Every culture stands on the shoulders of those who came before it. Yet, one of Europe’s most remarkable ancestors is often overlooked: the Minoans. Long before Greece gave rise to philosophers, poets, and democracy, the Minoan civilisation of Crete and the Aegean islands laid the foundations for how Europe would see art, beauty, and the divine. Their legacy, hidden beneath volcanic ash and centuries of silence, continues to shape our understanding of creativity and expression.
In Art, Religion, and Ideology in the West House Paintings of Thera (Santorini), Nanno Marinatos sheds light on this forgotten civilization. Through her study of the frescoes at Akrotiri’s West House, she argues that the Minoans were not only skilled artists but visionaries who created a language of art that would echo across time. Their paintings were not meant only to please the eye. They were expressions of belief, community, and power, the very ideas that would later define Western art and thought.
The Minoans employed imagery as a means of expressing their philosophy. In the West House frescoes, ships glide across calm seas, flowers bloom beside sacred horns, and a radiant sun oversees it all. Marinatos interprets these scenes as reflections of harmony between humans, nature, and the divine. The central figure in their art, the Solar Goddess, represented the balance of life, the light that sustained creation. In her rays, Marinatos finds the roots of Europe’s later fascination with order, proportion, and beauty drawn from nature.
What makes the Minoans remarkable is the extent of their influence beyond their shores. Their art travelled, not through conquest, but through connection. Frescoes inspired by Minoan style appeared in Egypt, Cyprus, and mainland Greece, blending local traditions into a shared visual culture. Marinatos describes this as the spread of “visual colonization,” a peaceful exchange where symbols of the Solar Goddess, the lion, and the crocus became common language. It was through such imagery that the Minoans spread ideas of unity and divine order, themes that would later appear in Greek sculpture and even Renaissance art.
While later European artists turned to myth and geometry to express truth, the Minoans painted it on their walls. Their vision was optimistic, grounded in the natural rhythms of sea, sun, and life. This belief in harmony and balance, seen in their architecture, pottery, and frescoes, became the quiet blueprint for Europe’s artistic tradition.
To rediscover the Minoans is to recognise that the story of European art did not begin in Athens or Rome, but centuries earlier, in the palaces and sanctuaries of Crete and Thera. Their work bridges the worlds of myth and reason, emotion and order, the very balance that Western civilisation would come to prize.
For readers who wish to see how this forgotten culture shaped the visual and spiritual roots of Europe, Art, Religion, and Ideology in the West House Paintings of Thera (Santorini) by Nanno Marinatos offers a vivid and compelling journey into the art that once made the gods visible.
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