![]() ![]() ![]() "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. ![]() His book is one of calm, inviting erudition that, mercifully, avoids the mean wrangling so common in academia. As well, Lapatin gently points out that very often our re-creations of the past are influenced by the ideas, mores, and, even, inadequacies of our present. In short, Evans's desire to believe clouded his scientific caution. Archaeology is by its nature a forensic enterprise, yet the excitement of discovery and decipherment is often lost in excavation reports and scholarly monographs. Evans, and others, took kernels of evidence to bake a large loaf of an idealized, matriarchal Cretan civilization. Lapatin, Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), X + 274 pp. They are almost certainly forgeries, according to Lapatin, or at best, "neither entirely genuine nor fully fake." This is not a crime story but rather a tale of well-meaning overextrapolation. Other, related figures (of equally dubious origin) retain pride of place in several North American and European museums. The gold-and-ivory figure, now residing in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, was discovered in the early 20th century by renowned archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. ![]() In Mysteries of the Snake Goddess, Kenneth Lapatin traces the murky origins (and seriously debunks the authenticity of) "the most refined and precious" surviving object of Minoan art. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |