(2015) A. Vlachopoulos, “Detecting ‘Mycenaean’ elements in the ‘Minoan’ wall paintings of a ‘Cycladic’ settlement. The wall paintings at Akrotiri, Thera within their iconographic koine”, in H. Brecoulaki et al. (eds), Mycenaean Wall Paintings in Context. New Discoveries and Old Finds Reconsidered PDF

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2 DETECTING Andreas Vlachopoulos / “MYCENAEAN” ELEMENTS IN THE “MINOAN” WALL PAINTINGS OF A “CYCLADIC” SETTLEMENT: THE WALL PAINTINGS AT AKROTIRI, THERA WITHIN THEIR ICONOGRAPHIC KOINE The Theran wall paintings, excellently preserved, methodically conserved, and pre- sented to the public by Spyridon...

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2 DETECTING “MYCENAEAN” ELEMENTS IN THE “MINOAN” WALL PAINTINGS OF A “CYCLADIC” SETTLEMENT:

Andreas Vlachopoulos /

THE WALL PAINTINGS AT AKROTIRI, THERA WITHIN THEIR ICONOGRAPHIC KOINE

The Theran wall paintings, excellently preserved, methodically conserved, and presented to the public by Spyridon Marinatos soon after they were excavated, constitute the largest corpus of mural images in the prehistoric Aegean. Their iconographic integrity and carefully recorded architectural context (that is, their attribution to specific spaces of the buildings) make them a unique treasure trove of information about the people of Thera, their natural world, and the social, religious, and ceremonial spheres of their community (Fig. 1a, b).1 The wall paintings at Akrotiri belong to a securely dated horizon of a few generations, between the “seismic” and the “volcanic” destructions of the site–that is, the Late Cycladic (LC) I period. Historically, this phase corresponds to the period of the emergence of the first royal houses in mainland Greece in the Early Mycenaean or Late Helladic (LH) I period, and the heyday of the new palaces on Crete during the Late Minoan (LM) IA period. It is generally accepted that the art of wall painting appeared at Akrotiri as an innovation introduced from palatial Crete, and that it can be interpreted as evidence for the wealth, customs, and fashions of an extroverted Theran society in the mid-2nd millennium B.C. However, the question of where the beginnings of the Minoan iconography of the 2nd millennium B.C. are to be detected has yet to be answered satisfactorily–that is, with persuasive arguments rather than working hypotheses. Research concerning this question frequently turns to the minor arts for explanations and sees the perfection of miniature seal-carving as the fertile meadow that gave rise to the “official” birth of monumental painting during the 1. O  n the wall paintings of Thera see, Thera I–VII; Marinatos 1972; Marinatos and Hirmer 1973, pp. 56–61, figs. 149– 153, pls. XXXIV–XLII. More generally on the community at Akrotiri, see Doumas 1992, pp. 16–31. All photographs and drawings illustrating material from Akrotiri are courtesy of the Akrotiri Excavations, Archaeological Society at Athens.

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Figure 1a

Akrotiri, Thera. Xeste 3, 1st floor, north wall. The wall painting of the Great Goddess. Akrotiri Excavation Wall-Paintings Conservation Laboratory. Courtesy of the Akrotiri Excavations, Archaeological Society at Athens.

Middle Minoan (MM) III period; this type of explanation often plays down the seals’ lack of narration as well as the fact that the subjects represented–even the human figures–emphasize emblematic qualities that were meant to evoke and promote the status of their owners.2 From as early as the 3rd millennium B.C., seal-carvings articulate “phthongs” of pictorial inquiries, which on the MM II sealings from Phaistos and Malia evolved into the first words of a vocabulary that was to be used in the Aegean for at least another 400 years.3 It is at this time that the griffin arrived from the East and the demon or genius from Egypt, and it is also at this time that the lion and the galloping ibex appear within landscapes that will be dubbed “Nilotic” not long after.4

D etec ting “M ycenaean” Elements in the “M inoan” Wall Painting s of a “Cyclad ic ” S ettlement

