Mycenaean art shows a complex mixture of its own iconographic agenda and the deployment of Minoan elements in old and new contexts. We have already examined examples relating to religious activity of a public and personal nature, and the early Shaft Grave art.
The Lion Gate, which forms the display entry to the Mycenae citadel, has a pair of rampant lions (?) either side of a Minoan column, their feet on altars, and their faces facing out to visitors (Preziosi and Hitchcock 1999). The missing heads on the Lion Gate, presumed in plaster, wood or a different stone, are not securely lions (Betancourt 2007), but might be birds of prey or mythical griffins, which appear in the same posture and setting in Minoan and Mycenaean art. We remain impressed by the Lion Gate as we approach Mycenae, even in its damaged form, retaining its ability to awe us into knowledge that we are entering an enclosed center of power. This “antithetical” setting of great animals not only recurs in the lions and griffins backing the throne in the Pylos palace, but is common in Minoan art in a religious rather than political form. The Knossos throne room is a complex case, since the similar accompanying art (paired griffins flanking the throne) may back a secular Minoan and/or Mycenaean ruler, or religious official (perhaps female). The least disputed interpretation is that the beasts are associated with divine and secular power in all these cases.
Apart from the existence of Mycenaean art in obvious places where art could underline power or ritual, the site of Gla challenges the conception of Mycenaeans as a warrior society contrasted with the more sensitive and playful Minoans. Frescoes were identified in almost all the buildings of this very “functional” series of administrative and storage structures, even the granaries, puzzling even to the excavator (Iakovidis 1998, 2001), and are of peaceful images (e. g., dolphins). It does seem likely that our traditional contrast between the Minoan worldview and that of the Mycenaeans, as displayed in art, is too superficial, and perhaps there was more homogeneity than allowed for. Thus at a minor Mycenaean settlement in Central Greece, by the modern village of Tanagra, around 50 terracotta mold-made coffins have been excavated from extensive cemeteries, showing strong Cretan cultural influences. Images are of funeral scenes, hunting, bull-leaping, and plausibly aspects of the spirit-world (Dakouri-Hild 2010).
Further insights have been derived from the analysis of the frescoes from the palace at Pylos (Davis and Bennet 1999). Scenes of warfare in the “combat frieze” may belong to the first phase of the final LH3B palace, when the incorporation of the outer provinces had recently been achieved, perhaps through military aggression. These warfare scenes are in the Southwest Building, which some see as the residence of the Lawagetas, war-leader and/or crown prince of the kingdom (Palaima 2000). The Great Megaron friezes with peaceful heraldry, feasting, and sacrifice would be later, celebrating the pomp and ceremony of the mature state. It is impossible when considering reconstructions of these Pylos feasting images, with tables of men holding cups aloft and a bard with a harp, not to recall the much later epics of Homer (probably active around 700 BC), where an elite warrior society with its kings feast in halls to the accompaniment of tales of their ancestors and living “heroes.” Few doubt that the Homeric poems of Troy and Odysseus’ wanderings represent a cumulative amalgam of stories and images deriving from a continuous elaboration of oral poetic recitation, beginning in the Mycenaean age, if not in the preceding Middle Bronze Age, right down to Homer’s own time (Sherratt 1990, Morris and Powell 1997).
Nonetheless, there are limits to a simple “Homeric warrior elite” gloss on Mycenaean society. Whilst it is true that the Mycenaeans favored heroic scenes of the hunt or war, whereas Minoan art has far fewer examples of such scenes and they are not so prominently displayed, the Mainlanders followed their predecessors in generally (but not entirely) rejecting the contemporary Near Eastern norm where art was used to show personal power (Betancourt 2007). No kings or war-leaders stride larger than life across Mycenaean palace walls.
The commonest Mycenaean art is of course on the plentiful ceramics. Betancourt (2007) perceptively comments that the naturalistic, swirling, busy animal, human, and plant forms of Minoan and Cycladic art are adopted by Mycenaean potters, only to become
“domesticated” and then increasingly schematized into unrealistic abstractions. The process is well shown by the “stiff” LH3 octopus (Figure 7.1) and the typical mature Mycenaean style on kylix-cups with their almost entirely abstract squids.
World History
