The West House Miniature Frescoes

In the present paper I am widening the cycle to include other miniature frescoes, which will allow us to form a more complete idea of the character and content of this cycle. This in turn will aid us in our interpretation of the scenes depicted in the two Theran friezes.

Even though this cycle was first established on the basis of works which are not paintings, the most suitable medium for it is the miniature fresco, the art-form par excellence for large compositions containing many human figures. Unfortunately there are very few miniature frescoes, and these few are in a bad state of preservation.

Apart from isolated sections of them and the embroideries on robes in large scale frescoes, we can only cite four compositions from Crete and two from the Cyclades. I do not include the Mycenean frescoes, first because they are not strictly speaking miniature but considerably larger-scale than the ones under discussion; and second because their style and typology make them appear like distant survivals of this cycle and, consequently, of no help to us here. The Cretan frescoes induded in the iconographic cycle in question are:

1. the Temple and Grand Stands Fresco (Evans 1936, 46f, pl. XVI);
2. The Sacred Grove and Dances Fresco (idem 66f, pl. XVIII);
3. fragments of The Siege Fresco, as Evans entitles it (idem 81f, figs. 45, 46: Cameron 1967, 67, fig. 7).

These three frescoes are from Knossos, while no. 4 is the Tylissian Fresco (Shaw 1972, 171 - 188).

The features these four frescoes have in common are: the smallness of the figures depicted - approximately 0.060 - 0.070 mm -, the shorthand style together with the meticulous rendering of other sections such as the ladies' elegant dresses, and finally the dense grouping of human figures that seem to represent spectators of, or participants in festivities. There is no doubt that in the case of the third, interpretation is difficult. Evans saw it as a portrayal of warriors besieging a city, but I believe that here too we have spectators or participants in festivities; for the yellow lines cannot be spears, as Evans assumed, because of the position in which the men are holding them. Moreover, the lone man with his lance resting upright on the ground, who was perhaps watching the crowded procession of men, manifests no sign of aggression ⁽¹⁾. The Tylissian fresco, which is in a very bad state of preservation, must have been an open-air composition similar to the first two frescoes from Knossos. It shows a building, a section of landscape, spectators, ladies in elegant dresses, and men carrying poles on their shoulders with pots suspended from them, and also male figures, which Evans took to be athletes. In a recent study, M. Shaw has attempted a reconstruction of the scene, which she described as follows: "Spectators, activities involving great numbers of people and taking place out of doors". Also, she doubts whether the male figures are athletes (Shaw 1972, 187). The above four frescoes are assigned to the MM IIIB - LM IA period (op. cit., 188; 1978, 326); that is, they are contemporaneous with or slightly older than the Theran frescoes. These, together with a miniature fresco from Kea, comprise the total number of miniature frescoes that concern us here.

The Kean fresco ⁽²⁾ is possibly a little later than the Theran (Coleman 1973, 284, 286, 296). Despite its bad state of preservation, we can assume that it was a large composition with a lot of human figures in various attitudes and engaged in various activities, whose significance it is difficult to grasp, except in two cases. The first, which depicts two tripod cauldrons with three human figures bending down in front of them ⁽³⁾, may be a ritual scene; in the second are three male figures, naked from the waist up, one behind the other and all leaning slightly forward - the lower sections have not been preserved. The figures are reminiscent in their attitudes of the oarsmen in the small boats depicted in the great frieze at Thera; and this hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that the background here is blue and not yellow as it is in other places. No landscape is depicted on the Kean fresco, only buildings whose architecture resembles the Creto-Mycenean except in one detail, which does not appear anywhere else; the cone-shaped projections on the roof. Mr Iliakis drew my attention to the triangular projections on the wall of a partially-preserved building depicted on the right-hand side of the little frieze at Thera, and he told me that similar projections are to be found on the terraces of other buildings which have yet to be published. Even though the projections on the Theran buildings are smaller and closer together than on the Kean, both may nevertheless represent a characteristic of Cycladic architecture. There are also large openings in the houses, in which appear the figures of ladies, white in colour as opposed to the other figures which are red, with hands raised before their faces in a gesture, presumably, of greeting, like the ladies in the great frieze at Thera. There is great variety in the types of clothing worn, some of which are unknown, and others of which resemble the short straight tunics worn by the figures in the Theran frescoes; in some cases one arm is left uncovered, and in one case the wing-like projections that spring from the back are reminiscent of the dress in the Camp-stool Fresco at Knossos (Evans 1936, 381f, pl. XXI D). Worth noting among the human figures is a man carrying a pole on his shoulders, from which is suspended what is possibly a sort of leathern bottle ⁽⁴⁾.

