If you are in the mood to dream along to images, then I definitely recommend looking at more examples of this art, which you can read about here. Themes include: blue monkeys; heraldic griffins flanking the throne; lots of lilies - even a lily prince; dolphins leaping above and below travelling boats; dancing women (whose hair flies out horizontally, probably from all that spinning!); underwater scenes.
"The art of the Minoans speak of a society of joyous disposition, in touch with their environment, and in awe of the logical order of the natural world. Above all, the unearthed artifacts reveal a people who had developed a high degree of self-respect and a keen eye for observing and adopting to their physical environment."
Below are the few images I selected, which was difficult given how many wonderful images there are. Please notice that there is a heart-shaped motif in the images below - it is Much Love Monday, after all!
Click for sources (all via wikipedia commons).
You may have noticed how much action is depicted in the images above (moving dolphins, running animals, travelling boats), and it is interesting to me how much those ancient peoples observed movement. I would have thought that action was a particular characteristic of our time (so much commuting, air travel, etc), but perhaps despite all that to-and-fro, we are more static than we think.
In any case, I was watching Robert Altman's The Company this weekend, and I was struck at how well dance lends itself to the camera. But why wouldn't it? - Dance is visual... And as we see in these frescoes, movement can be visual, too.
Imagine my delight then, when this morning, my internet wanderings brought me to the Paul Taylor Dance Company's 1977 "Images," described as such: "All two-dimensional friezes, human endeavour frozen in time, and oracular obsolescence. It carries the feel of pottery shards, the dust of the British Museum, the surprise of a fall through the shaft of a buried gravesite in Tuscany where the flashlight reveals a brilliantly hued mural left by [Minoans]," quoted here.
This is what the dance looks like (see here for better photos): a scene from one of the murals above, come to life!
