Geometrical Art in South-east Europe and Western Asia

Abstract

BETWEEN the vivid naturalism of Minoan art, the mature style of Crete and the South Ægean in the later Bronze Age, and the serene idealism of Hellenic art, in the great centuries from the sixth to the third, intervenes a style profoundly contrasted with both, popularly known as the Geometric Style of the Early Iron Age. It inherited something from Minoan art, and contributed more than appears at first sight to Hellenic; but in its maturity it was the negation of all that either Minoan or Hellenic craftsmen aspired to express. Such a group of facts, or sequence of events, presents a problem as fully worthy of scientific treatment as any crisis in geology or natural history: the problem, namely, of the apparitions and disappearances of geometrical art in the lands around the Greek archipelago. For the geometrical art of the Early Iron Age was not the only such occurrence; and its significance is best appreciated by comparison with other geometrical styles.