s believed to have taken place in the palace's Central Court which measured 160 feet by 90 feet. This fresco was first uncovered by archaeologist Arthur Evans (the main excavator and 'discoverer' of Minoan civilization) in the first decade of the twentieth century. The fresco is currently at the museum in Heraklion, the town nearest the site of the palace.
The "Bull Leaping" fresco (sometimes called the "Toreador Fresco") is small, measuring only 24 1/2 inches from its base to the top of the upper frame. The work is painted in true fresco technique which means that the pigments were painted directly onto the wet plaster of the walls. No medium except water was used, meaning the binding of color to surface relied entirely on the paints blending with the wet plaster. Because the plaster dries fast "fresco painting is always a rapid process."4 This process guaranteed some of the spontaneity found in this and other Minoan fresco painting. The Minoans employed six basic colors in their frescoes: black, white, red, yellow, blue, and green.
The fresco shows three human beings and a bull. At the animal's head a girl appears to grasp the horns of the bull preparing to do a backward leap over its back. At the center of the bull, a boy, hands grasping the bull's sides and legs over his head, prepares to make the backward leap off the bull. At the bull's tail another girl stands with her arms outstretched. Higgins cautions the reader that the Minoan frescoes survive only in fragments which have been heavily restored, "but not always accurately", with the addition of intervening parts of the paintings.5 But it is generally agreed that the subject of the bull leaping is shown here in a time-lapse manner, showing the three stages of the performance. Though it is also very possible that the subject is just what is depicted, with three acrobats involved in the performance at once. The three figures are tall and slim and naked exc...