ABSTRACT
The artworks from Knossos, Crete, are traditionally interpreted as integral to a cultural visual aesthetic which embraced the greater part of the Aegean and endured for at least two millennia. Sophisticated studies include the search for schools of painters (Cameron 1975), individual styles and portraiture (Preziosi and Hitchcock 1999: 143), or the classification of iconographic groups (e.g. Younger 1993). The norms of the societies in question are understood to be produced in the imagery, among which the clear-cut distinction between men’s and women’s roles and male and female symbolism occupies a central position. Such studies are essential for any investigation of the art of the Aegean, but, as Coote and Shelton (1992a: 6) have remarked in the case of anthropology, stylistic analyses are a means to an end, not the end itself. There is an almost complete lack of critical discussions of art, aesthetics, and sexed differences within this literature. There is a need, therefore, to move beyond the classificatory or descriptive tendency in Bronze Age Aegean art studies to a consideration of recent developments in theory on art and aesthetics and, simultaneously, to begin a detailed engagement with the particularities of specific ‘aesthetics’ of sexual difference.
