Mysteries of the snake goddess : art, desire, and the forging of history

Not only is one of the most famous pieces of ancient Greek art-the celebrated gold and ivory statuette of the Snake Goddess-almost certainly modern, but Minoan civilization as it has been popularly imagined is largely an invention of the early twentieth century. This is Kenneth Lapatin's startling conclusion in Mysteries of the Snake Goddess-a brilliant investigation into the true origins of the celebrated Bronze Age artifact, and into the fascinating world of archaeologists, adventurers, and artisans that converged in Crete at the turn of the twentieth century. Including characters from Sir Arthur Evans, legendary excavator of the Palace of Minos at Knossos, who was driven to discover a sophisticated early European civilization to rival that of the Orient, to his principal restorer Swiss painter Emil Gillieron, who out of handfuls of fragments fashioned a picture of Minoan life that conformed to contemporary taste, this is a riveting tale of archeological discovery.… (more)

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LibraryThing member IreneF

This is about much more than forged museum pieces. (We are belatedly recognizing the culpability of museums in archeological looting, so it's no surprise that institutional ability to avert ones eyes extends to more than just provenance.) Lapatin contends that much of what we think we know about

Minoan civilization is a product of wishful thinking on the part of archaeologists and popularizers.

As Winston Churchill said, "History is written by the victors." A review of European history in the first half of the 20th century exposes the intentional rewriting of history by the Nazis to bolster their racialist agenda. Happily the Nazis were defeated, but how much of history has been written--perhaps unintentionally--by intellectual victors?

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LibraryThing member JaneAnneShaw

A history of art book which reads more like a 'tec novel; it certainly makes you sit up & take more notice of what's in the world's premier museums, and how the artefacts got there ... AND if they're genuine. The story, too, of Arthur Evans' Cretan excavations.

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