These attempts are perfected in the outlined figure of a plate from Praisos, which is certainly Cretan (Fig. [29]). The childishly disproportioned structure has now become a clear organism of genuine Greek stamp, full of excellent observation of nature; the ornamentally constrained picture becomes now a free version of a legend, which however cannot be interpreted with certainty, till the white object under the sea-monster has been explained. It is most likely that we may see in it the foot of a female figure filling the left half of the plate, perhaps Thetis, who escapes from the attacks of Peleus by changing into a fish. The interior incised lines in the body of the sea-monster are a novelty, which the ceramic art has developed
PLATE XV.
[Fig. 29]. HERAKLES AND SEA-MONSTER (?) FROM A CRETAN PLATE.
[Fig. 30]. ARGIVE KRATER WITH THE SIGNATURE OF ARISTONOTHOS: SEVENTH CENTURY.
independently ([p. 37]). But on the other hand the advance in drawing and the technical rendering of form, the outline of Peleus, the light colour of the woman, the reddish brown tint of the rider on the reverse, cannot be explained apart from the influence of free painting, whose oldest stages are stated to have been outlining with progressive drawing of interior details, monochromy (i.e. outline drawing with a filling of colour) and distinction of sex by colour. After an interval of several centuries wall-painting must have sprung up again and flourished in Crete, different to be sure in essentials from the Minoan, rather influenced by the East like the decorative art of the time. In spite of the tendency to represent painting as ‘invented’ in Greece, Greek tradition reluctantly admits that this art was indigenous and highly developed in Egypt long before.
The bloom of Cretan art seems not to have outlasted the 7th century. Finds give out, and tradition expressly testifies to the migration of Cretan sculptors to the Argolid, a district which also took over the inheritance of Cretan vase painting.