 We will continue talking about architecture and trying to get as much of it covered as possible. We spent a bit of our class period going over the paper, but I think that will benefit everybody in the end. We're going to talk about Minoan art and architecture to begin with. And ancient Minoa is part of a Bronze Age civilization in the Mediterranean, located in Crete, which is an island to the south of Greece right over here. Just to orient you, here's Egypt, here's the Mediterranean, here's our old friend Ur, and here's mainland Hellenic Greece. The Minoan civilization is really interesting for a number of reasons. One reason is it seems to have a strong, matrilineal cult of goddesses, like the fabulous snake goddess over here. And it also has a really different predilection for formal organizations than the Egyptian stuff we've been looking at, favoring the curvilinear, favoring the organic. If you look at the pottery here, you see these kind of wonderful swirly things. Or the pottery over here, the octopus vase, where curvilinear forms of the sea begin to wrap the bulging vessel in a way that is really sympathetic. The Minoans seem to have had writing, these scripts Linear A and Linear B. We still don't know how to break the code of Linear A, and after great labor Linear B was deciphered, and it is kind of lists. 40 mules, 20 barrels of grain, 16 olives. So I don't know if we should even bother with Linear A. The origins of architecture go back to this island of Crete, or at least the mythological description of the origins of architecture go back to the island of Crete and Minoan civilization, where we encounter Daedalus, the first architect, the mythological first architect, father of Icarus. Daedalus is a great builder and a great tinkerer and a great maker of edifices. And one of the things he did was make wings for his son Icarus so that Icarus could fly to the sun. That's always a good idea. I wonder how that's going to work out for Daedalus and Icarus. But just to show you how important the concept of Daedalus and Icarus are, in portrait of an artist as a young man, James Joyce names his protagonist, this young artist about to forge in the smithy of his soul the unrequited longings of his age. He names him Stephen Daedalus after the first architect. This is what happens to Icarus with his beautiful wings. The wings were feathers that had been held together with wax, and they worked beautifully, of course, until Icarus got too close to the sun, the wax melted, and he fell into the sea. The Renaissance artist Peter Bruegel did a painting of landscape with a fall of Icarus. It's a beautiful painting. Anybody see Icarus? Right, exactly. This is, ah, sorry, this is Icarus. He's this little leg stuck down here. And so the poet W.H. Auden wrote a poem about this, and it's kind of a great thing. It's the Musée des Beaux-Arts where this painting is held. About suffering, they were never wrong, the old masters. How well they understood its human position. How it takes place while someone else is eating, or opening a window, or just walking duly along. How when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting for the miraculous birth, there must always be children who did not specially want it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood. They never forgot that even the dreadful martyrdom in his course anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot, where dogs go on with their doggie life, and where the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on the tree. In Bruegel's Icarus, for instance, how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster. The plowman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure. It was shown as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water, and the expensive delicate chip that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly along. So that was a bad little architectural first project for Daedalus, but a noble failure, that the queen of Knossos, the queen of Crete, Queen Pasafe, commissioned him for another important project. Always making important projects. She needed a mechanical cow. Sure she did. Why? She was in love with a bull, and she needed to find some kind of method that she could express her love physically with a bull. And so she needed a mechanical cow, and a guy who's willing to make wax wings to fly to the sun is also happy to make the mechanical cow. This painting is a wall painting from a villa in Pompeii showing Pasafe and Daedalus with the idea of a mechanical cow. She will climb inside its hollow belly and accomplish the mating she desires with a beautiful bull. This is a strange idea, the beautiful bull, but you see the image again and again in pottery. Pasafe gives birth to a child after her mating with a beautiful bull. And the child is half man, half bull. The child is the minotaur. And so this is Pasafe with her little baby minotaur, and this is a statue of the minotaur. I google beautiful bull because I wondered really, is there such a thing that's so alluring as a bull, that beautiful? And