Controversies of the ‘Ladies in Blue’ fresco

While the bright blue and yellow colors are beautiful, the fresco is almost entirely a restoration. Parts of their jackets, arms, and hands are original fragments, and therefore it was possible to restorate these parts almost true to the original. But if you look at the original fragments, you can see that they do not include the heads and hair of the women. The heads and hair are all the imagination of the restorer - just like the composition of the three women and the position of their arms and hands.

The restorer’s imagination was based on the artwork styles of other frescoes. For this restoration, the restorer used the ‘Cupbearer’ fresco (Fig. 6) (ca. 1450-1400 BC). These frescoes are almost never from the exact same period and area. It makes them problematic to use as examples, but sometimes there is no better way to restore such frescoes. Immerwahr, S.A. (2005). "Left or Right? A Study of Hands and Feet.", British School at Athens Studies 13: 180. As spectators, we have to keep in mind that when looking into specific aspects of the fresco during this tour, we do not know what the original looked like exactly , especially the minute details.

Not only the restorer, but the actual ancient artist also used other frescoes as an example. Minoan artists probably built upon a long tradition of developed memory images and formulas of figurines passed on by their predecessors. Sometimes even mistakes from earlier frescoes were copied by the artists. Can you find mistakes in this fresco?Immerwahr, S.A. (2005). "Left or Right? A Study of Hands and Feet.", British School at Athens Studies 13: 173-174, 183. We will show them in the next step!

If you are interested in a comparison with other Late Bronze Age frescoes, check out the long read below!