Pictures images and photos of Ancient Minoan art, antiquities and artefacts and exhibits from the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.. 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. It forms part of the wider grouping of Aegean art, and in later periods came for a time to have a dominant influence over Cycladic art. Since wood and textiles have decomposed, the best-preserved (and most instructive) 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. Minoan art was influenced by the neighbouring cultures of Ancient Egypt and the ancient Near East. Minoan art has a variety of subject-matter, much of it appearing across different media, although only some styles of pottery include figurative scenes. Bull-leaping appears in Minoan painting and several types of sculpture, and is thought to have had a religious significance; bull's heads are also a popular Minoan subject in terracotta and other sculptural materials. There are no Minoan figures that appear to be portraits of individuals, or are clearly royal, and the identities of religious figures is often tentative, with scholars uncertain whether they are deities, clergy or devotees.Equally, whether Minoan painted rooms were "shrines" or secular is far from clear; one room in Minoan Akrotiri has been argued to be a bedroom, with remains of a bed, or a Minoan shrine. Animals, including an unusual variety of marine fauna, are often depicted in Minoan art; the "Marine Style" is a type of painted palace pottery from Minoan III and Late Minoan IA that paints sea creatures including octopus spreading all over the vessel, and probably originated from similar Minoan frescoed scenes; sometimes these appear in other media. Minoan scenes of hunting and warfare, and horses and riders, are mostly found in later periods, in works perhaps made by Cretans for a Mycenaean market, or Mycenaean overlords of Crete. While Minoan figures, whether human or animal, have a great sense of life and movement, they are often not very accurate, and the species is sometimes impossible to identify; by comparison with Ancient Egyptian art they are often more vivid, but less naturalistic. What is called landscape painting is found in both frescos and on painted pots, and sometimes in other media, but most of the time this consists of plants shown fringing a scene, or dotted around within it.Download as royalty free stock photos or order as photo art prints

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