Six - Moving toward Life

Summary

This chapter examines the boundary-breaking spatial and social dynamism of animalian entities embodied within LB I–LB II polychrome murals of Crete and Thera. In these innovative paintings, animalian entities engaged with both painted and lived contexts, taking on novel manners of involvement in Aegean sociocultural spaces; some established new aspects of creaturely identity and relation. We begin with three animalian entities considered – boar’s tusk helmets, ox-hide shields and ikria – examining how their presence in murals further challenged long-standing parameters of two-dimensional representation. Here discussion broadens to consider how renderings of various animals in Minoan frescoes charged and unsettled the fabric of powerful built spaces. Innovations in color, scale and the creation of spatial depth approached the ways animalian bodies were experienced in the round. Simultaneously, details of the frescoes kept the painted creatures, and the spaces they occupied, tautly embroiled in the structured order of the wall. We close by considering how polychrome frescoes could foster radical newness in animals’ identities, focusing on renderings of blue simians. This blueness, regardless of whether originally intended to approximate biological hues, engendered distinct status for simians in the Aegean, with fascinating connections to renderings of young peoples.