Even a superficial comparison of the Kean and Theran frescoes is sufficient to demonstrate the relationship between them, and at the same time to stress the relative distance separating them from the Cretan frescoes and to justify the recognition of a Cycladic variant of the miniature fresco form ⁽⁵⁾. Both frescoes, to judge by the dress, belong outside of Crete and mainland Greece, and in this respect the architectural detail I referred to above may not be without significance. Even though the evidence of sea on the Kean fresco is very slight it should not be ruled out. We cannot say anything about the organisation of the Kean composition because of its fragmentary state, but it does not resemble the compositions at Knossos with their crowded groups of people. As in the Theran frescoes, the Kean figures must have been scattered over a pictorial space, which however had been left blank with no indication of landscape ⁽⁶⁾.

We must, therefore, recognize that there is a Cydadic variant of the iconographic cycle under discussion, a difference that manifests itself not only in the typology but in the style and structure of the frescoes. In Crete, the homogeneous and compact grouping of the human figures is dictated by a severe compositional design which indicates a somewhat academic approach, but which also evidences great skill in its combination of artistic shorthand and the fineness of the detail. The atmosphere of the Cycladic frescoes is different; in a space with no conventions to limit its freedom, a heterogeneous world presents us with living, realistic scenes. Apparently the Cydadic artist was not fond of conventions or high finishes ⁽⁷⁾. Yet, in spite of this, he follows the tradition of large many-figured compositions depicting scenes from city life.

What, however, is the character of these scenes? Are they closer to the Mycenean portrayals of wartime achievements, like the scenes on the silver rhyton and the stone vase, or to the Minoan depictions of festivities? For the answer to this in the case of the Kean fresco we must await Mrs Coleman's publication; she writes of this particular fresco in Part I of her study on the Kean frescoes (it will be published in Part II); "Miniature figured scenes of a town facade, a deer hunt, men and women dancing and a procession" (Coleman 1973, 296).

Speaking about the Theran frescoes, the late Marinatos maintained that they portray a campaign in Lybia (1974, 44f, pls. in folder 7. 9). There is no space here to enter into an extensive critical examination of the theories put forward by the excavator and others, so I will merely summarize my own comments:

1. There is no evidence so far of an Aegean settlement in Cyrenaica. Boardman refuted Stucci's arguments for such a settlement before the Theran frescoes were even discovered (Boardman 1968, 41).
2. It is impossible to make anthropological observations about the figures in miniature frescoes.
3. We cannot say, on the basis of the familiar Minoan and Mycenean types, that the scenes on the Theran frescoes portray anything outside the Aegean, since we know very little about Cydadic iconography, which we are only now gradually discovering.
4. At no point in the two frescoes is a battle depicted. The armed men in the little frieze are not necessarily soldiers. It is not certain that the small rectangular shield was used in battle, since in Crete it is borne by a non-warrior, and moreover whenever it appears in a battle scene it is of the body-shield type (Sakellariou 1974, 14). Thus, the array of armed men could be a guard of honour.
5. The figures in the sea do not look like the exhausted bodies of shipwrecked men or the inert corpses of drowned warriors. They are the most beautiful figures of the whole composition, and their harmonious movements are those of swimmers in a display of skill. The weapons thrown into the sea can be interpreted differently, as we shall see below, since there is no other evidence of a sea-battle or a shipwreck.

I said at the beginning that the subject-matter of the other miniature frescoes would perhaps be of value in the interpretation of those on Thera. We saw that in two at least of the Cretan frescoes, and most probably in the remaining two as well, the subject depicted was festivities. In the Kean fresco also, the scene with the three figures bending over the tripod cauldrons may be a ritual one. But the scene of the "Meeting on the Hill" on the little frieze at Thera may well be a ritual scene also; the ceremonial disposition of the differentiated figures supports this view, as well as the type of dress worn by some of them. In the light of this, we should examine the extent to which the two Theran frescoes as a whole have a similar content.

We cannot, however, confront this problem without first determining the number of towns depicted. On the little frieze is depicted either a different town from the one on the great frieze, or else a different view of the same town. The difficulty arises mainly in the case of the two "towns" on the great frieze, separated by the sea and distinguished by their different settings and the dress worn by the figures. Mr Iliakis, who undertook the reconstruction of the frieze, believes that there were two artists at work on the great frieze, which would explain these differences. It is a fact that in the right-hand town the buildings are more imposing and possess horns of consecration, which are lacking in the other towns. Most of the figures are dressed in the Minoan fashion. Rocks are suspended in the sky, in accordance with the all-embracing landscape style familiar to us from the Minoan frescoes. The left-hand city has nothing monumental about it, even though the architectural elements are the same. None of the figures is wearing Helladic or Minoan dress. Instead of hanging rocks, the wavy outline of a mountain is traced across the sky of the scene, and on it beasts are being hunted and trees are growing. Mr Iliakis' interpretation concludes with the hypothesis that the artist of the right-hand city is faithful to the Minoan palace tradition, while the artist responsible for the left-hand city is possibly a Cycladean, distinguished by spontaneity and realism and at the same time by ignorance or dislike of the conventional Minoan styles. If these inferences are correct, the great frieze depicts a gulf-embracing city at a time of festivity, with the ladies on the terraces, the men drawn up on the shore, and the procession of decorated ships. If it is a festival that is being portrayed, then it must be a sea-festival, for the identification of which we must turn to later sources, since we lack Bronze Age documents.

