Steve Kershaw: The Cycladic islands form a circle centred on the island of Delos in the Aegean sea. And they gave birth to a culture whose remains, although very sparse, are very intriguing.
And this is a culture that produced artefacts that are wonderfully sophisticated in design (at least to modern sensibilities they are), and they're certainly executed with great care and with great skill.
Now some of the most characteristic products of Cycladic art are the marble figurines that you’ll often find referred to as Cycladic idols – whether they are idols or not is actually hard to tell, but that designation comes from a time when they were assumed to represent either spirits or goddesses. But anyway, we’ve been granted special access to the collections of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology here in Oxford, which has the finest collection of these figures outside Greece, and here we can examine a selection of these intriguing sculptures.
Now the Cycladic figurines come in two basic types – there's the highly schematic types, at the bottom of the case there, which date largely from the EC I, roughly the Grotta-Pelos Culture of about 3300-2700 BCE, and the, later relatively naturalistic figures.
Now the most characteristic design of the schematic types is the ‘Violin’ Form, so-called for obvious reasons. This is a human figure, although it’s hardly recognisable as such: it lacks a head, and arms and legs, but the neck is indicated by a kind of a prong, the body is as wide at the shoulders as it is at the base, and the waist is narrowed in a very pronounced way.
Once we start to see greater naturalism in the figures, you should be able to pick out some of the quite distinct qualities and characteristics: the devil is in the detail here: the shape and the inclination of the head, the shape of the shoulders, the length of the neck, the carving of the legs, the articulation of the knees, and so on. These are the features that enable scholars to categorise them into the various types.
Now, the more naturalistic ‘Plastiras’ type, still from EC I, is characterised by an oval head, with the ears and the nose moulded in relief. The eyes and the mouth are sometimes marked and this figure is very clearly gendered as female. The hands meet finger to finger (the arms aren’t folded, as the case is with the majority of the figures). The navel is indicated and this one’s broken off at the knees, and although the kneecaps are nicely moulded the figure would have been standing on flat feet on the ground.
Another naturalistic design as we move across the boundary between EC I and EC II is the Louros type.
And here the legs are clearly separated and separately shown (again she’s a standing form). There are no arms – she's just got just stumps at shoulders. The head is separately shown on the neck. And she's got no facial features at all (not even a nose).
Now as we enter the EC II, Keros-Syros Culture, so roughly 2800–2300 BCE, we start to see the very distinctive, more naturalistic, ‘Folded arm figurines emerging – with again, some quite distinctive defining features that are discernible to the trained eye – and that trained eye is soon to be yours!
Now the most characteristic figures are female and stationary; and generally their arms are folded across their chests (the right arm usually lower) and they're represented lying down. In these figures the human form is really reduced to a few key components: the head, the neck, the torso, the arms and the legs.
Now the figure here is a very fine example of the Spedos type. You can see how she’s defined by a distinct roundness of form that’s lacking in flatness and angularity. It’s also noticeable that her head is quite thick in profile, with a vertical surface & crown. Her head as well is ‘lyre-shaped’ as they call it from the front, and some of the figures of this type (like her neighbour in the case) show quite a marked broadening of the face at the crown.
And her face is convex; her chin is rounded; her waist is clearly modelled (it’s much narrower than her thighs); her upper legs are modelled separately from her calves; and her feet point downwards; and although incisions aren’t numerous, her gender is made explicitly clear. And you can also just make out some traces of her painted eyes.
Now in contrast to the rather curvy Spedos types, the Dokathismata variety, dating c. 2400 – 2100 BCE have a long, thin, angular elegance.
And in this lovely example you can see the thinness, along with the rather sinuous lines of her angular profile. Here the surface is flat, with the details indicated by incision, and true to her type, she has an almost triangular head with a rather aquiline nose. She has a trapezoidal shape to her torso from her shoulders down to her elbows, and her breasts are quite lightly modelled and are rather a long way apart. She has slightly swollen features in the abdomen and this probably shows that, like so many of these figurines, that she’s in the early phase of pregnancy. She also has quite rudimentary legs, which are indicated by a single sweeping line, with feet that again point downwards.
The figurines were usually painted as well in bright colours, with reds and blues in particular. With facial features, hair and tattoos and jewellery being the favourite elements, and this reconstruction here shows how radically the paint might alter our perception of their pure whiteness.
There are other types not represented here in Oxford, but you’ll be able to explore those in the rest of the Unit. In terms of art-appreciation, it’s possible to be very detailed, even down to the identification of individual artists, but so much about these figures and their cultural significance is still enigmatic.
Relatively few of them have been found in well-documented archaeological contexts, and those that were weren’t all found in graves. When they do appear as grave goods they tend to be found singly rather than in groups; a few are male – you get musicians and drinkers and hunters and warriors – but the majority are female: many appear pregnant and/or with the genital area very strongly marked, which suggests that they may have some kind of association with fertility, but who made them? Who for? What for? Do they represent their owners? A goddess? Ancestors? Toys for the dead to play with? Figures from Cycladic mythology? For now we just don’t know, so they’ll have to remain beautifully and enigmatically inscrutable...