According to Sinclair Hood, the accepted assessment is that during the MM IIIA period the walls of the new palace of Knossos were adorned with blue monkeys gathering saffron, relief male figures with bulls and spirals, and possibly aniconic representations of a labyrinth.5 These are followed, in the MM IIIB period, by large-scale scenes of a relief bull in an olive grove, miniature scenes of crowds, bulls, and bull-leapers, male figures and griffins, ornately bedecked female figures, and buildings.6 It is clear now that the successive renovations of the palace of Knossos, old and new, were accompanied by iconographic programs of related and familiar thematic cycles, a situation that was disrupted by the (more bibliographically alleged than actually proven) “Mycenaean” presence, beginning in the LM IB period.7 Consequently, in the period when the Neopalatial court of Knossos was creating wall-painting compositions of high art, and crystallizing through these an anthropocentric cosmos replete with symbolism designed to reflect the image of those who commissioned and enjoyed them, this thematic repertoire seems to have been applied in a mature and already developed form. The so-called Kamares ware, the supreme creation of the art, technique, and aesthetics of the Old Palace pottery workshops, displays only a few of the properties of monumental painting, such as polychromy, syntactical composition, and even the seeds of narrative representation, but compared with the contemporary Middle Cycladic polychrome pictorial pottery, the styles are so dissimilar as to create unease about the synchronisms between Crete and the Cyclades.8 In the MM III pottery of Crete there was a dynamic development of the pictorial elements of the MM II period, as seen on a small pithos from Phaistos decorated with fish in nets, and two MM III pithoi from Pachyammos.9 Some motifs are rendered in relief (an ibex in a rocky environment, a bull in a flower-filled landscape, dolphins) and the landscapes present clear characteristics of mural painting.10

2. Anastasiadou 2009, pp. 341–369; Poursat 2010. 3. On Phaistos and Malia, see Immerwahr 1990, pp. 26–28, figs. 8, 9; Anastasiadou 2009, pp. 56–58. Indications of the use of monochrome painted plaster appear long before the first palaces of Crete (MM IB), in the Final Neolithic (Levi 1976, pl. 8v; Militello 2001, p. 35) and the Prepalatial period (Immerwahr 1990, pp. 22­–28; Militello 2001, p. 35). See also Blakolmer 1997, pp. 96–97; 1999, pp. 42–43; 2010b, p. 149. 4. On the griffin see Aruz 2008, pp. 64–67, 100–101, 107–108, 112, 116; Doumas 2008b, p. 124. On the genius see Aruz 2008, pp. 75, 77–78, 84–85. On the Nilotic landscape see Immerwahr 1990, pp. 28–30, fig. 10.

5. H  ood 2005, p. 50, fig. 2.3. On the date of New Palace paintings, see Hood 2005, pp. 46–47, fig. 2.1. On the monkey saffron gatherers, see Hood 2005, p. 62, no. 5. On reliefs with males, bulls, and spirals, see Hood 2005, pp. 46–47, 76–78, nos. 30 and 31, figs. 2.1, 2.28, pls. 4.1, 27.3. On relief wall paintings in general, see Blakolmer 2010b, p. 155. Concerning the labyrinth, see Hood 2005, p. 80, no. 34, figs. 2.30, 2.31. 6. Hood 2005, pp. 50–52, nos. 2, 9, 10–13, 20, 28, 32, figs. 2.1, 2.3. 7. Hood 2005, p. 45, fig. 2.2. On the diffusion of the art of wall paintings in Neopalatial Crete, see Blakolmer 2010b, pp. 150–151. 8. On Middle Cycladic pottery, see Doumas 2008a, pp. 30–36, figs. 34–40; Papagiannopoulou 2008a, 2008b; Nikolakopoulou 2010; Vlachopoulos 2012. On Kamares ware, see Levi and Carinci 1988. 9. Phaistos pithos: Walberg 1986, p. 85, fig. 103; Dimopoulou-Rethemiotaki 2005, p. 250; Vlachopoulos 2012. Pachyammos pithoi: Seager 1916, pp. 19–20, 23–24pls. IX, XIV; Koehl 2008, p. 64, no. 34. 10. Levi 1976, pls. 78 and 79; Sakellarakis and Sakellaraki 1997, p. 555, figs. 553–559; Blakolmer 1999, pp. 48–49. Karetsou, Andreadaki-Vlazaki, and Papadakis 2000, pp. 56–58, nos. 30–35 (Malia); Dimopoulou-Rethemiotaki 2005, pp. 249, 256. Protopalatial wall paintings seem not to have developed similar iconography, with their repertoire in Phaistos being restricted to polychrome linear, geometric, and a very few floral motifs (Militello 2001, pp. 37–97; see also Blakolmer 1997, pp. 97–100; 1999, pp. 42–43; 2010b, p. 150).

