Published: 09/07/2023
Illustration details: Painting of the Taureador Fresco from the Court of the Stone Spout in the Palace at Knossos (Evans Fresco Drawing N/4) Dimensions: h x w x d 86.4 x 152.8 x 1.2 cm Primary support h x w x d 90.4 x 156.3 x 3.3 cm. Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
To curate a memorable exhibition needs the imaginative flair and attention to composition of a poet or a painter. Each exhibit needs to be chosen not just for its intrinsic interest or beauty, but also for its role in the orchestration of the exhibition space. The visitor should be engaged, engrossed and enthralled. The Ashmolean’s ‘Knossos’ exhibition’s curator Andrew Shapland achieves exactly that. The moment you enter the exhibition space, you feel a frisson of tense excitement: through the darkness a stark marble sculpture of the Minotaur confronts you; there is a labyrinth stencilled around him on the gallery floor. As you explore Athenian pots showing Theseus with Ariadne, then slaying the Minotaur, you will have the Cretan legends retold for you from a range of artefacts and art works from different eras and in different genres. Here’s Picasso’s Minotauromachie (1935), and works by Michael Ayrton, another 20thcentury artist fascinated by the legendary monster. There’s a Greek papyrus fragment with an extract from Homer’s Iliad; look up, and you see a quotation from a poem by the Roman poet Catullus: ‘So did Theseus fling down the conquered body of the brute tossing its horns in vain towards the skies’. Very differently, and from our own times, there’s a reminder of Mark Wallinger’s ‘Labyrinth’ art commission featured at each of London’s 270 tube stations to celebrate its 150th anniversary.
Further on in the gallery, you will learn how it was not Arthur Evans who really first discovered Knossos, but the appropriately named and little known Cretan archaeologist Minos Kalokairinos. Arthur Evans and Knossos may lack the scandal and intrigue associated with Heinrich Schliemann and Troy, but there are stories to tell, and this exhibition tells them well. Arthur Evans’ excavation diaries, with their meticulous drawings and plans, record his unwavering conviction that the palace should be ‘reconstituted’, as he put it: rebuilt, using modern building materials. Architect Piet de Jong, working on the site in the 1920s, used reinforced concrete. The historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood visited soon afterwards and commented: ‘the first impression on the mind of a visitor is that Knossian architecture consists of garages and public lavatories’.
There is beauty here in the ‘Knossos’ exhibition, too, though: beauty in abundance: Minoan pots with their coiling octopus motifs and crocus designs; sculptures of stylised human forms from the 6thmillennium which for us evoke the work of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth; watercolours by the Gilliérons (father and son) reconstructing the coloured bull-leaping frescoes from the palace as Evans envisaged them.
This is an exhibition of light and of darkness: the vibrant colours of Minoan painting, the exuberance of the bull leapers, the glamour of the women on frescoes (one is known as ‘la Parisienne’); but also the macabre associations of the Minotaur myth, from tales of Athenian youths being fed to the monster annually in ancient times, to the resonances of mid 20thcentury European conflicts. Picasso had a long fascination with the Minotaur. In 1960, he said: “If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur.” Michael Ayrton said, of the Minotaur: ‘He is the savage, ungovernable, violent and destructive part of us and it is an open question whether does die. Myself, I suspect that Theseus falsified the account and failure to kill him. Otherwise, why is he still so much with us?’
There are less sombre moments too. A special film in the exhibition shows how the acclaimed video game ‘Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’ was created through research into the legends of Knossos. You can try online jigsaw puzzles of some of the exhibits click here. There is also plenty for children to do, with coloured panels at a child’s height setting challenges. During the earlier months of the exhibition, Heston Blumenthal at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, London, offered an opportunity to discover the delights that may have been served at an Ancient Greek table. Blumenthal’s restaurant launched a new tasting menu inspired by Knossos. In short, thanks to Andrew Shapland’s inspired curation, ‘Labyrinth’ at the Ashmolean offers something for everyone.
For a ‘trailer’ to the exhibition click here. Scroll down, and you will find links to a range of fascinating online articles relating to the exhibition.
For a short audio ‘essay’ on Knossos, bull leaping and the Minoans, listen to this episode of Neil MacGregor’s wonderful A History of the World in 100 Objects series click here.
