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The Geometric style makes a virtue of the necessities of rude beginnings; out of the simple decorative material at its disposal, it creates a rich system. Angular patterns, rows of dots, strokes, ‘fish-bones,’ zig-zags, crosses, stars, hooked crosses, triangles, rhombi, hook maeanders, maeanders broken up in different ways, maeander systems, chequers, net patterns are most common; alongside of them are circles and rosettes neatly made with the compass. The wavy line, which like the snake edged with dots perhaps comes from Mycenean polyps, takes a second place; all other free ornamentation is eschewed; the place of continuous spirals is taken by circles connected by tangents. Thus the ornamentation appears to be steeped in mathematics, and the same is the case with the representation of living beings. Man and animal alike appear in stylized silhouettes, which bring the various parts of the body into the simplest possible scheme, and set them off sharply against one another. Thus the human breast appears as an inverted triangle and is shown frontally, but the legs and head are in profile. The head, which is only emancipated from the silhouette style in the succeeding period, already often has a space reserved in it to indicate the eye. As a rule the human body is represented naked, while towards the end of the period, the instances of clothing, especially of women, become more numerous. There has been division of opinion as to whether this nudity reproduces actual life. That is certainly not the case. “This is the nudity of the primitive artist, of the abstract linear style. It is not man as he actually is, but the concept ‘man’ which is to be rendered, and clothes are no part of this concept.” (Furtwängler). These oldest Greek representations of man are not, properly speaking, reproductions of nature, but a kind of mathematical formulæ;, which gradually in the course of centuries of fresh observation of