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Figure 1b

A . Papadi mi tr i ou, U. Th al e r, J. M ar ran

B ear ing the Pomegranate B earer : A Ne w Wall-Painting S cene from Tir yns

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Akrotiri, Thera. The wall painting of the Great Goddess. Courtesy of the Akrotiri Excavations, Archaeological Society at Athens. Drawing M. Kriga.

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To these works in relief we should also add some executed in the round–exquisite art with scenes of land and sea that seem to blend subjects of Egyptian art with Cretan taste, a style which is now international in its scope.11 In the Middle Cycladic city of Akrotiri there is an imported Minoan flask with a polychrome relief representation of a bull being attacked by a lion in a rocky landscape.12 Phase C of the Middle Cycladic horizon at Akrotiri, as defined in recent years by Irini Nikolakopoulou, is contemporary with the MM IIB–MM IIIA horizon of Knossos, yet Kamares ware was not imported to Akrotiri.13 In this period Theran bichrome pottery becomes polychrome with the addition of white, and a series of large-bodied vases (pithoi, asaminthoi or bathtubs, and jugs) is decorated with pictorial representations of a narrative character; the representations include griffins in thickly vegetated or rocky landscapes (Fig. 2a, b), hunting scenes, birds in narrative compositions (perhaps alluding to initiation), and human figures performing ritual-ceremonial acts (Fig. 3a-c).14 The iconography of the Middle Cycladic vases of the Theran pictorial “school” laid down a thematic vocabulary for the wall paintings before these monumental murals, as the fashion of the times dictated and the expressive needs of an emergent “bourgeois” mentality, appeared at Akrotiri.15 The experienced and bold potters, as Christos Boulotis has argued for the potters of the Kamares vases, would have easily switched to the more demanding endeavor of mural painting, with their tried and tested artistic vocabulary and syntax.16 However, it seems that this did not happen immediately. The lilies jug from Xeste 4 (Figs. 4a, b, 5a, b) is an important piece in the Late Middle Cycladic Theran pottery repertoire, one that links a Cycladic vase type, the tubular-spouted

10cm Figure 2a

Akrotiri, Thera. The Middle Cycladic “Griffin Pithos.” Akrotiri Excavation Pottery Conservation Laboratory. Courtesy of the Akrotiri Excavations, Archaeological Society at Athens.

11. P  oursat 2000. See also, Immerwahr 1990, p. 35. 12. At Akrotiri, Middle Cycladic pictorial and polychrome pottery came to light in large quantities during the excavation of the deep “pillar pits” (φρέατα) for the foundation of a new roof to cover the site of Akrotiri; see Doumas 2008a, p. 30. On the bull and lion see Knappett and Nikolakopoulou 2008, pp. 19, 27–29, 34, fig. 17; Girella 2009, p. 445, 458, fig. 5a, b. 13.  Nikolakopoulou et al. 2008; Nikolakopoulou 2010. On pictorial pottery assigned to the MC Phase C of Akrotiri, see Vlachopoulos 2013. 14. Doumas 1999; 2008a, pp. 30–36; figs. 34–40; Knappett and Nikolakopoulou 2008; Papagiannopoulou 2008a, 2008b; Nikolakopoulou 2010; Vlachopoulos 2013. 15.  Doumas, Marthari, and Televantou 2000, pp. 62, 68; Marthari 2000; Vlachopoulos 2007b, p. 117; Papagiannopoulou 2008b. 16. Boulotis 2000.

