By the Dawn’s Early Light: Colour, Light and Liminality in the Throne Room at Knossos

Wall paintings first appear in the Final Neolithic and Early Minoan periods on Crete, developing into more abstract designs and technological complexity in the Middle Minoan period, and reaching their highpoint with the introduction of pictorial paintings in MM IIA (the beginning of the Neopalatial period). These Neopalatial pictorial frescoes seem to have been restricted to specific buildings, most notably elite buildings such as the famous 'palaces', Knossos in particular, as well as larher houses in towns such as those from Akrotiri on Thera. The use of natural light, either sunlight or moonlight via windows, doorways and partitions or firelight, would emphasise specific aspects of these paintings, suggesting that the experience of viewing them would not have been a static activity, but one that was temporally mutable. This paper will consider the location of these frescoes and the effect of forms of lighting on the perception of the viewer, as well as the interplay between colour and light and the changing relationship between the two depending on light sources and time of day.