The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  In comparison to other objects of Cretan art found, the Minoan frescoes are few and come to us in a crippled state, burnt by fire, mutilated by the dubious endeavors of restorers. And although it was certainly an art inferior to Egyptian art, it bears the mark of an inimitable originality.

  White, blue, gray, yellow, black, red, and green—this was the “palette” of the painters of Crete and of the Nile Delta. But the differences are more important than the similarities.

  The Minoans painted on walls while they were still moist, while the Egyptians used the tempera method. These two techniques entail important consequences: the first requires speed, decisiveness, avoidance of detail, something like improvisation; the second allows for retouching, corrections, is more focused, slow and contemplative.

  Probably more than any other art on earth, the painting of the Egyptians, their whole art, was under the powerful sway of metaphysics. But at the same time the most banal scenes from life—wild ducks among the reeds, carp in a pool—are painted with an almost scientific precision, and we have no difficulty distinguishing the species of animals and plants represented by the anonymous Egyptian masters. How to explain this unsettling mésalliance of naturalism with lofty matters of the spirit?

  These detailed, idyllic Egyptian scenes are almost always accompanied by a sign, an inscription, a hieroglyph, which tells us that behind the colorful veil of life there exists one grave world of gods and souls seeking immortality. Realistic exactitude is not always an expression of a joyous affirmation of life, a praise of visible reality. A lotus blossom painted scrupulously as in a nature guide, a hand drawn with fine precision on the strings of a harp, the feather of a wild duck—do not signify either praise or affirmation. They are there so we may read from those fragments the pure melancholy of transience.

  In Cretan painting, there is less power and sublimity; it is devoid of philosophical reflection and religious ecstasy. It puts one in mind of the slight, frivolous Rococo. It is a spontaneous art, nervous, impetuous, caring little for detail, so that birds, fish, and flowers express what seems a general idea of nature and at times it is hard to say what species they belong to. But in all of this there is the refreshing breath of deified nature, grace, humor, and a dance-like movement.

  The whole corpus of Minoan painting, almost everything that survived the conflagration, is in the modern, well-lit museum of Heraklion. The frescoes are on the second floor marked with the letter K. There are not many of them, 38 altogether, of various sizes, from miniatures whose height varies from 17 to 80 centimeters to great processional paintings which represent figures at something close to life size.

  We know that painting in Crete was—at least during a certain period—very widespread and covered the walls of many palaces and villas. The Minoan artists painted what we would now call “abstract” decorative motifs, ornaments, buildings, columns, porticoes, stylized plants, as well as animals, people, landscapes taken from the surrounding world. The phrase “painted after nature” does not make much sense in relation to Cretan artists, they certainly did not set themselves any models to copy; they carried the models inside themselves, an inexhaustible store of forms and colors, they were a medium passing on the running stream of the colorful world. As if there were then no separation of object and subject, the artist did not stand facing nature and trying to fathom it with the aid of geometry, but was a part of the cosmos, like tree, water, and stone, a meeting-place of elements, and it would not have entered his mind to think he was a creator, an exceptional and inspired being.

  Not many works of art have reached us in their full glory and splendor. One should be surprised (and it is a joyful astonishment) that so many testimonies to human sensitivity and genius have survived. In the garden of art there is a big hospital of mutilated and dying forms. The powerful mill wheels of time work relentlessly. So wandering through the rooms of the museum in Heraklion as if through hospital wards I tried to discover in the old frescoes the beauty of youth. Like the sick, they expect our compassion and understanding. If we begrudge it them, they will depart, leaving us alone.

  The Blue Bird was found in the so-called House of Frescoes in Knossos and is from around 1600 B.C., and thus from the Middle Minoan period. Chronologically it is one of the oldest preserved Cretan paintings.

  From the dark brown patch of rock a blue bird emerges—painted summarily, as on a piece of folk pottery—probably sitting on a stone, with its neck extended, its head lifted, and with a yellow eye round as a bead. All this happens in unreal space, where three states of matter are continuously passing and transforming themselves—rock into water, water into air. And added to that, plants—groves of irises, reeds, the open buds of unknown flowers, flying in all directions like musical lines, like notes of landscape. The bird drinks water and listens to the song of the vegetation. The finders were delighted with this scene by the stream, a pretty picture, an idyll without mythological commentary, without evil spirits, a praise of eternal life wrested from death.

