10 Facts About Minoan art

Minoan art is the art produced by the Bronze Age Aegean Minoan civilization from about 3000 to 1100 BC, though the most extensive and finest survivals come from approximately 2300 to 1400 BC.

Since wood and textiles have decomposed, the best-preserved surviving examples of Minoan art are its pottery, palace architecture (with frescos which include "the earliest pure landscapes anywhere"), small sculptures in various materials, jewellery, metal vessels, and intricately-carved seals.

Largest and best collection of Minoan art is in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum near Knossos, on the northern coast of Crete.

Minoan art has a variety of subject-matter, much of it appearing across different media, although only some styles of pottery include figurative scenes.

Arthur Evans, the first archaeologist to excavate Minoan Knossos, hired the Swiss artist Emile Gillieron and his son, Emile, as the chief fresco restorers at Knossos.

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The main colours used in Minoan art frescos include black, white (slaked lime), red (hematite), yellow (ochre), blue (copper silicate) and green (yellow and blue mixed together).

Early Minoan art ceramics were characterized by patterns of spirals, triangles, curved lines, crosses, fish bones, and beak-spouts.

Late Minoan art in turn influenced that of Mycenae, and saw reciprocal influence, both in the subjects used in decoration, and in new vessel shapes.

Minoan art jewellery has mostly been recovered from graves, and until the later periods much of it consists of diadems and ornaments for women's hair, though there are the universal types of rings, bracelets, armlets and necklaces, and many thin pieces that were sewn onto clothing.

Minoan art jewellers used stamps, moulds, and before long "hard soldering" to bond gold to itself without melting it, requiring precise control of temperature.