so let's have a conversation here about the true wet fresco technique so far we've only seen dry fresco which is pigment on a wall and this is the first time where we take a big step in the western european art world so what's happening is we are applying pigment to wet plaster and as the plaster dries calcium carbonate is formed and the pigment gets sucked into the wall so the color doesn't just ride on top it gets sucked into the wall a thirty second to sixteenth and eighth of an inch depending on where we are in the world and when we're there this is a very long lasting and it holds its color obviously very well for centuries but it kind of has to be done by an expert because you can't make any changes if you make a mistake in a true wet fresco you've got to chip the wall out replaster it and start all over again and so that's what we see here on the right this stylized image of a minoan woman and uh this uh featuring of the female is an important part of the story as you'll see as we move forward so probably one of the most famous images from the minowin world is this bull leaping fresco all right bull leaping evidently this was some type of game that was played by the minowens and remember this is the region where the olympics are going to evolve and so you know this probably has some kind of a ritual uh spiritual nature to it in addition to just being sort of a life-threatening game so what the artist is showing you here is before during and after so this is a multiple narrative three different leapers and one bull okay so what happens is you run in you grab the bull by the horns now that is a idiom an expression in english to mean to take charge he grabbed the bull by the horns and then he's going to flip over and bounce off the bulls back and then land on the feet facing forward with hands up in the air like a 13 year old gymnast in the olympic games crazy right so you'll notice here that we've got what appears to be people with different skin tones and this is an interesting conversation but we know that here the fair skin refers to women and the dark skin refers to men remember we don't know a lot about why but they know from the attire that they're wearing that that is the case this border here could represent minowin shields so like let's say you have a spear and a shield but they have this really cool overlap pattern so this area where i'm indicating is where the fresco is missing and this is where it survives okay and several times through the course of art history we have times where so much is missing that the conservators will make decisions about restoration is sort of a case-by-case basis so pause the recording for a moment and write down the definition of dry fresco versus wet fresco how'd you do in just the simplest words a dry fresco paint on the wall true wet fresco paint on wet plaster becomes the wall and that's what we want you to hang on to so we not only see this bull leaping activity happen in a two-dimensional form here is a sculpture it's a little bronze and it's not in very good shape but it lets us know that this is not just a one-off this happens all the time so here is our bowl and then here is our bowl leaper now when was the last time in this class that you heard about women having any kind of agency at all because we have so little evidence of women from the ancient world and we know even less about their habits and their art making whenever we know something's going on with women women in a culture we're going to make a big deal about it and that certainly is the case here with the minowin world we know that there was a matrilineal line so that means that property could be passed on through the female line and that is a big deal because so often it's only the men are included in that story [Music] the other thing is that we do not see women doing daily life activities we don't see women and children we don't see women weaving or cooking we see them bull leaping we see them as we see here in this very famous sculpture called the snake goddess this is a restoration of a beautiful mural cycle of minowin women so something was going on here and it leads us to believe that women had an exceptional amount of power in the ancient world this snake goddess figure and this is the the primary example on the right it shows us a bunch of things it shows us how minou and women dressed interesting how they have a a bare breasted top that has long sleeves they have a corseted waist with this sort of apron like object that falls down over a series of ruffles or flounces on the skirt if we jump back for a moment and take a look at the bulleepers you see that they've got that same apron like device they're just missing the long skirt we see this more than once so here is another example not identical but similar and you notice that look at her eyes look at her facial expression she is fierce she's holding two snakes up in either hand and she has a cat on her head so any woman that wears a cat on her head is fierce in my book now when we oops sorry when we talk about her her physique we say that she has a wasp waste wasp meaning this wretched little insect if you've ever been stung by one you know how it's not fun do you see where the body joins there's just this little tiny tiny juncture i don't know if that's really a waste but you get the idea and so she's got you know traditional size shoulders and hips and this little tiny waist that is referred to as a wasp waist so this figure is made from a clay like uh material called fans it works a little bit differently than clay but it's really much more important to understand the iconography than it is the process reminding ourselves that crete is surrounded right here in this wonderful mediterranean sea that so much of the environment is impacted so much of the art is impacted by the environment and we see that here with these examples of what we call marine style marine style referring to the ocean so these people spent their lives around the shore on the shore the these are functional ceramics they would have been made for holding water oil storing grain but they were more than they needed to be right they didn't have to have these wonderful decorations on them and i just love this octopus first of all he's hilarious with his his googly eyes down here right and then look at all of his tentacles and how the tentacles curve to go around the curvature of the pot he's not flat and you can see that this is obviously a popular theme so that is something to keep in mind as we look at the contrast that we see there's lots of ceramic evidence from the minimum world it's hard to get rid of a pot you can break it into a thousand pieces but you can find those pieces and put them back together again another interesting object is this vessel that is not ceramic in fact it is carved from stone and it has a wonderful band of narrative around it it is quite small five inches made from uh steatite and has this wonderful relief carving and we don't know what's going on but people are singing and laughing and they're walking through the fields they're playing musical instruments and so scholars have called it the harvester vase for that reason it would not stand up on its own it has a little metal stand that it sits in today in the museum setting but i wanted to show show what it looked like when it was original and when you look at a close-up of this image especially the one in the center you notice that we get a sense of of animism of animation so this guy here is this guy there and do you see how he's larger he's pushed to the front he is in the foreground closest to us the viewer and he's holding this it's kind of like a tambourine-like device and he's singing and you know how when you sing you inhale his ribs are showing the other detail that you notice is that see all this stuff that looks like dirt that is gold so this entire band of the of the pot from here to here would have had like a pressed gold leaf or gold powder in it and when we do this roll out photo you can see the entire narrative the carving here was done through a technique we called using a bow drill now i know this picture is from ancient egypt i couldn't find one from the aegean so forgive me a bow drill has a wooden stick with some kind of a protection that's held in the hand of the user and then there's something in the bottom of that stick that is sharper than what you are carving you have a piece of wood with a leather strap on it that you wrap around the vertical and you saw it back and forth and it creates friction and that's how these incised line details were made so what happens to the minowins well it's disputed of course but they're probably run over by their inland colleagues the myceneans it was not a center of culture after 1400 but there's lots of ongoing discovery in this part of the world so we'll know more someday