Aegean art

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Figure from the Cyclades, popularized by its appearance at the Athens 2004 olympic games oppening ceremony

Aegean art refers to art that was created in the Grecian and Persian lands surrounding, and the islands within, the Aegean Sea. Included in the category Aegean art is Mycenaean art, famous for its gold masks, war faring imagery and sturdy architecture consisting of citadels on hills with walls up to 20 feet thick and tunnels into the bedrock, the art of the cyclades, famous for its simple "Venus" figurines carved in white marble, and Minoan art which is famous for its animal imagery, images of harvest, and light, breezy, unwarlike architecture which is almost the antithesis of the Mycenaean art. Taking all this into account, the term "Aegean Art" is thought of as contrived among many art historians due to the fact that it includes the widely varying art of very different cultures that happened to be in the same area around the same period.

In the Bronze Age, about 2800–1100 BC. Despite cultural interchange by way of trade with the contemporaneous civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Aegean cultures developed their own highly distinctive styles.

Minoan woman statue

The elegant art of the Aegean figurines has recently been used at the 2004 Summer Olympics,held at Athens; specifically, during the opening ceremony and as the original idea behind the games mascots: Athina and Fivos.

The Athens 2004's mascots were based on this clay model at the National Archaelogical Museum

This type of figurines are furthermore particularly intriguing, because of the high resemblance they excibit with modern sculptures (e.g. in Henry Moore's works).