DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.806#0286
272
SCRIPTA MINOA
of the round 'signet' type exhibiting the portrait of a male head. The features are
sharply characterized, with an aquiline nose and the waving hair that meets us in
some of the Palace frescoes (Fig. 124). The design must be regarded as the earliest
attempt at real portraiture yet discovered in any part of the European area, and that it
Portrait of should have been attempted at all goes far to prove that we have here the actual
priest-king
and his son.
Fia.123.
Sealing with Portrait Head.
likeness—curiously Armenoid in its general traits—of a Minoan dynast. On another
sealing from the same deposit the head of this adult male personage is associated with
the impression of a second signet showing the profile head of a very young boy,
presumably his son (Fig. 125). We seem here to have before us an example of
an 'association' of the kind for which we have been accustomed to look on the
coinage of the Roman Empire.
It is a natural inference that the official formula belonged to the personage with
Fig. 124.
Portrait Heads associated on Sealings.
whose effigy it is thus brought into connexion. From the contemporaneity of style
we may, indeed, go a step further and attribute to the same prince the fuller title as
seen on the cornelian prism-seal, together with its personal device, the seated cat.
Should this Minoan portrait, recovered thus from the Palace archives at Knossos,
be indeed that of an actual priest-king, the architectural references in the titles may
have a historical connexion with the building.
SCRIPTA MINOA
of the round 'signet' type exhibiting the portrait of a male head. The features are
sharply characterized, with an aquiline nose and the waving hair that meets us in
some of the Palace frescoes (Fig. 124). The design must be regarded as the earliest
attempt at real portraiture yet discovered in any part of the European area, and that it
Portrait of should have been attempted at all goes far to prove that we have here the actual
priest-king
and his son.
Fia.123.
Sealing with Portrait Head.
likeness—curiously Armenoid in its general traits—of a Minoan dynast. On another
sealing from the same deposit the head of this adult male personage is associated with
the impression of a second signet showing the profile head of a very young boy,
presumably his son (Fig. 125). We seem here to have before us an example of
an 'association' of the kind for which we have been accustomed to look on the
coinage of the Roman Empire.
It is a natural inference that the official formula belonged to the personage with
Fig. 124.
Portrait Heads associated on Sealings.
whose effigy it is thus brought into connexion. From the contemporaneity of style
we may, indeed, go a step further and attribute to the same prince the fuller title as
seen on the cornelian prism-seal, together with its personal device, the seated cat.
Should this Minoan portrait, recovered thus from the Palace archives at Knossos,
be indeed that of an actual priest-king, the architectural references in the titles may
have a historical connexion with the building.