  How different is the stucco relief found in the so-called Guard House at the northern entrance to the Knossos palace. Painted in dark, burnt red turning to brown—the portrait of a bull in profile. It is probably a hunting scene (like the one sculpted on a cup from Vaphio), if we judge from the tongue sticking out, the eyes half-closed with rage and the flared nostrils smelling the approaching enemy. The bull’s body in motion, in full gallop, is a study of strength, a fugue of rage, which reminds one of the frescoes at Lascaux. In the delicate Cretan world this charging bull is an exceptional thing; it brings to mind the Romantics—Delacroix would probably have copied it with relish.

  The Dolphins, the large fresco in a faded fallow blue shade found acknowledgment in the eyes of Nikolaos Platon, the ephor or director of the Heraklion museum, who was critical toward the restorational activities of Evans and his team. He stated that the restoration had been carried out correctly. I was not taken by this “group portrait” the colors are saccharine, the lines mannered, but one has to remember that the painting was separated from the architecture and its decorative meaning is difficult for us to grasp.

  Here is the famous Parisienne (the titles come from Evans and like the names of the rooms he invented, betray his Romantic tastes)—the small portrait of a Cretan lady, reproduced myriad times, in which people have seen the influence of Egyptian art. Quite wrongly, for though it is true that the eye is enormous, Egyptian, the contour of the face painted in a thick line, the slightly upturned nose, the sensual lips, the expressive chin and hair, especially the hair, the extravagant hairdo with the bun in the neck and a coquettish lock over the brow, and the painterly treatment of the whole—all contrast with what we see in Egyptian frescoes outlined with a dry contour line. The portrait of this young woman has nothing in common with courtly stiffness—which you might expect here—but quite on the contrary is filled with a slightly arrogant charm.

  The fresco called Tauromachia (severely damaged) was supposed to be the crown evidence that there were bloodless games on Crete in the Minoan period. Evans left a sketch explaining what the circus game portrayed in the painting was: the acrobat seized the galloping bull by the horns, bounced off them as if on a trampoline, landed on the animal’s back and jumped off onto the shoulders of another acrobat. These alleged fantasy acrobatics, this true salto mortale, proves that the renowned archaeologist knew very little about bulls, since toreadors—the real specialists—agree that nobody could ever perform such a stunt. On the fresco the bull’s body is extended in flight, multiplied unnaturally by speed, but in accordance with the tendencies of Cretan art, possessed by motion.

  I was most touched by the small, miniature frescoes that derive from the late Minoan period, and which Evans entitled The Ladies of the Court and The Garden Party. I think that it was in their miniatures that the Cretans reached their peak.

  A crowd gathered around a sacred building (the columns are set in two rows, stylized bull’s horns) watches what are probably the rituals of a
cult. It is like in a great theater—the mood of an opera hall rather than a temple where there is to be an encounter with a terrible god and his stern deputies.

  “A group of ladies with intricate hairdos, in colorful and very fashionable dress, sits merrily chatting, not paying attention to what is going on in front of them […]. We easily recognize ladies of the court in their elegant attire. They have just come from the hairdresser’s; their hair is wound about their heads and shoulders, held by a ribbon that passes over the forehead and falls in a long band on their backs, amid strings of beads and jewels […], the sleeves of their dresses are puffed and tightly fastened, the bands and flounces of their skirts are closely reminiscent of today’s fashion. The narrow neck bands suggest transparent blouses […], their nipples are visible […], which gives the effect of a low décolleté. The dresses are cheerily colorful, with ribbons in blue, red and yellow with white stripes, and some with red stripes.

  One’s attention is immediately drawn to the lively conversation between the third lady from the right (the one with a hair net) and the lady sitting next to her. The latter gives emphasis to what she is saying with an extended right arm, almost touching the thigh of her conversation partner, who herself raises her arms as if with the astonished cry: “Well, you don’t say!” This scene of womanly confidences, gossip, and social scandal is very remote from the classical works of art across the ages; this vibrant genre style and Rococo mood transport us to the present age.”

  I have quoted Evans at length with a somewhat perfidious purpose. For this quotation is taken from his journalistic writings, not from his scientific works. The discoverer of Knossos was an excellent minister of propaganda for his own work, he had an agile pen, and the journalistic experience of his youth came in handy; his many popularizing articles for the Times and other periodicals won throngs of admirers for the newly discovered civilization.

  Evans knew very well that the layman is most easily moved by the statement: “but they were just like us, they loved the circus and jolly company, their women were like ours, the ones so beautifully painted by Whistler.” So Evans read into the frescoes, whose figures are no bigger than your pinkie, a very Victorian atmosphere, and this will to find in a remote civilization features close to his own age led him on to reconstructions and interpretations that were too risky.

  The Boy Gathering Saffron—a small wall painting, found in the north-west part of the Knossos palace and restored by Gilliéron according to Evans’s indications. Later, a renowned expert on Minoan art, the aforementioned Nikolaos Platon, discovered that the body of this saffron-picker had an odd shape and was also painted in blue, a color never used in representations of human figures. Later other small fragments were found, the piece of a tail, a crocus, and finally a blue non-human head. And so the Boy Gathering Saffron became the Monkey in the Palace Garden.

  The Youth Carrying a Ryton is a fragment of the reconstructed Procession Fresco found in the Knossos palace right at the beginning of the excavation work.

  “Early in the morning,” Evans writes in his journal, “we removed the next layer in the corridor to the left of the megaron and discovered two large pieces of a Mycenean fresco.* One represented a head, the other a waist and part of a female figure (later found to be male) carrying in its hand a long Mycenean ryton, or long, conical dish used in funeral ceremonies. A life-size figure, painted in dark red, like the figures in Etruscan tombs and the Kefti** of Egyptian painting. The profile of the face is noble; full lips, the lower emphasized by a curved line. Dark eyes, almond-shaped eyelids. Beautifully molded shoulders […], without a doubt one of the most admirable human figures from the Mycenean age found so far.”

  But this suggestive description fired no enthusiasm in me. The fresco is mortally wounded; its color of clotted blood is peeling. Like the Prince among Lilies, also considered a masterpiece, a life-size man striding among stylized plants, drawn with a banal line. Here most of all you see the heavy hand of the conservationists; the few damaged fragments of the original were united into a whole with the aid of the unconvincing conjectures of Gilliéron, who threw some of his own butterflies and flowers in for good measure.

  But just when I thought nothing in Minoan art would be able to move me, I stumbled on the sarcophagus from Hagia Triada and experienced a revelation. This is undoubtedly a masterpiece, next to which all the Cretan frescoes pale and fade. I drew near it with piety, walked around its four sides—and then the bell rang. The museum was closing. And again I had the fantasy of letting myself be locked in to spend the night and the morning alone without obsessive excursion groups, to learn by heart all its colors and lines, so that later when I would be far away I could close my eyes and summon the memory like a film—an image more precise than any reproduction.

  I CALLED IT THE meat and fruit neighborhood. It lies in the center of Heraklion and life comes to a standstill here when the sun stands straight above the town; but it blossoms at dusk and in the long evening and night hours when a cool wind comes down from the mountains. The smell of blood, the sweet breath of bakeries, a sharp cloud of herbs. The fruits of gardens and fruits of the sea. And over it all the noise and racket of a Turkish bazaar. An appendage of Asia.

  Little one-floor wooden houses with cheap restaurants. Simple wooden chairs, set out on the street, as they should be. First of all the waiter, not asking, brings a glass of cold water, which fills the whole body with the freshness of the spring. I order for a starter a plate of small fish fried whole, goat’s cheese, olives and killer peppers, and the inevitable anise vodka—ouzo. Then the simplest dishes—Greek pizza, moussaka: eggplant, pureed potatoes and ground meat; this whole layer cake is baked at the hottest temperature. The bread is white and sweet, with sesame seeds on the crust. White wine from the island of Samos, seasoned with resin as in the time of Homer. And then a huge piece of filo pastry. Greek cuisine is rustic and fulfills one’s dreams of paradise, where everything should be sweet and rich.

