Daedalus appears in numerous places within Greek myth, but it seems that his relationship with his labyrinth and the Minotaur is the most famous. Anywhere Daedalus is mentioned, he is always portrayed as being a genius and a master architect. In fact, Minos finds Daedalus by assuming the only one who could solve a certain cunning problem is Daedalus.
Where Daedalus is first mentioned is with the beginnings of the Minotaur. When Minos' wife Pasiphae falls in love with a magnificent bull (due to a curse given by the god Poseidon), Daedalus devises a way for her to satisfy her passions. He constructs a hollow wooden cow covered with cowhide for Pasiphae to hide in and allow the bull to mount. Pasiphae then conceives son: the Minotaur. Daedalus is then instructed by Minos to create a lair for this creature, and so he designs a complex maze that is known as the labyrinth.
When Theseus arrives to slay the Minotaur, Minos' daughter Ariadne pleads with Daedalus to help save Theseus. He tells Ariadne to give Theseus a ball of string that he can use to tie one end to the door, and unravel it to show him the path back. After Theseus' success, Minos imprisons Daedalus and his son Icarus within the labyrinth. Minos knows that the labyrinth is so complex, that even its builder cannot escape. But Daedalus finds feathers (from fowl the Minotaur had previously dined upon) and attaches them to his and Icarus' arms with some kind of glue. They fly out of the labyrinth over the sea. Daedalus warns Icarus about flying too close to the sun lest the glue melt, but as a youth Icarus flies higher and higher. Finally, he gets too close to the sun and his feathers fall off, then he drops into the sea and is consumed by the waves. This is thereafter called the Icarian Sea. Daedalus flies safely to Sicily where he was received warmly by the king there, but is distraught over the loss of his son.
The great hero Heracles finds Icarus' body and takes him to an island (that is called Icaria thereafter) and buries him there. Daedalus, upon hearing this, erects a life-sized statue of Heracles in honor of the great deed Heracles did for Daedalus.
Minos learns of Daedalus' escape and mounts a great search for him. He plans to find Daedalus by devising a difficult puzzle and offers a great reward to whoever solves it. Minos expects Daedalus to not be able to resist and thus whoever solves it must be Daedalus, since none other has the genius. The problem was to thread through a spiral shell of some great complexity. Sure enough, Daedalus tells the Sicilian king how to solve this problem: drill a small hole in one end and allow an ant that has the thread tied around it to walk through the passages of the shell. Minos travels to Sicily to take Daedalus back for more punishment. However, Daedalus devises a clever trap where when Minos is having a bath in the Sicilian king's palace, boiling water (or oil) is poured on him and Minos is thus slain.
- (Greek: "Cunningly Wrought"), mythical Greek architect and sculptor, who was said to have built, among other things, the paradigmatic Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete. Daedalus fell out of favour with Minos and was imprisoned; he fashioned wings of wax and feathers for himself and for his son Icarus and escaped to Sicily. Icarus, however, flew too near the Sun, and his wings melted; he fell into the sea and drowned. The island on which his body was washed ashore was later named Icaria.
Icarus in Greek mythology, son of the inventor Daedalus who perished by flying too near the Sun with waxen wings.
Daedalic sculpture type of sculpture attributed to a legendary Greek artist, Daedalus, who is connected in legend both to Bronze Age Crete and to the earliest period of Archaic sculpture in post-Bronze Age Greece. The legends about Daedalus recognize him both as a man and as a mythical embodiment. The writer Pausanias thought that wooden images were referred to as daidala even before Daedalus' time. Daedalic sculpture reveals Eastern influences, known as Orientalizing in Greek art. Orientalizing is particularly noticeable in the head seen from the front; it resembles an Eastern head, with wiglike hair, but is more angular, having a triangular face, large eyes, and a prominent nose. The female body is rather flatly geometric, with high waist and formless drapery. Early sculpture exhibiting these attributes is known as Daedalic; it was used for figurines, on clay plaques, and in relief decorations on vases. It seems to have had a marked influence in the Peloponnese, Dorian Crete, and Rhodes.
