The
art that had produced the beautiful polychrome Kamares ware passed
away, and was succeeded by the naturalism which has left us the Blue
Boy who gathers the white crocuses, and the faience reliefs of the
Temple Repositories, a naturalism which, with various modifications
in style and material, persists to the end of Late Minoan I. In the
midst of this period (Late Minoan I.) come what are perhaps the
highest developments of Minoan art in the shape of the steatite vases
of Hagia Triada, Boxer, Harvester, and Chieftain. On the mainland
the kindred culture of Mycenae was rising to its culmination, and
the art represented in the Circle-Graves was almost in the fulness
of its bloom. Naturalism declines in its turn, and is succeeded by
the Later Palace style, more grandiose, more mannered, and less
free than that which had preceded it. It was in the Later Palace
period (Late Minoan II.) that the miniature frescoes were painted,
to preserve for us the strangely modern style of the Minoan Court,
with its flounced and furbelowed dames. Naturalism, though failing,
was still capable of great things, and its last efforts in the palace
at Knossos gave us the magnificent reliefs of painted stucco, such
as the bull's head and the King with the peacock plumes. Over the
seas, the Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty were setting down on
their tomb walls those likenesses of the Keftiu which have helped
us to the date of this last development of Minoan greatness.
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