The Fisherman and the Chariot Krater

Week Five: Aegean Art

The work titled The Fisherman isn’t too hard to identify as Minoan since the Historywiz website identifies him as such.  The point is: how would an art historian who discovered such a fresco determine that is indeed Minoan?  

This mural depicts a nude young man or adolescent male holding up his catch of fish for the viewer.  The fish are identified in the caption as mackerel or tuna which are likely to be found in the sea rather than in a river, are painted in bright colors and overlap each other in a realistic way.  The pose of the fisherman shows some Egyptian composite elements, the figure is mostly in profile but the eyes are frontal.  The torso is turned toward the viewer but isn’t entirely frontal, as it might be shown in Egyptian art, though this scene doesn’t depict an important person so the composite pose might not have been used in any case.  The figure is realistic with the arms attached to the shoulders in a natural manner and the chest appearing to overlap the arm to the left of the scene.  The young man is slender and his waist is small but he doesn’t show the extreme nipped in waist as do most Minoan depictions of the human form however it is narrower than most depictions of Egyptian males.

The theme of this fresco struck me as similar to a work that we have seen in the book of the Girl Gathering Saffron Crocus Flowers on page 81.  Both the figures have shaved heads, which may be growing out, and youth locks, which are definitely similar details.  They also have a natural but mainly profile pose with narrow waists and the frontal eye position.  It’s as if they are an equivalent pair, she is gathering her flowers as a preliminary preparation for her rite of passage into adulthood and he is showing his ability to provide for a family with his successful catch. That the fish are seagoing species also points toward the Aegean Islands rather than the Nile. (When I checked, these works turned out to be from the same Aegean Island town of Akrotiri on Thera.) 

The other work is the Terracotta Chariot Krater which has been identified by the Metropolitan Museum of art as Helladic Mycenaean Late Helladic 1300-1230 BCE.  (I went through their website to print an image of it because I couldn’t get a good one through Flickr.)

This krater of fired pottery is very regularly shaped and appears to have been formed on a potter’s wheel.  There are two handles, each fixed to opposite sides to the rim and to the flared body of the piece.  The foot on the bottom is small but sufficient for the krater to stand upright without additional support.  It’s difficult to tell if the decoration is painted light on dark or dark on light but I will assume dark on light. The decorative figures are painted on to the clay in a very stylized, regimented manner with no overlapping.  A horse is pulling a chariot with two people in it, one appearing to be driving, with a passenger.  A figure that appears to be female stands behind the chariot.  All the human figures have wide open mouths and all have wide open, round eyes, even the horse.  The figures are decorated with dots and horizontal lines and spirals indicate breasts on the female figure.  In the same register band with the figures there are other columnar shapes. These columns have patterns of dots at their tops that may be flames.  There are wide bands of color at the top and bottom of the krater and narrower stripes immediately under the figures and in the narrower, lower parts of this vessel. 

Probably the main indicator of Mycenaean origin is the painted on decorative figures which are unlike the Minoan style of decorating such vessels by carving (see the Minoan Harvester Rhyton on page 89 and the Mycenaean Warrior Krater on page 99 of our textbook).  The poses of the figures are much more stylized and simple than the Egyptian art that we have studied.  The Mycenaeans seem to want to portray the emotions of a scene rather than concentrating on lifelike representations or glorifying their rulers.