ABSTRACT
Apart from Tuscany, and especially Florence, in the popular imagination the Renaissance is most associated with painting, and especially fresco cycles. If the Etruscan origins of Tuscany are evident, from etymology through landscape up to culture, painting and frescoes directly connect back to Minoan Crete. In contrast to all other civilisations, including Greece, ‘painting on the flat, as opposed to vase painting, is the most precious gift which Cretan art has left us’ (Glotz 1976[1925]: 309).71 Cretan artists had ‘an exceptional gift for the pictorial’, and it manifested particularly in a genial Cretan invention: ‘painting in fresco on the wet stucco’ (Ibid.). As the new technique required ‘rapid execution’ with ‘bold, dashing and exuberant’ strokes, it was ‘impossible to bind it’ with ‘academic formulas’, enabling each artist ‘to put his whole personality into work’, resulting in an art which was ‘full of charm’ (Ibid.). All around the Mediterranean, including Egypt, in terms of mural painting ‘[e]verything comes from Crete – technique, style, and often subject’ (Ibid.: 314).72