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D etec ting “M ycenaean” Elements in the “M inoan” Wall Painting s of a “Cyclad ic ” S ettlement

Black Red Burnished

The MC “Griffin Pithos.” Courtesy of the Akrotiri Excavations, Archaeological Society at Athens. Drawing A. Kontonis.

jug, with a post-Kamares representation of spiral-like tendrils swirling symmetrically in a rock garden of scrolling lilies.17 Minimally narrative but superbly decorative, the polychrome lilies jug seems like a fleeting miniature, a preliminary drawing for the monumental Spring Fresco, which a talented painter, known for his work throughout Xeste 3, created in Complex Delta at Akrotiri.18 We do not know exactly how many years after the lilies on the jug the lilies of the wall painting were made, however, what this jug shows is that compositions such as that of the Spring Fresco were being executed earlier by the painters of polychrome pottery in the period of the first real springtime of Theran art. The Kamares style seeded the ground in which the Theran lilies “flowered” and climbed elegantly up amidst the spirals of the Minoan hybrid seabed. The Minoan tradition of polychromy in pottery evolved alongside the pictorial inquiries of Theran art of the Late and Final Middle Cycladic period. This inquiry quickly found its full narrative development in mural painting, but it seems that first it was tried out enthusiastically in clay. The fact that the swallow, the third pictorial subject of the Spring Fresco, is encountered exclusively in Theran pottery, with the same qualities of design and coloration that are utilized later in 17. Vlachopoulos 2013. 18. X  este 3: Vlachopoulos 2008. Complex Delta: Doumas 1992, pp. 100–107, figs. 66–76; Vlachopoulos 2008, p. 454; 2013.

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Figure 2b

A . Papadi mi tr i ou, U. Th al e r, J. M ar ran

Figure 3

b

a

Akrotiri, Thera. The Middle Cycladic “Ganymede Jug.” Akrotiri Excavation Pottery Conservation Laboratory. Courtesy of the Akrotiri Excavations, Archaeological Society at Athens.

Black Red Burnished

c

Drawing: A. Kontonis. 44

b

Akrotiri, Thera. The Middle Cycladic “Lilies Jug.” Akrotiri Excavation Pottery Conservation Laboratory. Courtesy of the Akrotiri Excavations, Archaeological Society at Athens.

White

White

Red

Red

Brown

Brown

a

Figure 4

10cm

a

b

Akrotiri, Thera. The Middle Cycladic “Lilies Jug.” Courtesy of the Akrotiri Excavations, Archaeological Society at Athens. Drawing A. Kontonis.

Figure 5

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D etec ting “M ycenaean” Elements in the “M inoan” Wall Painting s of a “Cyclad ic ” S ettlement

monumental painting, completes and consolidates the body of argument advocating the earlier configuration of certain pictorial subjects in Middle Cycladic pottery.19 In no Middle Cycladic level at Akrotiri, no matter how disturbed, have wall paintings been found.20 The earliest decorated plasters, which are of excellent quality in fabric and pigments from the start, are found in the “Seismic Destruction Phase” of the settlement, which has been defined by Marisa Marthari as comprising the transition from the late MC to the LC I period. It is at this point that the art of wall painting appears in the settlement in polychromy, with superb workmanship, but with a rudimentary thematic repertoire (Fig. 6).21 To the earliest known painted plasters, which had been used as an under-layer for the plaster of the later wall paintings from Building Beta, Xeste 3, and the West House, the excavations conducted in the years 2000-2002 added a large pile of plaster fragments that had been removed from their walls and discovered in an outbuilding of Xeste 2.22 These pieces have significantly enriched our knowledge of the earliest practice of the art of wall painting at Akrotiri. No pictorial motifs have yet been identified on the polychrome fragments that have been cleaned so far (Figs. 7, 8).23 It is very interesting to note, however, that decoration in relief can be identified on at least two of the earlier fragments from Akrotiri.24 The relationship between wall painting and pottery is not straightforward, but, nevertheless, it is intriguing. On Crete, the developed mural iconography that appears at the beginning of the new Minoan palace period can neither be reduced to, nor is it reflective of contemporary pottery, whereas on Thera in the same time period, it is a peculiar phenomenon that pottery actually develops autonomously into a pictorial art of high standards, while the art of wall painting appears later and is initially aniconic. On Thera, pottery remains the attractive yet problematic link that connects the fully developed pictorial output of the Theran workshops to the art of wall painting, which was to function as the outward testimony of the wealth of the cosmopolitan Theran society and the fashion it set.25