these are some of the images that came up. I think probably this is the kind of beautiful bull she saw. This is a Belgian blue bull which is famous for its genetic abnormality that causes the suppression of myostatin, which in turn causes a phenomenon known as double muscling. That's a beautiful bull. And this whole myth of the minotaur, the whole myth of the enchantment of Pasafe, enchanted so that she would fall in love with this bull, that was her doom, fascinated Picasso. And Picasso is probably one of the great pornographers of our age. If you like pornography but don't like art, Picasso will turn you around on that. So here Picasso is drawing a kind of scene of the mating of the bull and the queen inside the mechanical cow, and he's just crazy about that theme over and over again. So there's this mythological origin to Crete, to Canalsos, so much so that the dwelling that was excavated by Sir Arthur Evans, one of these Indiana Jones style archaeologists that came poking around the site at the very beginning of the 20th century, was associated with a labyrinth, another piece of the minotaur story, because the minotaur of course being half bull, half bull half person needed to eat people all the time. You would if you were half bull, half person. And so once again, Daedalus is called on in the mythological story to build something to contain the minotaur. Queen Pasafe did not want to kill the minotaur because it was her child after all, but you needed to contain him. And every year you would feed the minotaur seven young men and seven young women, and that would be enough. So this is the palace of King Minos in Canalsos, very ancient. And you can see how people would think this is like a labyrinth. It probably wasn't anything like a labyrinth at all. It was probably some kind of very simple domestic space with store rooms. But if you look at the plan, particularly if you look at all these little passageways, all these little rooms, it is kind of like a rabbit wand. And therefore the notion that this was some kind of device to trick the minotaur seems plausible. Seems like people could have understood that. The civilization of ancient Minoa was periodically interrupted by earthquakes and ultimately there was a fire in around 1380 BCE that wiped it off the earth or at least killed everybody or people dispersed because they were seafaring people. So if you look at the palace at Canalsos, you would say it must have been a pretty peaceful place. There are no signs of fortifications. There's no sign of any kind of defensive strategy. It really seems to be very much about an agrarian kingdom, a kind of agricultural kingdom with store rooms and so forth. If we look at the general organization, it's not really that crazy. But for practical purposes, one could call it a fried egg scheme. And so it's a very different kind of organization than the organization we had in Egypt. In Egypt we had a linear axis clearly organizing our procession through the building and clearly organizing our understanding of each of the spaces. And here it's a really different kind of organization. We have a very clearly defined center and then a kind of hodgepodge of elements that accrete at the perimeter, kind of like a fried egg. This is, the Minotaur finally gets killed by one of the great heroes of Greek mythology. Bye-bye Minotaur. And this is what the palace in Canalsos kind of looks like. And when I say kind of looks like, I mean it was a pile of rubble when Sir Arthur Evans got there in 1900. And quite a lot of what we have is Arthur Evans' reconstruction of it. And all of these early archaeologists were just so kind of willing to invent, so willing to put their own stamp on it. And the fact is Evans did so much that most of the archaeological work going on in Canalsos right now is preserving Arthur Evans' work, his 1900 work, and there's very little money left to actually deal with the ancient Minoan antiquities. I just want to show you some of these images. There's this same sensibility that we saw in the pottery on the wall painting. You know, beautiful curvilinear forms, forms from nature. There's a strange idea about the column where it tapers at the bottom and flares upward. Evans had fragments, he had column bases, and then he had column tops, and he extrapolated a lot of these geometries. And a lot of the picturesque decoration that we've been admiring is also largely his imagination, or the imagination of these Austrian artists that he had working with them. For example, if you see this famous painting of bull leaping, the little patches of white are the real bits of the fresco, and the brightly colored stuff is the stuff that the Austrians painted there. If you look at these magnificent maidens, I don't know if you can see it clearly enough, these little patches of pale colored stuff are the real fresco, and the rest of it's the invention. But it's beautiful stuff. Who cares how fake it is? So the other great Bronze Age civilization was in Mycenae. This is the land of the Homeric epics. This is where the House of Atreus