Minotaur Greek MINOTAUROS ("Minos' Bull"), in Greek mythology, a fabulous monster of Crete that had the body of a man and the head of a bull. It was the offspring of Pasiphae, the wife of Minos (q.v.), and a snow-white bull sent to Minos by the god Poseidon for sacrifice. Minos, instead of sacrificing it, kept it alive; Poseidon as a punishment made Pasiphae fall in love with it. Her child by the bull was shut up in the Labyrinth created for Minos by Daedalus.
The History of Western Sculpture: Ancient Greek: THE ORIENTALIZING PERIOD Sculpture of the Orientalizing period was profoundly affected by technical and stylistic influences from the East. In about 700 BC, the Greeks learned from their Eastern neighbours how to use molds to mass-produce clay relief plaques. Widely adopted, this technique helped to establish in Greece a stereotyped convention for figure representation, even in freestanding, unmolded sculptures; and a strong Eastern stylistic influence ensured that the convention was Oriental in flavour--in most cases a frontal pose with stiff patterned hair and drapery rendered in a strictly decorative manner. The adoption of this convention, which has come to be known as Daedalic style (after Daedalus, the legendary craftsman of Crete, where the style especially flourished), put an end to the development of naturalism and freedom in miniature sculptures that had shown promise in the Geometric period, and eventually became representative of even major Greek sculpture in the mid-7th century BC.
Ancient European Religions: Greek religion: BELIEFS, PRACTICES, AND INSTITUTIONS: Religious art and iconography. Art often portrays incidents relevant to the study of Greek religion, but frequently essential information is missing. On a well-known sarcophagus from Ay’as Tri‡dhos in Crete, for example, a priestess dressed in a skin skirt assists at a sacrifice, flanked by wreathed axes on which squat birds. The significance of the scene has been much discussed. The birds have been regarded as epiphanies of deities, giving sacral meaning to the transformations in Homer. Again, since goddesses appear to preponderate in Minoan-Mycenaean art, while male deities are represented on an inferior scale, this has been thought to reflect the general superiority of goddesses in many parts of Greece. In the earliest period, terra-cotta statuettes of deities were small and crude, while the old cult images were made of wood and commonly attributed to Daedalus. When artists turned to bronze and marble, they depicted the anthropomorphic deities as idealized human beings. The skill of the Greek sculptor reached an almost unparalleled height in the new temples on the Acropolis of Athens; but while high attainment in the visual arts indicates the presence of a high level of aesthetic consciousness, it would be hazardous to conclude that it necessarily accompanied a profound religious experience. The human form idealized was still used for portraying the gods, but only a brief step was needed to produce an art in which the human form was idealized for its own sake. The growth and decline of religions may be matched by the growth and decline of their art, and works of high artistic quality may inspire, and be inspired by, profound religious emotions; but, as the continued worship of the old wooden aniconic statue of Athena, mentioned above, indicates, it is often the antiquity of a cult object that inspires the awe that surrounds it.
Labyrinth- also called MAZE, system of intricate passageways and blind alleys. "Labyrinth" was the name given by the ancient Greeks and Romans to buildings, entirely or partly subterranean, containing a number of chambers and passages that rendered egress difficult. Later, especially from the European Renaissance onward, the labyrinth or maze occurred in formal gardens, consisting of intricate paths separated by high hedges.
- in Greek mythology, son of the inventor Daedalus who perished by flying too near the Sun with waxen wings. See Daedalus.
Icarus asteroid that has a more eccentric orbit and also approaches
nearer the Sun (within 30 million km [19 million miles]) than does any
other known body in the solar system except comets. It was discovered in
1949 by Walter Baade of the Hale Observatories (now Palomar Observatory),
California. Its orbit extends from beyond Mars to within that of Mercury;
it can approach within 6.4 million km of the Earth. In June 1968 Icarus,
the first asteroid to be examined by radar, proved to have a diameter of
about 0.8 km, considerably smaller than previous estimates, and a rotation
period of about 2.5 hours.