Aegean Art
Cycladic
Minoan
Mycenaean
About the Aegean People
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Seafarers
Traded with ancient Egypt and near East
Peaceful
Possible gender equality
Significant to the bronze age
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
Cycladic Sculpture
•Harpist, c.2500 BCE, stone.(right)
•Cycladic Female Figure, c.2500 BCE.
(below)
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
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
Minoan Columns
•Painted wooden columns
smaller at bottom than at top
•Capitals painted black
•Central courtyard
Toreador Fresco, from Palace at Knossos
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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
Spring Fresco, from Akrotiri (Thera)
very early landscape; geometrically simplified swallows; vibrant colors; domestic; full of s-curves
Old Palace Pottery
Kamares ware jug, 2000•
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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
Gold!
Second Palace Period Sculpture
Woman or Goddess with Snakes,
second palace period, faience,
Palace Complex at Knossos
• Possibly a ritual figure?
• Flounced skirt and barebreasts is common Minoan
dress
• Extremely thin waist
• Wide-eyed (suggests religious
use)
Minoan Marine Pottery!
Don’t forget this image!!!!!
Info: Minoan Marine Motif
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)
Mycenaean Art
1400-1100 BCE
Mainland Greece
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)
Corbelled Vault
Treasury of Atreus,
Mycenae. (actually a beehive tomb)
(2 slides)
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.
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