ABSTRACT
Despite a close early bond, art history and archaeology have had an uneasy relationship in Aegean prehistoric studies. One could attribute this to the associations between connoisseurship, the art market and looting, such that appreciation of individual works clashed with the fundamentals of archaeological context. At the same time, the field underwent a shift toward more anthropological approaches, as well as the rise of methods less reliant upon artifact assemblages, such as landscape surveys. Yet, art historical study necessarily continues: the extensive corpus of glyptic requires art-historical techniques of analysis, as do other complex iconographies in wall painting, metalwork, relief stone vases, jewelry, and pottery. Still, studies in an art historical mode do not sit comfortably with archaeological approaches. One vantage point, we argue, that has the potential to work between these perspectives is to look at the framing devices employed in ancient art. Some of the more iconic art styles of the Aegean Bronze Age, such as Marine Style, have been taken to exemplify a primitive lack of framing. But there are actually sophisticated devices and motifs across a range of media that serve to frame figurative depictions. While features such as the rocky landscapes in Minoan fresco or the imitation stone slabs at the bases of walls have long been recognized, scholarship has typically cast them as “accessory” or “ornamental.” However, by taking recent work on frames in other periods of Greek art history, we can develop a fuller understanding of the dynamic ways in which such devices served to construct meaning in various kinds of figurative scenes. Through a specific focus on wall paintings, and notably those from Akrotiri on Thera, we show how thinking through frames enables us to combine the archaeological prerogatives of context with an art historical emphasis on figuration and narrative. Comparisons with framing devices in other media, particularly three-dimensional containers in clay, stone, and metal, is also instructive. Finally, we might recognize this recent emphasis on frame and ornament in ancient art history as a particularly fruitful way of working through questions generated by phenomenological inquiry within an iconographic framework.
