(jazz piano music)
- [Voiceover] The Aegean Bronze Age
is made up of three cultures.
On the mainland and slightly later, the Mycenaean.
On the large island of Crete to the east,
you have the Minoan culture.
And then, you have a chain of islands called the Cyclades.
And on an island that in the ancient world was called Thera,
we found what seems to be an entire city frozen in time.
- [Voiceover] Today the island is known as Santorini.
We might be better off saying what's left of the island
because in the 17th century, most archaeologists agree,
there was a volcanic eruption that basically
blew open the middle of the island.
- [Voiceover] Some geologists think that this eruption
was perhaps the largest volcanic eruption
on the entire earth in the last 5,000 years.
- [Voiceover] As a result, just like in Pompeii,
a town on the island of Santorini or ancient Thera,
Akrotiri, was preserved under layers of
volcanic ash and pumice.
- [Voiceover] But unlike Pompeii,
the site was not discovered before
modern archaeological techniques had developed
and so whereas in Pompeii there was extensive damage
by people who were removing art as trophies,
the site at Thera is in the process of being
systematically studied and uncovered.
It's interesting because archaeologists think that
the earliest people in Akrotiri
did not have much relationship with either
Mycenae or with the Minoans on Crete.
But that seems to have changed later
so much so that some art historians think that
Akrotiri became a settlement that was directly related
and perhaps directly under the control of the Minoans.
- [Voiceover] And we also know that
they traded with the Mycenaeans.
So we shouldn't imagine these as very separate cultures.
- [Voiceover] What we found are a series of houses
of prosperous inhabitants.
We haven't found palaces but we have found structures
that have more than one story.
And we've also found walls covered with fresco.
- [Voiceover] We're looking at a series of frescoes.
All of them unusual in their subject matter.
- [Voiceover] Probably the most outstanding feature
of the frescoes that we've found,
and these are true frescoes,
that is, this is wet painting over a fine layer of plaster
over a rougher layer of plaster, over straw.
But probably the most interesting feature is that
these provide for us the very earliest examples
of landscape painting.
- [Voiceover] It's hard to call them landscape painting
in the way that we might think about it,
with fields and trees and sky,
because it's very abstracted, very stylized.
We see a lot of curve-linear forms standing for the rocks.
We see blues and reds and yellows.
These are colors that were very commonly used
in their fresco painting.
- [Voiceover] And then we see again abstracted renderings
of lilies, of flowering plants, that decorate
the tops of those rocks as well as
representations of swallows cavorting around the flowers.
- [Voiceover] There's a shelf and above that
the room is painted red and so,
we don't have a sense of a blue sky.
The backgrounds were consistently white.
Now it's important as we look at this to distinguish between
the in-painting that the museum has done for us
to give us a sense of the whole room,
verses the ancient fresco.
- [Voiceover] Modern conservation techniques seek to
stabilize and to give us a sense of what the image
would have looked like without trying to restore the object
to it's original state.
This is probably most clear,
not in this so-called Spring Room,
but rather in another fresco know as The Boxing Boys.
- [Voiceover] And in the same room
we see a pair of antelopes.
- [Voiceover] The antelopes are almost caligraphic.
There is this beautiful serpentine line.
I'm not seeing any straight lines
throughout this entire wall.
And there's this feeling of grace
in the representation of these animals.
- [Voiceover] We have to be cautious
about reading into it too much
because to us there's a sense of almost
the pleasure of nature in the scene of animals
and also in the Spring fresco,
where we can almost sense a warm day,
of flowers blowing in the wind,
a sense of colors being intensified by the sunlight,
of birds in the air, the pleasures of a spring day.
But maybe this had some kind of ritual significance.
Maybe it just is a beautiful spring day.
It's impossible for us to know.
- [Voiceover] To our modern eyes, it feels whimsical,
it feels like it is all about pleasure.
It's about bringing the exterior world inside.
But those are to eyes that have grown up
in the 21st century, not eyes that grew up in 1700 B.C.E.
- [Voiceover] With The Boxing Boys
we can clearly see that very little remained
from the ancient fresco but enough
to give us a sense of a very unusual composition
of two boys who have boxing mitts on,
whose heads are shaven except for
pony tails in the front and back of their heads.
- [Voiceover] You can see that they're wearing belts.
They seem to be nude otherwise
except for their boxing gloves
and I see some traces of jewelry around the upper arm
and the neck of the figure on the left.
- [Voiceover] A lot of the frescoes
that were found at Akrotiri
seem to have ritual function.
Many seem to be related to
religious rituals or rites related to
cults around godesses.
But it's impossible for us to understand
the iconography and the meaning of those frescoes.
- [Voiceover] We have almost no written records
from the Bronze Age and the Aegean
and absolutely none from the Cyclades.
And so, what we're forced to look at
are simply the physical remains
of the architecture, of the vessels that have been found
as well as these extraordinary frescoes.
(jazz piano music)