  I settle down across from a bloodbath. An athletic butcher is putting on a free show called “quartering an ox.” The knife slips masterfully through hillocks of flesh, a cleaver cracks the bones, dividing this magnificent thing into its elements. With a single movement he removes the stomach and heart from the inside and throws them flat on the chopping board. I think of the critics who will busy themselves with us, who will torture what we leave behind, hacking and ripping blindly.

  I think also of the abandoned sarcophagus, of the advantage of works of art over works of literature. The sarcophagus is equal to itself, effectively defends itself against interpretations, doesn’t let the noisy and arrogant get anywhere near it, doesn’t lend itself to being divided into first causes. It now rests in a glass case in the waxen stillness of the museum, alone with its mystery—a motionless procession of people and animals.

  I went back the next day. I postponed my excursion to Phaestos. Nor did I go to the palace in Knossos, faithful to the principle that one must not greedily wolf down everything, that one should choose from among the mass of objects the best work, the sum of the others, and crown it, enthrone it, call it a masterpiece. For the sarcophagus from Hagia Triada is beyond all doubt a masterpiece—its maker seized and conveyed to us that happy moment of revelatory knowledge and inspired sobriety, when a civilization sees itself whole as if in a mirror, conscious of its boundaries, strength, and shape.

  The sarcophagus was found, as I’ve said, in Hagia Triada, in a small vaulted tomb where the remains of persons belonging to the royal family were kept. Scholars date this royal crypt to the pre-palace period, so it would be something along the lines of a Saint-Denis of Cretan kings. But the sarcophagus itself derives from the later Minoan period.

  It was made of limestone. It is not large. Its length is 137 centimeters and because I owe it many hours of happy contemplation, I thought that it would be that sarcophagus I would carry from a fire, if I were suddenly in a position to express my gratitude to it for having restored my faith in the grea
tness of Cretan art. It is untouched by the hands of conservationists, and so it is the crown witness of the art of the Minoans. Its colors: tans, blues, red, emerald green, sandy yellow glow with a muted and noble radiance.

  The torment of description. For I will have to describe the sarcophagus, and the description will be like any description, long, dull, like an inventory—the enumeration of figures and objects. I will not be able to avoid unwinding sentences like bandages, from left to right, against the rules of sight, which gives the whole in the clear and sudden light of simultaneous presence.

  The first long side of the sarcophagus, from the left: three colorful bells of skirts, from which flat and bare Egyptian feet protrude. The rest is gone; the upper part of the mural was destroyed and is now a white wall of nonexistence. In the middle a stone table for sacrifice, upon which lies a fettered bull with its throat cut. Blood flows into a dish standing under the table. The animal’s eyes are open wide and full of melancholy. Under the table two goats huddle, in the background a figure with braids waving playing a double flute. This is probably how we are led to the altar, before which the priestess stretches out her hands above the sacrificial dish; up above a basket of fruit floats against all laws of gravitation. On the very edge of the scene, the wall of an altar with stylized bull’s horns and two double-edged scythes on thrones as high as columns. And then a tree, painted delicately and tenderly amid this ceremonial and almost mystical scene.

  The other long side of the sarcophagus is as it were divided into two acts, two scenes, distinguished by differently colored backgrounds. On the left side, between thrones, two double-edged axes—labryses (birds have alighted on them), and a large crater. A woman dressed in a corset and leather skirt, pours the blood of the sacrificial beast into the crater. Behind what is presumably the priestess, a lady dressed in an indigo-purple gown, with a diadem on her head (a princess, according to some interpreters), carrying two pails on a bar that rests on her shoulders. And finally, the last person in the ceremonial procession, a figure in a golden ankle-length gown, playing a large musical instrument reminiscent of a lyre. Thus ends the scene marked by a bright sand-colored background.