From the moment that wall paintings began coming to light at Akrotiri their “identity” was sought: all those elements that could speak of the ethnic-racial, linguistic, and cultural identity of the Therans, and could perhaps illustrate their history, were closely examined.26 In 1968, the second year of the excavations, Spyridon Marinatos recognized in the wall painting fragments decorating the antechamber of the carefully constructed “Porter’s Lodge,” “an altar with horns of consecration in perfectly Minoan style, but supported by columns of somewhat Egyptianizing form,” and in another fragment, the figure of a plumed male next to a palm tree (Fig. 9), which led him “to similar reflections, for it has anthropological characteristics that are foreign to the Cretan-Mycenaean race.”27 Consequently, he recognized a Creto-Mycenaean racial identity.28 He characterized the figure as “African” or as a “Bedouin Arab of Syria,” adopting an orientalist interpretative stance that was to be reformulated again two years later and applied to the so-called priestess with her thick lips and “eastern or Nubian” earrings–an interpretative stance that reached its peak in 1971 with the presentation of the Miniature Frieze from the West House.29 Marinatos’s ethnoarchaeological approach to the Miniature Frieze (Fig. 10), with its obsessive identification of topographical and cultural elements from (Herodotus’s) Libya, went further than Sir Arthur Evans’s strong “Egyptian” view on the Minoan world, seeking evidence that presaged the colonization of Cyrenaica by the Therans in the 7th century B.C.30 In Marinatos’s opinion (followed also by Dennis Page and Sandro Stucchi), the Miniature Frieze (or, the “Miniature Fresco of Libya” as he called it) depicts cities in Libya inhabited by a mixed population of Aegeans and Libyans, with some of the latter being classed as “bad.”31 Concerning the ethnicity of the Aegeans, he was confident that they were “Minoan Therans,” based obviously on the idea that the latter could not exist without the former. Since its discovery, the Miniature Frieze has been the main canvas on which, depending on their ideological baggage and geographical area of expertise, researchers have

19. O  n the swallow, see Papagiannopoulou 1992, p. 180, pl. 68:β; Marthari 2000, pp. 874, 887; Nikolakopoulou 2010, p. 215, fig. 21.2.c; Vlachopoulos 2013. For a fuller discussion concerning the configuration of certain pictorial elements in the Middle Cycladic pottery, see Vlachopoulos 2000, pp. 652–653. 20. Vlachopoulos 2007a, p. 132; 2007b, p. 117, n. 88; forthcoming. 21. Marthari 1987. On wall painting at the MC III/LC I transition, see Doumas 1992, p. 185, figs. 149, 150; Televantou 1994, pp. 129, 358–360, pl. 2α, β, color pl. 22; Doumas, Marthari, and Televantou 2000, figs. 35, 36; Vlachopoulos 2007b, pp. 116–117; forthcoming. 22. Vlachopoulos, forthcoming. 23. All fragments are of fine quality and decorated with red, black, yellow, and blue linear and abstract motifs. On one fragment a stylized “rosette” motif can be identified. 24. The first fragment is exhibited in the Museum of Prehistoric Thera, the second is from the pile of removed wall painting fragments found in Xeste 2 (Figs. 7, 8). In LC I the only known wall paintings in relief from Akrotiri are the masterfully executed panels of the “rosettes in relief lozenges” from the second floor of Xeste 3 (Doumas 1992, pls. 136, 137; Vlachopoulos 2008, p. 463, figs. 41, 46a, b). 25. As Doumas (2013, pp. 20–21) notes, however, only the human figure disappears from the LC I pictorial pottery

26. T he first fragments, which depicted a couple of red lilies, excavated by Henri Gorceix and Henri Mamet (Vermeule 1964, p. 120, fig. 23b; Τzachili 2006, pp. 165–166, figs. 71, 73), had certainly raised the hopes of Marinatos, who in 1967, however, found only very eroded fragments of colored plaster (Thera I, pp. 39–47, figs. 64–66). 27. Thera II, p. 54, f...