The Guessing Game: Cycladic, Minoan, or Mycenaean?

    First "Unknown" piece of art

Learning the basics of different cultures, as we have in class this week, has helped with figuring out the culture in which this painting has come from. If you notice the small waist of this person as well as the fish in the painting and the colors, a person can deduce that this artwork is from the Minoan culture. The first detail in this piece that made me think it was Minoan is the waist, and although it is not the tiny pinched waist of some other artwork, it is still very small and skinny. The skinny waist is an attribute to the Minoan style and can be seen in the lectures we watched this week in the "Flotilla Fresco" and the man in the boat with such a small waist. As well as the waist I also noticed the fish hanging in the hands of the man and this popped out to me as an Island type of picture, where fishing was a very important part of their culture, it was the basis of their diet most likely. Not only does this fish explain where they are geographically, it also shows their culture's emphasis on nature and the Earth. In many paintings of Minoan art we see much landscape, flowers, and animals, etc. All of these attributing to the natural world view of the Minoans. Lastly this painting has very bright colors of orange, blue and red. These colors show up in many Minoan paintings, especially ones like the "Flotilla Fresco" and the "Spring Fresco" (Lecture PPT) In all of these paintings the Minoans use such bright colors and this is what lead me to believe that this painting from the Minoan culture. The Minoans are characteristic to using Egyptian style profile views, like in this art piece the shoulders are facing front, but the face is a side view, very Egyptian.   The Second "unknown" piece of art

This next piece of art is a vase whose characteristics lead me to believe it was from the Cycladic culture. If you look at the people and scene painted on this vase it is very abstract and hard to figure out. The people, who look more like chickens to me, are in a horse drawn cart and there are a few people standing behind the cart. We see that one person specifically is standing straight up with their arms in the air and very large breasts. This I think relates to that symbol of breast as fertility, so maybe this is a vas showing fertility of some kind or ritual. The main reason this appears Cycladic to me is the depiction of the humans as very abstract and their bodies not naturalized at all. In fact all of the dots and lines as bodies show possibly tattoos or scratches as mentioned in the Cycladic culture during lecture. This aspect contributes to the reasoning that this vase was from the Cycladic culture. The wave type detail next in between the horse and human on the cart could represent the Aegean Sea and show that this culture (being on a string of islands) are indeed the Cycladic people who would put an important part of their life on their vases, the Sea. All of these reasons lead me to believe that this vase is Cycladic and it is especially the fact that their bodies are so different from that which the Minoan’s and Mycenaean’s have depicted in their frescos and vases.