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Looking Carefully, Describing, and Analyzing

It is incredible how stylistic conventions change from civilization to civilization: in relatively the same periods, art was flourishing in different places in entirely different ways. Produced contemporaneously, the bull-leaping fresco at the palace of Knossos couldn’t be any different than the one found in the tomb of Nebamun in Thebes. In both cases, only fragments of the entire pieces have survived, but from what we have, we may draw conclusions.
The subject of the former is the ceremonial ritual of bull-leaping. A young man is shown in the air, having, it seems, grasped the bull’s horns and vaulted over its back in a perilous and extremely difficult acrobatic maneuver. The fresco in Nebamun’s tomb shows four noblewomen watching and apparently participating in a musicale and dance where two nimble and almost nude dancing girls perform at a banquet. At the death of Nebamun, her family must have eaten a ceremonial meal at his tomb, and would return once a year to partake in a commemorative banquet celebrating the communion of the living with the dead. This fresco represents just such a funerary feast, with an ample supply of wine jars at the right.
Liveliness and spontaneity characterize the bull-leaping fresco at Knossos; the young women are painted with white skin and the young men with dark skin, making it easier to distinguish between the sexes, given the fact that the portrayal of figures during this period tended to be very feminine. The bull was brilliantly portrayed in all its power due to the artist’s elongation of the animal’s shape and the use of sweeping lines to form a funnel of energy, beginning at the very narrow hindquarters of the bull and culminating in its large, sharp horns, and galloping forelegs. The human figures have also a very stylized shape, portrayed with pinched waists, long limbs, highly animated, and with very long, curly hair. They were depicted in profile, the same as in their Egyptian counterparts, but the elegance of these figures with their proud and self-confident bearing distinguishes them from their contemporaries of other cultures.
In the fresco of Nebamun we can represents the new art that surged in the New Kingdom. The Egyptians during that area certainly went back to conventional portrayal of figures, but some of them assumed a less schematized stance and favored liveliness over conceptual representation of the human body. The overlapping of the dancer’s figures, their facing in opposite directions, and their rather complicated twists were carefully and accurately observed and executed, and the result is a pleasing intertwined motif. Contrary to Minoan art, Egyptian artists represented everyone as having the same color of skin. The profile view of the dancers is consistent with their lower stature in the Egyptian hierarchy. The eyes were, like in the bull-leaping fresco oversized and emphasized. The composite view was reserved for Nebamun and his family and of the four seated women, only two are in profile; the others stare at the viewer right in the face a rarely attempted frontal pose. The artist gave the figures the appearance of dancing by loosely arranging the stands of hair, as if they were moving. The informality viewed in this fresco represents a relaxation from the Old Kingdom’s strict canon oh human representation. This fresco also attests to the wealth of the Egyptian nobility and their luxurious way of life.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101600545.html