Knossos: Popham (op . cit. n. 14) pl. 7e-f); idem, The Minoan Unexplored Mansion at Knossos. BSA Supplementary volume 17 (London 1984) pl. 69); alabastron, Kamilari: D. Levi, Annuario 39-40 (1961-62) 35, fig. 32a-f; Knossos: Popham (op. cit. n. 14) pl. 18c. 24 In addition to the two basket rhyta with fish discussed above, a third example (in a different style) may be men- tioned: 1990 Calendar of Art Gallery Gunter Puhze, Freiburg im Breisgau. I thank Joost Crouwel for drawing my attention to this piece. 25 Watrous (op. cit. n. 18) 304. 26 See V. Turner, The Forest ofsymbols (Ithaca 1967) 280-298. For the application of this approach to Aegean art, see C.E. Morris and A.A.D. Peatfield, ‘Minoan “sheep-bells”: form and function, preliminary results’, in Cretological 6 “, A2, 29-37; C.E. Morris, ‘In pursuit of the white tusked boar: aspects of hunting in Mycenaean

CHRISTINE MORRIS: FISHY TALES FROM KNOSSOS 193

object is found, or, the specific activity performed using it at a given time, may all affect the response, resulting in a stronger focus on one or some elements of meaning.

Only if there is an exclusive relationship between object and motif is it reasonable to argue for singularity of meaning. Thus we may differentiate between motifs or images which are explicitly funerary in nature, and those which may have a funerary dimension. A prothesis scene on a lamax or on a Geometric vase is an example of an image and an object made for the grave. An image such as a chariot procession on a Mycenaean krater, where the relationship between form and design is strong but not exclusive, where the object is often but not always found in tombs, and where the image occurs in many other non-funerary contexts (wall-painting and seals for example) is better understood as having a funerary dimension through the burial context.

In terms of marine iconography (including, of course, the fish) the same methodology can be applied. Such motifs occur throughout Minoan (indeed Aegean) art over a long period of time.27 In the ceramic medium they occur on bath-tub and chest lamakes, and on vases. Watrous cautiously excludes the bath- tub lamax from his analysis on the grounds that it is also used in domestic contexts. But the use of the bath-tub shape as a bath immediately suggests one reason why fish and wavy lines representing water are frequently depicted on the interior, as on the Royal Villa fragments. When the bath-tub was filled the fish would appear to swim in their native element - water. Thus, the fish and other marine elements on the Royal Villa bath-tub, though unusually elaborate, are typical on the bath-tub form and contextually appropriate.

But through the work of attribution we know that the painter decorated both lamax and vases with an identical motif, and looking again at the vase shapes we may be struck by their connection with the manipulation of liquids: rhyta for pouring libations, an amphoroid krater (for mixing and displaying liquids), cups and bowls for drinking. Note too that the fish swim inside the bowl from the North-West House, that is, within the liquid. Beyond being internally consistent, the idea that these fish motifs act as iconographic reinforcement, that they reflect and emphasize the function of the object they adorn, finds further support elsewhere in Minoan art. Mountjoy has shown that a high proportion of Marine Style pottery occurs in clear ritual contexts, and that a significant proportion of the known examples of the style decorates shapes connected with liquids, such as rhyta and jugs.28 In a different medium the Mallia stone triton is an excellent example of a triple combination of marine referents: the object shape, a triton shell; the form, a rhyton pierced for pouring; and the engraved decoration, where a Minoan Genius actually pours a liquid from a jug onto the hands of a second Genius.2y

Since by the Late Minoan period a large proportion of bath-tub lamakes occur in tombs, there is no reason to erect an unyielding boundary of meaning (or lack of it) between those motifs shared between the two lamax forms. In the rich, multi-referential world of symbols the allusion to the journey of the dead across the sea and the strong link of marine iconography with manipulation of liquids (and other, as yet undiscovered meanings) may co-exist. And careful consideration of the overall way any motif or consistently associated set of motifs is used, may lead us to the conclusion that even on humble clay vases motifs could retain integrity of meaning within the complex framework of Minoan iconography.

society’, in R. Hagg and G.C. Nordquist (eds.), Celebrations of Death and Divinity in the Bronze Age Argolid (Stockhom 1990) 149-155. 27 Summarized by Ch. Boulotis, in A. Delivorrias (ed.), Greece and the Sea (Athens 1987) 20-34, who stresses the multifarious significance of the sea and its symbols.

P.-A. Mountjoy, ‘Ritual associations for LM IB Marine Style vases’, in P. Darcque and J.-C. Poursat (eds.), L’iconographie minoenne (Paris 1985) 231ff. 2y Moms (op. cit. n. 6 ) 235-7, 328 with n. 42, and discussed also by Peatfield in this volume. The Mallia Triton is published in full by C. Baurain and P. Darcque, ‘Un trition en pierre B Malia’, BCH 107 (1983) 3-73 .

28