Ancient and Modern – 20 December 2008

The Today programme would call her iconic, but since she is a 16.1cm gold and ivory (‘chrys-elephantine’) statuette, it would not be saying much. She stands there, erect, shoulders back, thrusting forward impressive bare breasts (one nipple the tip of a golden nail), both hands holding snakes that, twined round her arms, stretch outwards from her, tongues flickering. The best-known of all the ancient Cretan snake goddesses, she has graced the covers of, and been reproduced in, a thousand books.

It is her face that has caught the imagination. With her pouting lips and deep-set eyes, she has been hailed as ‘charmingly serene’, ‘radiant’, ‘demure’, ‘expressive of individuality’ and ‘arresting’. ‘Rendered with a freedom and naturalness that are exceptional’ she ‘shows all the distinguishing features of Cretan art at its best’ and is a ‘unique’ masterpiece.

For Lacey D. Caskey, curator of the Classical Department at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, her acquisition was the ‘event of the year’ (the year was 1914). For Sir Arthur Evans, the man who excavated Knossos from 1900–1944, she was yet another piece in a jigsaw that would fulfil all his fantasies about the ancient civilisation he was to call Minoan Crete (after its legendary King Minos).

She is a fake. So are most of the other Cretan snake goddesses, not to mention the ivory Boy-gods associated by Evans with them (their ivory is no more than 500 years old). In his Mysteries of the Snake Goddess, the American archaeologist and art historian Kenneth Lapatin (associate curator at the Getty) reveals all in an investigation of which Inspector Morse would have been proud.

The starting point is that no one in 1914 had the remotest idea where the snake goddess had been found.