The Sainsbury Exhibition Galleries at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford aren’t the largest space in the world, and on entry Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality seems a bit crowded. Keeping one eye on an ancient marble-and-plaster fragmented effigy of a human torso with a bull’s head, you have to work out which way to go in order to negotiate the opening items on display as your eyes adjust to the dim half-light. And then the penny drops. It’s quite a clever start to a show that leads visitors through the legend of the Minotaur, without which the various broken pots and crumbling frescos might seem little more than a dry exercise in the archaeological arrangement of three thousand years of history.
Each informs the other, but do children learn about the Greek myths in school anymore? I hope so. Almost the first exhibit is a cartoon-style video of the story of Theseus and the horrid creature – half-man and half-bull – that lurks at the centre of a fiendish maze on Crete from which anyone is yet to emerge alive. It’s a great tale, but a dark one too: boy meets girl; girl gives boy ball of string; boy slays nasty man-bull; boy saves hapless friends; boy takes girl home with him; boy dumps girl on way; boy forgets to send message; boy’s dad assumes worst; boy’s dad commits suicide; boy becomes king. It’s not exactly a narrative from which the hero emerges well, but at least his former interest marries up and becomes Mrs Dionysus instead.
It is, however, a legend that has captivated people, regardless of creed or culture, for at least three thousand years. One of its more recent devotees was Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941), who was Keeper of the Ashmolean from 1884 to 1908. Evans was a man of private means and so was able to base himself on Crete for considerable periods of time and self-fund the excavation of what he considered to be King Minos’s palace at Knossos. Only a Victorian would have had the confidence to commit funds and energy to the search for a mythical building, but commit he did. Not only that – and bizarre to modern ears – he also set about restoring parts of it to how he thought it might have looked millennia before.
And so here you’re not only engaging with the story of an ancient Greek myth, but also with Evans’s engagement with it – which was from time to time ham-fisted, to say the least. The whole thing therefore takes on an unnerving air, and in places it verges on the bewildering. A labyrinth pattern that predates the legend itself by a thousand years seems to be made up entirely of swastikas, but isn’t. Next to it is a design by Mark Wallinger, who is still with us, for a series of pictures on the London Underground: it looks very much like a human brain. What you see, then, you have been conditioned to see, and in the legend of the Minotaur in his lair much of what you know has probably been conditioned by Evans himself.
This parallel presentation pervades the whole show. Things that might seem dull at first glance (did I mention the broken pots?) take on an evocative quality when set in the context of their own time, of the Minotaur myth, and of Evans’s expositions. It is convincingly done, and if the first half of the exhibition was about meandering by choice, in the second half the labyrinth chooses you. Not that you notice it until you look up, where around the walls deep red pillars evoke the colonnades of Knossos as reimagined by Evans – each made of a single tree trunk. Below them outlines of right-angled turns and dead ends hang from the double-height ceiling, and subtly push the message home.
Bit by bit the curators wean you off Evans’s legacy and help you see for yourself the depth and wealth of the Minoan culture that both inspired the legend of the Minotaur and was itself inspired by it. Bulls feature prominently, but so also do many less bovine artefacts from the Ashmolean and elsewhere – most notably from Athens and Heraklion. They tease out a story that stands proud on its own, with perhaps little need of the embellishments of Evans’s theories and speculations. Nevertheless his legacy is hard to dismiss, and he has himself become part of the legend. His influence even extends to video games: an Assassin’s Creed Odyssey excerpt is spectacular – fantastical, compelling and littered with corpses.
There are two stories to this exhibition, then, or perhaps even three. The first is the legend of the Minotaur itself, which continues to fascinate and terrify even after all this time. The second is that of Sir Arthur Evans, bungling and brilliant, with his important if controversial excavation of Knossos and his interpretation of its secrets. The third is the one that perhaps I want to engage with least of all: Theseus in the labyrinth pursued by the beast, with all its metaphorical application to my own life as I stumble through my personal maze. Does the Minotaur presage the roaring lion of Compline, who “walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” – and if so, where is my saving piece of string secured, and to what, or to whom?
I mused on this deep matter as I ordered a cup of coffee in the rooftop restaurant afterwards, and began to pore over the exhibition catalogue – a doorstopper volume packed full of interesting information and photographs and edited by Dr Andrew Shapland, who rejoices, appropriately enough, in the title of “The Sir Arthur Evans Curator of Bronze Age and Classical Greece”. The Ashmolean marketing department is clearly also going all-out for this show, for when my cappuccino arrived I realised with a jolt that the chocolate sprinkled on its frothy top was in the pattern of – yes, you’ve guessed it – a labyrinth. I took up the teaspoon and stirred it into oblivion, watched from a menu by the Minotaur with his red, glowing eye.
Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 30 July.
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