The Role of Wall-Paintings in the Bronze Age

"There is hardly a doubt that all human art primarily developed in the service of rituals and that the autonomy of "art for art's sake" was achieved only by another, secondary step of cultural progress." Thus writes K. Lorenz in his book On Aggression (p. 73) showing that artistic creation was not only a serious activity but also that it was not devoid of magico-religious connotations.

The question is when this secondary step took place. Had the Minoans already taken this step in the Bronze Age? Most specialists would be prepared to say yes, and they would argue that one function of frescoes was purely decorative. The tone was set by Sir Arthur Evans to whom we owe much of our knowledge and ideas about the Minoans. In a characteristic passage from his Palace of Minos II he describes the "House of the Frescoes" at Knossos and the paintings it contained:

"The house itself was quite a small one... Yet the citizen, we may suppose,of the petty burgher class who had his habitation here is shown by the remains that have come down to us -a mere fraction of the whole- to have been a man of cultivated taste. The painted decoration of the walls is unrivalled of its kind for its picturesque setting, and the many-coloured effect is enhanced, not only by the varied choice of flowers, but the convention of the rocks cut like agates to show their brilliant veins". (pp. 466-67).

Words like "burgher", "cultivated taste", "picturesque" betray Evans' preconceptions: he placed the Minoans in a social setting familiar to that of his own times and hence he described them with a vocabulary which, although perfectly compatible with 19^th and 20^th century Europe, may be totally inapplicable to a society of the 15^th century B.C.

In fact, it is difficult to find purely decorative wall-paintings or sculpture before the end of the Classical period of Greece - if that early. Certainly, large scale art of the early phases of Greek civilization served only two masters: the gods and the polis.

But, of course, a better starting point for an investigation of the role of Minoan frescoes is the Bronze Age. Minoan Crete did not exist in a cultural vacuum but was in close contact with the major civilizations of Egypt and the Near East. In both of these, large scale art was used for either of two purposes: expression of religious ideas and practices, or glorification of the ruler. Purely decorative art was at besttrivial if it existed at all.

Egyptian tomb paintings had a magico-religious function even if they depicted every day scenes. They were meant to perpetuate the spiritual life of the dead by representing life, in all its manifestations. Temple sculpture had the double purpose of glorifying the god, and the ruler who was himself a living god. In periods of aggression and expansion the Pharaoh was depicted not only as a god but, also, as a conqueror and a victor over forces of chaos. The same is true of Mesopotamia where art revolved around the ruler and his exploits or around the gods.

It can be argued, of course, that very little of private house paintings have survived to either prove or disprove this hypothesis. A few fresco remnants from Amarna (14^th century B.C. Egypt) show, however, that the decorative schemes of the houses were not dissimilar to those in the tombs, and there is no doubt that in the latter these were permeated by the religious ideology of the revolutionary king Echnaton. The degeptive naturalism of the Amarna frescoes does not display a "picturesque" or romantic love of nature, they are a tribute to the sun god whose rays sustain life and make it possible in all its forms.

If this is so, then one wonders if Minoan art could be different. Naturally, there were important differences between Crete and the Orient but the similarities were more basic. An Egyptian would not have felt totally alien in Crete, although he would certain feel out of place in the modern world where the values are radically different to his own. Thus, if we are going to approach Minoan mentality at all, and that is all we can do in the absence pf written records, we have to see Crete and Thera as part of the larger world of the Ancient Orient. In such a world the words "burgher" or "cultivated taste" would have been meaningless. To quote Henri Frankfort (Kingshipand the Gods, p. 3) "The purely secular was the purely trivial."

Let us explore the function of Egyptian murals and wall sculpture and the possible analogies with Crete. These functions can be summarized as follows:

1. Propagation of official ideology revolving around the ruler. This is a theme which is either totally absent in Crete and Thera or else thoroughly disguised.
2. Ritual scenes depicting actual ceremonies which are carried out in the very room they decorate. Examples are the sacred barge with the cult image of the divinity which is usually depicted on the walls where the barge was kept in the inner sactuary of Egyptian temples; funeral processions in tombs such as the tomb of Ramose; ceremonial processions beside the stairways of temples, such as the ones in the Hathor temple at Dendera. These types of scenes, where the actual ritual is duplicated on the wall, have close analogies in Grete and, as we shall see, Thera. Suffice it to mention here the tribute bearing procession from the S. corridor of the palace of Knossos which almost certainly reflects the actual ceremony, and the Camp-Stool fresco friezes from the Sanctuary Hall on the piano nobile of the same palace.
3. Scenes which are relevant to the function of the space in which they exist but do not reproduce the actual ceremony performed in it. Examples are the offering and festival scenes in the courts of Egyptian temples; funerary and underworld scenes in tombs. Many Cretan frescoes would fall in to this category: the Miniature frescoes of the Grand Stand and Sacred Grove from the palace of Knossos which depict public festivals; the bull-leaping rituals which must have had some connection with the palace, etc.
4. Finally, some depictions enlarge the conceptual and spatial boundaries of the room by means of the representations on the walls. The scenes from every day life in the Egyptian tombs or the nature scenes in Cretan and Theran murals provide an appropriate setting in which the dead or the divinity can transgress the confines of the walls and enter a divine, metaphysical or imaginary sphere. Minoan art likeEgyptian art, is thus functional, not decorative.

Does that mean that aethetics, beautification and decoration were alien to the Minoan people? I would certainly not go so far as to say that. A beautiful work of art is beautiful on its own merits regardless of its function, and there is no doubt that a patron who commissioned a painting would have had certain expectations and aesthetic requirements. Rather, what I am trying to stress is that there was a degree of seriousness in the way the spectator perceived the painting which called for more than the purely decorative. Modern man, contemplating a piece of art in a living room, a museum or a gallery, may derive pleasure or even an emotional experienceif the subject moves him. But he remains essentially detached and alien to the work of art. The intentions of the artist remain obscure or may be misunderstood. Besides, modern artists are notorious for refusing to tell the public what they intend. The relationship between art and viewer was very different in the Bronze Age, I believe.

For a Minoan or Theran, a painting represented part of his tradition which was comprehensible and even predictable. It can be said that art was a representation of the collective values of the society of which the viewer was a member. Thus, the relationship between art and viewer was intimate and the function of the painting important. As we shall see, the themes centred around religious experience, although, these could be indirect as well as direct. Political portraiture seems to be totally absent.

In the following chapters I shall try to show the religious associations that lie behind Theran arid Minoan frescoes. In fact, Mark Cameron has come to similar conclusions about Cretan frescoes. In the Second Thera Congress he stated: "In my view it was that transference of the cult of a mountain-top goddess to an urban context which inspired the phenomenon of figured scenes and naturalistic pictorialrepresentations in general first in Minoan (and then in other regional fields of Aegean) mural decoration as a fitting means of consecrating the newly erected Second Palaces and their towns to her worship". (Thera and the Aegean World II, p. 317).

In summary, Theran paintings have to be studied in their sociological context. Without denying their decorative value, we must go beyond that and ask what they mean and what was the collective experience to which they appealed.

Source: "Art and Religion in Thera" (pp. 31 - 33)

Author: Dr. N. Marinatos