A photomontage of a preserved fresco painting of the ‘Mycenaean Lady’ from the Acropolis of Mycenae.13th c.BCE. (Archaeological Museum of Athens, Greece)

1. The famous ‘Mycenaean Lady’ is the most emblematic representation of a female figure in all Mycenaean art and essentially summarizes and embodies all that we know about the aesthetic ideal of beauty in her time. Her identity, however, remains ambiguous: holding a double necklace in one hand, it is not clear whether she is the mortal offering it to the divinity or if she is the goddess herself receiving it. Perhaps the secret of her identity lies in the smile dawning on her lips, expressing her satisfaction at the beautiful gift she receives, as she looks at it intently with half-closed eyes.
The Mycenaeans visualized their gods in human form, they created them“ in image and in likeness”, and placed them in a supernatural, idyllic world, where they were served by fantastic beings. The Linear B tablets feature a Mycenaean pantheon with numerous divinities and suggest the existence of a complex mythological system, which unfortunately eludes us…In Mycenaean religious iconography, two important paradoxes are observed: on the one hand, the scarcity of representations of male gods, and on the other the ambiguity in rendering female goddesses and priestesses or adorants, for whom essentially the same aesthetic model is employed. This second observation leads to the thought that the imaginary and the real world are intertwined, rather intentionally, in order to help worshippers approach, if only just conventionally, the divinity and to create the impression of the possibility of coexistence.

2. The nature of beauty is a perennial question in philosophy, having its western origins in Plato’s dialogues, notably the Symposium. Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in the middle ages all held that beauty existed outside a person’s mind, making it objective. People had to discover the nature of beauty through knowledge and extramental reality. In the modern period, the focus shifted inward, and people became their own standard of whether something was beautiful. “If we treat beauty as a property of objects apart from subjects, we seem to omit the transport of soul, or at any rate the pleasure, with which we associate beauty.” - C.Sartwell (303)
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1 Sartwell C. (2017) Entanglements: A System of Philosophy, (part of SUNY series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought)
https://aestheticsresearch.com/2022/02/11/beauty-objective-or-subjective
2 Lagogianni-Georgakarakos, M. (ed), 2018. The Countless Aspects of Beauty in Ancient Art. Exhibition Catalogue. National Archaeological Museum - Athens.