After a rapid investigation, I came to the conclusion that the festival of the lsidis Navigium, dedicated to Isis and celebrated on March 5th to inaugurate the new season's sailing, might provide a starting point for the solution of our problem (Roeder, col. 2129; Deubner 1912, 180f; Nilsson 1961, 625; Wachsmuth 1972, col. 938; Griffiths 1975, 31f. 259f). Despite its popularity, very little information about it has come down to us. The most exhaustive description of it occurs in Book XI of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. After a masquerade, the statues of the Gods were carried in procession to the shore, where, says Apuleius,

"... from reverent lips the chief priest uttered the most exalted prayers over a ship that had been built with exquisite skill and decorated round about with wonderful Egyptian paintings. With a bright torch, with an egg and with sulphur he purified the ship so well that it was purity itself. Then he publicly named it and dedicated it to the goddess. The gleaming sail of this auspicious barque bore golden letters woven into its texture; these signified the inaugural prayer for fortunate sailing in the new year's commerce. A rounded pine rose as its mast, lofty in its radiance and with a finely resplendent top. The stem had a curving beak and shone with a covering of gold leaf. In short the whole ship was aglow with the polish of smooth citrus-wood. Thereupon all the people, both the devotees and the unattached alike, vied in loading the ship with baskets heaped with spices and similar offerings and they poured on the waves libations of meal mixed with milk, until the ship, laden full with generous gifts and votive tokens of good omen, was freed from its anchor cables and launched into the sea with a favourable breeze that blew especially for it. When by reason of its movement it had faded from sight, the bearers of the images took up again their respective loads and with a will made their way back to the temple, observing the same dignified order of procession" .

(Griffiths 1975, 16).

From this description it is obvious that the sacrificial ship was not sunk, but that, laden with riches, it was offered to the sea, which carried it far away.

The elements in the Theran composition which permit this comparison are:

1. The impressive naval parade, in which the ships are decorated with various insignia, and one of them with garlands of familiar Creto-Mycenean ornaments.
2. The attire of the ships' passengers, who are seated with great formality and whose heavy garments resemble the priestly robes ofthe figures in the scene of the "Meeting on the Hill".
3. The archaic appearance of the ships, which according to Casson can be explained if we assume that the ships are being used in religious ceremonies (Casson 1975, 7).
4. In this context, the weapons thrown into the sea acquire a significance in keeping with the overall interpretation of the picture.

If the festival portrayed on the Theran frieze is analagous to the Isidis Navigium, this does not mean that the ritual would necessarily be identical. Obviously over 1,500 years the outward forms of the ceremony could undergo a change, while fundamentally, as regards the significance of the occasion and the essence of the sacrifice, it remained the same. During the Hellenistic periods, at a time of wealth and extravagance, an entire ship was sacrificed, whereas in the Bronze Age the sacrifice to propitiate the deity at the inauguration of the new season's sailing would have consisted of a few precious objects, such as weapons, thrown into the sea. Very probably they offered libations to the sea, and the swimmers would perform swimming contests in order to round off the ceremony.

I have put forward this working hypothesis in the hope that its further investigation will be undertaken and improved upon by the experts in this field.

- (1).   Smith (1965, 82) does not appear to agree with Evans.

- (2).   This fresco will be published by C. Coleman. I am very obliged to the excavator, Prof. J. Caskey, who kindly allowed me to study and sketch the fragments of the wall-painting in 1968.

- (3).   Other similar groups are mentioned in Sakellariou 1972.

- (4).   A similar type of person with a pole on his shoulder from which a pot or sack is suspended is known from Tylissos (Shaw 1972, 174. 186) and from the great frieze of Thera (Marinatos 1974, pl. in folder 9).

- (5).   Coleman (1973, 296) notes the differences and raises the question whether we have to do here with a Cycladic style or a local Kean one.

- (6).   Coleman (1973, 292, 293, 295, 296) notes the diminished importance of the landscape in other Kean wall-paintings as well.

- (7).   Coleman writes (1973, 296): "Simplified designs and a lack of interest in depicting details characterize the Ayia lrini paintings".

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