Minoan and Mycenaean Art

This is an excellent guide to the arts of Bronze Age Greece. The book is generously illustrated with good photographs. Higgins's text is densely written and conveys abundant information on the subject matter. The writing style of the accounts (based on areas, periods, and categories of art) is neither dry and technical nor shallow "purple prose," but simply states, usually objectively, what is known. The depth of information for a relatively small book is good. For example, we learn about the characteristic rough surface of Minoan Bronze artefacts and the possible reasons for this. Higgins allows subjective diversions now and then, which can be quite entertaining. One gets the impression that the Minoans were already master craftspeople when the Myceneans were still trying to fashion hats from mud and twigs. However, even the Minoans had their off-days. For example, a Minoan vase with applied ornamentation is described as an unusual lapse of taste (it is decidedly tacky, and I thought it was the Romans who invented bad taste...) This is a fine book from which to gain a sound basic knowledge of Greek Bronze Age art, and certainly one to take to Greece if you intend to visit some of the archaeological sites and museums there.

Every ancient culture needs a work to survey and catalogue its art, to provide a background against which more detailed studies can be done, and to provide a general base of knowledge for interested laypeople and beginning students of the culture. This book succeeds admirably in this mission; it is organized, thorough, does not assume much preliminary knowledge of these cultures, and even has color pictures. My only quibble with it is that few of the artifacts have their dimensions listed in the captions; those are given in the List of Illustrations in the back of the book, and only one number is given. This makes it harder to translate a photograph into a mental image of the object in question. That said, this is an excellent book, one of the first I bought when I began stocking my personal library of archaeological books.