We have seen several ways in which art sheds light on Minoan society: the elevated status of women, at least the upper class; the importance of religion and general ritual in public life; and the late chronology for most representations of individuals, especially in assumed stances of power, agreeing with a gradual tendency over time for more visible, if not more actual, exercise of personal power within the court-complexes. If Knossos in MM3B is the first phase of the Second Palace, some suggest we call its later LM1A phase the Frescoed Palace, whilst Driessen even suggests that ruler images on all art forms are from its final LM1B phase.
Some scholars link the image on a sealstone, the “Mother of the Mountains,” of a “powerful female” flanked by lions, to the flanking griffins in the Knossos
Throne Room, as part of a symbolism relating to a Minoan goddess “mistress of animals,” who was perhaps role-played by a priestess on the throne. The association there with a sunken stepped depression or “lustral chamber” introduces a general set of associations with many similar elaborate room complexes, of which one of the most informative is that in the heavily “Minoanized” town of Akrotiri on Thera; there frescoes are claimed to show initiation rites, including one for pubescent girls (Preziosi and Hitchcock 1999, see Chapter 6).
Also noteworthy in Minoan art are representational conventions, potentially a pathway for accessing Cretan mentalities. Uncontroversial is the pale color for women in frescoes, compared to brown-skinned adult males, a distinction common in many other cultures, where it is associated with the desirability (if not always reality) that upper-class women should remain indoors whilst men are active in the outside world of production and war. That adolescent males can be portrayed in intermediate shades may reflect Minoan emphases on age grades and associated initiation rituals.
Further connections have been drawn between age, gender, and status in Minoan art through utilizing distinctions in hairstyles (Davis 1986, Koehl 1986). Group scenes also deploy dress to differentiate elaborately-clothed individuals from those with far simpler, even clearly “rustic” wear (Barber 1991). German (2005) argues that most Minoan figure-scenes represent young men and women, many of higher status. Predominantly they are shown dancing and bull-leaping, which in palatial architectural surroundings may show ceremonies of passing to adulthood. For German, these representations are created for palace elites rather than the masses. However, many societies (for example Archaic and Classical Athens) represented their citizens in idealized form as youthful and bodily perfect to symbolize inner virtues, whilst little suggests that bull-leapers are an aristocratic caste. But her idea that these key “performances” portray Minoans passing into adult membership of the community seems insightful.
Shaw (1993) notes that Minoan art till the late Second Palace era emphasizes impressionistic combinations of the real and surreal, in which nature and especially flowers are central components. People collect and present flowers and we see orgiastic behavior of both sexes toward trees and stones. Arthur Evans had suggested a form of worship oriented to natural objects, and Herva (2006) reinforces these ideas with a general thesis that the art represents such animistic cults rather than anthropoid (human-like) divinities.
Also striking are the recurrent, stereotyped gestures of the rare figures found on wall-paintings and the commoner figures on seal stones and in portable figurines of clay or bronze. Verlinden (1984) classified hand and arm gestures into six types: amongst the most recurrent and clearest in context are one where the hand is placed to the forehead (“Minoan salute”), seen as a mark of respect to elite or supernatural individuals, and two others interpreted as postures of power, where the individual has hands on hips or folded across the chest.
The remarkable complexity and richness of Minoan “palatial” ceramics has likewise encouraged interpretation. The famous polychrome “Kamares” fine ware was probably highly decorated and widely distributed for use in communal feasting, but might (as provocatively argued for Classical Greek decorated wares) be imitating more valuable metal vessels (Schoep 2010).
World History
