Lecture: October 23, 2024: Cycladic Iconography or Minoan Provincial Art? On the Character of the Mural Paintings in the Early Late Bronze Age Cyclades, Fritz Blakolmer

Analysing iconography is a viable path, among many others, for gaining a better understanding of the interrelations between the Cyclades and Minoan Crete during the Neopalatial period and thus for approaching issues traditionally characterised by the catchy terms ‘Pax Minoica’ and ‘Minoan Thalassocracy’. The mural paintings of Akrotiri on Thera are one of our primary sources of Minoan iconography, mural schemes and pictorial programs in LC I/LM IA. Despite some debate between “Minoan imperialists” and “Cycladic nationalists” (J. Davis) on the character of the iconography of the Theran murals, it is beyond any doubt that they were executed by local painters, and a Cycladic craftsmanship can be attributed also to the mural images at Phylakopi on Melos and Agia Irini on Kea. Nonetheless, it is equally obvious that the iconographic motifs in Cycladic mural paintings largely conform to Minoan models. In this lecture, therefore, I will focus on the ‘largely’, meaning, on the non-Minoan elements in these iconographic scenes that permit us to speak of ‘Minoanizing’ paintings, instead of truly Minoan ones.

The following questions therefore arise: to what extent were Minoan pictorial formulae used and correctly understood by Cycladic painters? Did they really possess a deeper familiarity with the iconographic vocabulary shaped in Minoan Crete some generations before? Were the painters and their patrons at Cycladic sites selective in their pictorial subjects, and can we detect subjects other than those in contemporary Crete? To what extent did Cycladic mural paintings of the LC I period differ from their Cretan models, what were the modes of artistic transmission, and what was the character of the ‘Minoanization’ of the arts in the Cyclades? By focusing on the non-Minoan features in the mural paintings at Akrotiri and other Cycladic sites, we thereby gain some insight into the notion of the ‘Minoanization’ in the sector of iconography, i.e. a Cycladic identity during the period of Neopalatial Crete.