1. Aegean Art Cycladic Minoan Mycenaean

3. About the Aegean People • Seafarers • Traded with ancient Egypt and near East • Peaceful • Possible gender equality • Significant to the bronze age

4. Cycladic Art • 3000-1600 BCE • Cycladic Islands in the Aegean Sea • Elegantly stylized statuettes reduced to geometric form of mostly nude women and musicians (male) playing harps • Seafaring people • Most art found in gravesites

5. Cycladic Sculpture Harpist, c.2500 BCE, stone.(right) Cycladic Female Figure, c.2500 BCE. (below)

6. Minoan Art • 1900 – 1375 BCE • Crete • Mixed-use palaces (not just for rulers) with maze-like ground plans and a central megaron • Farmers and herders • Experts at bronze-working • Traded with Egypt and the near East • Dynamic, fluid figures • Landscape paintings • Curvilenear • Divided into Old Palace, Second Palace, Late Minoan

7. Palace at Knossos, 1700-1400 BCE, Crete • Open–air chambers flooded with light • Center for business, religion, trade and manufacturing • Labyrinth-like plan from rebuilding after multiple earthquakes • Megaron – main audience chamber

8. Minoan Columns Painted wooden columns smaller at bottom than at top Capitals painted black Central courtyard

9. Toreador Fresco, from Palace at Knossos • Males have darker skin than females • May have been a ritual • Thin waists, bare-breasted females • True profile, but otherwise similar to Egyptian canon of proportion • Chariot wheel border

11. Spring Fresco, from Akrotiri (Thera)very early landscape; geometrically simplified swallows; vibrant colors; domestic; full of s-curves

12. Old Palace Pottery Kamares ware jug, 2000-1900 BCE, ceramic, Crete (slide) • Use of potter’s wheel • Extremely thin walls • Painted decoration – stylized curved forms derived from plant life • Black, brown, red • Exported to Egypt and Syria

13. Gold!

14. Second Palace Period Sculpture Woman or Goddess with Snakes, second palace period, faience, Palace Complex at Knossos • Possibly a ritual figure? • Flounced skirt and bare-breasts is common Minoan dress • Extremely thin waist • Wide-eyed (suggests religious use)

15. Minoan Marine Pottery! Don’t forget this image!!!!! Info: Minoan Marine Motif

17. Minoan Rhyton (ceremonial vessels) • May have been used for ceremonies and may have been broken as part of ritual • Smallish in size • Bull is very detailed and naturalistic • Harvester vase shows overlapping forms and enthusiasm (departure from Egyptian)

19. Mycenaean Art 1400-1100 BCE Mainland Greece

20. Characteristics of Mycenaean Art • Cyclopean masonry (so big a mythical Cyclops would be needed to move the rocks) • Corbelled arches • Less delicate and more realistic than Minoan • Heavily influenced by Minoan painting (from Mycenaeans occupying Crete in Late Minoan period)

21. Corbelled Vault Treasury of Atreus, Mycenae. (actually a beehive tomb) (2 slides)

22. Lion Gate, Mycenae The other lion gate. Notice the lions are above to doorway (as opposed to the Lion Gate of the Hittites) Heads would have been made of something other than stone.

23. Repousse examples Gold Cup from Sparta Thin waist Raelistic depiction of bull in motion Taut muscles on man Funerary Mask, from tomb near Mycenae Eyes are slits Found in royal shaft grave Placed over face of deceased Incised marks for hair NOT Agamemnon