Minoan Artists in Egypt
Transcript
Sara Cole: This particular fresco shows a scene of what we call bull-leaping.
Female Narrator: Sara Cole is Curatorial Assistant at the Getty Villa, and co-curator of this exhibition.
Sara Cole: So what we're seeing is a group of men with long hair and kilts approaching the bull, grasping it by the horns, and then somersaulting over its back. And the scene is taking place against a maze pattern background. And to the sides of the scene we can see a sandy and rocky landscape, and then the scene is bordered along the bottom by the stylized rosette pattern. Bull-leaping is a theme that we know of from the art of Minoan Crete.
Female Narrator: Cole says the maze background signals a connection to Minoan palaces, although the fresco was painted within an Egyptian palace setting.
Sara Cole: Perhaps the artist who executed it understood that this was a type of scene associated with palaces and so it was appropriate to show that type of scene in the pharaoh’s palace in Egypt. The pharaoh may have chosen this particular type of scene in order to signal his cosmopolitanism and his connection with the palaces of other civilizations in the region.
The artists who made this fresco used a particularly Aegean technique in which they applied layers of lime plaster to the wall and then applied the pigments to the plaster while it was still wet.
Female Narrator: This meant sections of vibrant colors, instead of flaking off over time, survive to this day. The technique was so specific to the Aegean that scholars don’t think Egyptian artists could have learned it from just observing Minoan frescoes; instead, this fresco is likely evidence that Aegean artisans travelled to and worked in Egypt.