was organized. And this is where the Palace of Agamemnon and all of the people who went over to Troy to bring Helen back came from it. She started quite a lot of trouble. So these are the sites. This is Cunasos, where we were before, looking at ancient Minoan civilization, and here we have Mycenae, Athens, and Troy, way over here. You probably know something about the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad is all about the Trojan War, all about the battle with the people of Troy to bring Helen back and to reestablish sovereignty. And the Odyssey is all about the sea voyage and coming home. Images of the Odyssey in mythology. There's a great archeologist also in ancient Mycenae. In fact, this is a man who devoted himself to the study of all the archeological sites related to the Homeric epics. So he is kind of the great excavator of Troy, but he also excavated Mycenae in sites, the cities of Mycenae and Tyrens. Heinrich Schleeman. Very fancy man, I might add. He started stacking groceries and hurt his arm stacking groceries. So then he cornered the gold market in San Francisco, which is a nice way to move up in the world. Some of the grave goods found in Mycenae are things like this fabulous mask of Agamemnon, probably not Agamemnon, the combatant. But here's what a Mycenaean site looks like. This is the city of Mycenae. This is clearly a warfare in country. This is a very different kind of architecture. It's a very different way of occupying a site than we saw in Manoa. First of all, there's a giant fortification wall. And even the terrain has to do with fortification. It's on a hill, it's on the high ground, so that views can be commanded and you can protect yourself that way. The Masonry is pretty amazing of this enclosing wall. It's called Cyclopean Masonry, again from the mythological Cyclops, a giant that Odysseus encountered, because each of these blocks are something like six by three feet. They are impossible to imagine how people without sophisticated moving equipment could have brought them there. And in the complex of Mycenae, there are a couple of particularly strong figural architectural elements. One of them is the lion gate. If you look at the lion gate, you can see a kind of post and beam architecture happening over here. But we also see another idea about a different structural system, and that is corbelling. C-O-R-B-E-L. Corbelling has to do with the fact that if you put something, if your first block is here and you extend the second block slightly out from the first block, you'll be able to have that little bit of a cantilever. And then the next block pushes down again. And so through slightly displacing each block with respect to the next one, you begin to get a structure. You begin to get something that spans. So there is a kind of hybrid system of post and beam and corbelling going on here. This is Mr. Schleeman climbing around on his lion gate. And here is a view of the procession through the lion gate. And as you move through the lion gate, you're coming into various deeper parts of the site, particularly something that is called by Schleeman the Treasury of Atreus. We see this kind of corbelled opening over here. And when we come into the Treasury of Atreus, it's probably not a Treasury at all. It's probably a tomb. But the corbelling strategy that we saw happening plain in the archways now is happening three-dimensional. So we get a corbelled dome. This entire beehive dome is created through this slight displacement of blocks. And it's an amazing span. It is 47 feet in diameter. That's kind of amazing for people, again, with very primitive technology to build something like that. And it's very high, 43 feet high. So here's a plan that shows you the procession through the channel in the rock, through the little entryway, the little triangular entryway, and into the tomb. So most of the architecture that we have is monumental or palatial. It is a fact of architectural history that not that much everyday ordinary architecture remains to us. However, we do have some evidence of what dwellings look like in ancient Mycenae. And that is the simple single-cell dwelling called the Megaron. And for those of us who look for origins, and that is everybody who thinks about architectural history, the Megaron is pretty interesting because it's so early and it's so elemental. I mean, if you look at the Megaron, it's almost like the little diagrams we were doing, with a square and a circle in the center of the square and an axis penetrating through that. So this centerpiece would have been a void wrapped by a lower space. And it kind of gives you everything you need to understand the basic organization of architectural procession. You have a really clear idea of center and enclosure, but you also have axis and procession, establishing hierarchy and frontality. So we went quite quickly through ancient Mycenae and Minoan civilizations. But when we come back next time, we will talk about the architecture of Hellenic Greece. And by Hellenic Greece, I mean the mainland culture of the Greeks.