Photos of Ancient Greek Cycladic Museum Antiquities Art including Cycladic Doll figurines and Syros pans Photos by photographer Paul E Williams
Ancient Greek Cycladic Museum Antiquities Art Photo Collections
Individual Museum Cycladic Collections
Photos of Ancient Greek Cycladic Museum Antiquities Art
Pictures and images of Ancient Cycladic Art Antiquities. The ancient Cycladic culture flourished in the islands of the Aegean Sea from c. 3300 to 1100 BC.
Along with the Minoan civilization and Mycenaean Greece, the Cycladic people are counted among the three major Aegean cultures. Cycladic art therefore comprises one of the three main branches of Aegean art.
The best known type of artwork that has survived is the marble Cycladic Doll figurine, most commonly a single full-length female figure with arms folded across the front. This type is known to archaeologists as a “FAF” for “folded-arm figure(ine)”.
Apart from a sharply-defined nose, the faces are a smooth blank, although there is evidence on some that they were originally painted. Considerable numbers of these are known, though unfortunately most were removed illicitly from their unrecorded archaeological context, which seems usually to be a burial.
The marble figures usually called “idols” or “figurines” even though neither term is exactly accurate: the former term suggests a religious function which is by no means agreed on by experts.
These marble figures are seen scattered around the Aegean, suggesting that these figures were popular amongst the people of Crete and mainland Greece.
Perhaps the most famous of these figures are musicians: one a harp-player the other a pipe-player. Dating to approximately 2500 BCE, these musicians are sometimes considered “the earliest extant musicians from the Aegean.
The most important the early Cycladic Civilisation groups (3300–2700 BC) is the Grotta–Pelos culture are Pelos, Plastiras and Louros. Pelos figurines are of schematic type. Both males and females, in standing position with a head and face, compose the Plastiras type; the rendering is naturalistic but also strangely stylized.
The Louros type is seen as transitional, combining both schematic and naturalistic elements. Schematic figures are more commonly found and are very flat in profile, having simple forms and lack a clearly defined head.
Naturalistic figures are small and tend to have strange or exaggerated proportions, with long necks, angular upper bodies, and muscular legs.
The purpose of these antiquities to the peoples of the cycladic civilisations is unknown but archaeologists believe that the objects were not mad as burial goods.