Painting into wet plaster
A fresco, from the Italian for “fresh”, is a painting made on lime plaster while it is still wet. The pigment soaks into the surface, and as the lime dries and hardens it locks the colour in. This is how the Minoans of Crete worked, and it sets their painting apart from that of Egyptian tomb painters, who painted on dry plaster with a binder. In Minoan fragments you can still see the marks of the method: thin grooves where a taut string was pressed into the soft plaster to lay out straight lines, and colour that goes into the surface instead of sitting on top. Painters had to work fast, section by section, before each patch dried, and they added some details afterwards on the dry wall.
Their colours came from minerals: red and yellow ochres, black from carbon, white from the lime itself, and a bright blue made from a copper silicate, the same artificial “Egyptian blue” used along the Nile. Green was usually a mix of blue and yellow. Like the Egyptians, Minoan painters followed a colour code for skin: men are painted reddish brown, women white.
Bulls, processions and a woman called La Parisienne
The frescoes decorated the halls, corridors and upper rooms of the palaces, above all Knossos. The most famous is the bull-leaping panel (about 1450-1400 BCE), with a charging bull and three young acrobats, one at the horns, one over its back, one behind. Other paintings showed long processions of men carrying vessels, crowds watching ceremonies, and groups of seated people drinking.
From one of those drinking scenes comes the best-known face of Minoan art: a young woman in profile, with a large dark eye, red lips and a curl falling onto her forehead, painted on a fragment just 20 cm high (about 1450-1350 BCE). When the French scholar Edmond Pottier saw her soon after the excavation, he said she looked like a fashionable woman of Paris, and the nickname “La Parisienne” stuck. She may be a priestess or a goddess taking part in a ritual; nobody knows.
How much of what you see is modern?
Quite a lot, sometimes. Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos from 1900, employed the Swiss artist Émile Gilliéron and later his son to turn heaps of painted fragments into complete pictures for display. The so-called Prince of the Lilies, a striding young man with a crown of lilies and peacock feathers, was put together by Gilliéron in 1905 from a few pieces: part of the crown, part of the torso, a thigh. No face was ever found, and some scholars doubt that the pieces even belong to the same figure. The restored picture is beautiful, but it is largely an early-twentieth-century idea of a Minoan king.
Other reconstructions have been revised. The Dolphin Fresco, two dolphins swimming among small fish, was found in 1900-1902 near the so-called Queen’s Megaron, where Evans placed it on a wall. According to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a different reading of the excavation records suggests that it decorated a floor on the upper storey instead. So when you look at a Minoan fresco in a museum, it is worth asking which parts are ancient. Usually you can tell: the original fragments are darker and uneven, the modern infill smooth and flat.
Akrotiri: a painted town under the ash
The best-preserved Aegean frescoes do not come from Crete at all. Akrotiri, a harbour town on the island of Thera (Santorini), was buried by a huge volcanic eruption, dated by radiocarbon to the late seventeenth century BCE and by archaeologists to a little later; the debate is still open. The inhabitants seem to have fled in time, because no bodies have been found. From 1967 the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos excavated houses standing two and three storeys high, with paintings still on their walls.
Their style is closely related to Crete’s, which is why they are often discussed as Minoan, but they show more of the world outside. In Room 2 of Building Delta, the Spring Fresco wraps three walls with red and yellow volcanic rocks, red lilies and swallows, without a single human figure. In Building Beta two young boys box, each with a single glove on the right hand, beside walls painted with antelopes. In the West House a long frieze shows a fleet of ships sailing between harbour towns. Elsewhere, young women gather crocuses and offer them to a seated female figure, often read as a goddess.
What were they for?
Frescoes cost time and skill, so they marked important rooms: reception halls, shrines, the upper floors where the owners lived. Many scenes seem connected with ritual, such as offerings, processions, gatherings in front of shrines and the crocus harvest; others celebrate nature and the sea. Because Linear A, the Minoan script, cannot be read, no caption explains them. What they share is a taste for movement: bodies twist, plants sway, waves curl, and the painters seem less interested in where things stand than in how they move.
Where to see them
The frescoes of Knossos are in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum on Crete, with copies on the walls of the palace itself. The Spring Fresco, the boxers and the West House paintings are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens; other paintings from Akrotiri are in the Museum of Prehistoric Thera on Santorini, and the site of Akrotiri can be visited under its protective roof. Check opening times with the Greek Ministry of Culture.
Sources
- Heraklion Archaeological Museum, “Bull-Leaping Fresco (Taureador Fresco)” (Τ14) and Neopalatial and Final Palatial galleries.
- Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Minoan Room catalogue: “The Dolphin Fresco”.
- A. Brysbaert, The Power of Technology in the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean: The Case of the Painted Plaster (2008).
- C. Doumas, The Wall-Paintings of Thera (1992).
- L. Morgan, “Approaches to painting” (2018).
- National Archaeological Museum, Athens, “Collection of Antiquities of Thera”.
