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Continuity and discontinuity of Minoan visual representations in Homeric Epics: The spirals of Okeanos
Year: 2025
Type of publication: článek ve sborníku
Name of source: Proceedings of the 13th International Congress of Cretan Studies
Publisher name: Society of Cretan Historical Studies
Place: Agios Nikolaos
Page from-to: 1-13
Titles:
Language Name Abstract Keywords
cze Kontinuita a diskontinuita minojských vizuálních reprezentací v homérských eposech: Víry Ókeána Studie zkoumá archaické způsoby zobrazování, a to na příkladech, jako je Homérův popis Achilleova štítu a minojské fresky. minojské fresky; Knossos; homérská epika; Achilleův štít
eng Continuity and discontinuity of Minoan visual representations in Homeric Epics: The spirals of Okeanos I suggest that the experience of Minoan visual culture was transmitted through oral epics during the “Dark Ages” that followed the Bronze Age collapse, in the same way that scholars usually assume the transmission of various narrative motifs across different cultures and areas. This experience then emerges in some of the many descriptions, similes and ekphrases of the Homeric Epics. Here, it is not usually possible to detect original Minoan iconographic motifs, but rather similar representational strategies and the intermingling and transformation of original contexts and meanings. Using the example of Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles, and especially its last two passages, the “Knossian dance” and the image of Okeanos, I first show their mutual visual resonance mediated by geometric motifs of circles, lines, and most especially spirals and whirls. I then argue that Okeanos does not have a cosmogonic dimension in Homer, but rather offers an ekphrastic image of spatial and cognitive unapproachability. I proceed to show how the three specific original contexts from which we know Minoan spiral ornaments – the association with figure-of-eight shields, their use as a kind of ornamental frame and their occurrence near the Knossian miniature frescoes (associated with the Shield of Achilles as early on as by Evans) – can crystallise into a new thematic element, the visual image of Okeanos. Finally, I suggest that it is the ornamental, whose structuring quality inextricably links meaning to its form and context, that can conveniently transmit cultural content across the cultural seam between the Minoan Bronze Age and Archaic Greece, when no stable preferred medium of representation such as painting or poetry is at hand. Minoan fresco painting; Spiral friezes; Figure-of-eight shields; Miniature frescoes from Knossos; Homeric Epics; Shield of Achilles; Okeanos; Homeric Cosmogony; Homeric Cosmology; Ekphrasis; Ornament

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