Finally we are at my favourite site, Pylos! I wrote so much this weekend that I had to move to my next journal. Pylos is my favourite because I take a particular interest in paintings of antiquity, and Pylos is famous for its wall paintings. Alex mentioned while we were at the site that Emily Egan does work putting back together these plasters, taking small pieces (sometimes very very tiny) and recreating the whole. As a Classics and Studio Art major that loves jigsaw puzzles, that seemed like the perfect job to me! I looked up Dr. Egan and read a paper of hers on argonauts (the fish, not the friends of Jason). By studying depictions of these argonauts across other Mycenaean art in detail, Egan is more easily able to identify which pieces come from the same plaster:
“[The] formal similarities [of the depictions], however, seemingly produced without the use of a template or other replication device, may indicate that the pieces instead derive from the same frieze, pieces of which became separated after detaching from the wall during or after the palace’s destruction.”
Emily Egan, “Standardization vs. Individualization in the Pylian Painted Argonaut.”
Egan is able to use the example of the argonauts to explain her thoughts on the process of production at the site as well. All the argonauts share some similarities, but have small and consistent differences. This suggests that multiple painters, each with slight variations in style, were painting simultaneously (perhaps from the same guide or a set of instructions). This indicates the trust that the supervisors must have had in the artistic ability of the painters they hired.
Dr. Egan’s paper is of great interest to me, even though I can’t say I care much about underwater creatures. It’s more her process that I’m interested in– to be so close to/well-versed in these paintings as to notice such miniscule details is really incredible!
Nestor’s Palace also raised a question, which Helen Banta may have written about as well (look forward to our future co-authored paper on the subject). See Fig 1 Below.
So: someone wants to take a bath, let’s say she’s the queen (but really the point still stands for anyone). Her servants fill up the bath for her, she bathes, and then gets out. Where does she dress? There is not enough room for her in the bathroom to be dressed by servants, if that was the practice at the time. There is not much room for her to dress herself either (considering the complexity of the garments depicted below). So: she is probably dressing somewhere else. Where? Maybe in the room across the hallway. But then she has to cross the main entrance way, naked or in some state of undress. It’s even worse if she has to cross into what is supposedly her “megaron” (though this was probably a meeting area rather than a bedroom). So maybe this is a guest bathroom for people as they come in– why have a bath in it? If anyone is bathing there, except maybe children, that says something about the standards of “decency” and “indecency” to those living in the Palace.
Egan, Emily Catherine. “Standardization vs. Individualization in the Pylian Painted Argonaut.” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies, vol. 8, no. 3–4, 2020, pp. 379–88. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.8.3-4.0379. Accessed 29 Apr. 2024.