The Cycladic figurines
Abstract white marble forms with folded arms and featureless faces.
Zde โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Jean Housen โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Jean Housen โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Jean Housen โ CC BY-SA 4.0
**A museum inside a Venetian castle, holding the figures that shaped modern art** โ at the top of the **Kastro**, Naxos's fortified quarter. The building is part of the visit: a Venetian-era **Jesuit school** within the castle walls, whose 19th-century pupils included the writer **Nikos Kazantzakis**. Its most important holding is the **Cycladic figurines**: white marble forms from the **third millennium BC** โ flattened, simplified bodies, arms folded across the chest, and faces with no features but a nose. They are older than Minoan civilisation itself. โ And to this day we do not know **what they were for**: gods, ancestors, grave goods? No texts, no explanation. โ But their abstract simplicity astonished 20th-century artists โ **Modigliani, Brรขncuศi and Moore** โ and influenced modern sculpture directly. There is also Mycenaean pottery and Hellenistic and Roman finds.
Abstract white marble forms with folded arms and featureless faces.
The Venetian building itself, its courtyard and stairs inside the castle.
Venetian lanes and carved coats of arms above the doors.
Kastro, Naxos Town, 84300 Naxos, Greece
**Europe's oldest abstract art โ and we do not know what it was for.** โ **What they are**: human forms carved from **white marble** in the Cyclades between about **3200 and 2000 BC** โ that is, **before** Minoan civilisation on Crete and a thousand years before Mycenae. The best-known type is a standing woman with **arms folded across the chest**, the head tilted slightly back, and **a smooth face with nothing on it but a nose**. โ **What we do not know**: **their function**. Most were found in **graves**, so they have been read as funerary companions, ancestors, deities or substitutes for people โ **and no text settles it**. โ **One fact changes how you look at them**: they were originally **painted** โ traces of pigment survive on eyes, hair and tattoos; so the abstract whiteness we admire is **the result of colour being lost**, not the sculptor's choice. โ **Their modern influence is real**: **Brรขncuศi, Modigliani and Moore** saw them in European museums in the early 20th century, and they directly pushed sculpture towards simplification and abstraction.
**The Venetian Catholic quarter inside the walls โ and it is still distinct from the Greek Naxos around it.** โ **The background**: after the Fourth Crusade the Venetian **Marco Sanudo** founded the Duchy of the Archipelago in **1207** with Naxos as its capital, **and built the Kastro**: a fortified quarter on the hilltop **for the ruling Catholic families** โ walls, towers and only three gates. โ **The population stayed divided for centuries**: **Catholics of Venetian descent inside the walls**, **Orthodox Greeks outside** in the lower town. โ **What you see today**: stone houses with tall doorways carrying **carved coats of arms** of Venetian families whose names are still known, a **Catholic cathedral**, the Jesuit school (today's museum), and the original **Trani gate**, still with its stone jamb. โ **This is rare in Greece**: a Latin Catholic community continuous for eight centuries โ and it still exists on Naxos, Tinos and Syros.
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