DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0092
THE PALACE
51
give an even surface, which was then covered with a smooth
coat of pure lime. For burnt lime was already known and
freely used, but only as plaster or cement, never as mortar
in laying up walls.1 On the inner walls this lime plaster
was often painted with frescoes — in black, white, red, yel-
low, and blue — and many fragments of these frescoes have
been found with their colors still fresh and bright. The
most notable fragment from the Tiryns palace represents a
bull coursing at full speed with a man apparently swinging
himself on to the animal's back and seizing him by the
horn,—a subject repeated with slight variation in the Bull
Hunt on one of the Vaphio cups. Another fragment (Fig.
13), belongs to a border which offers a remarkable parallel
to the design of the carved ceiling at Orchomenos.
The flooring of the palace is a concrete of lime and
Fig. 12. The Tiryns Bull (Fresco from Palace)
pebbles. In the more exposed places —as the men's court
and the outer propylaea — the pebbles so predominate as
1 "Only in aqueducts do the Greeks in early times seem to have used lime
mortar."— Dorpfeld, Tiryns, p. 255.
51
give an even surface, which was then covered with a smooth
coat of pure lime. For burnt lime was already known and
freely used, but only as plaster or cement, never as mortar
in laying up walls.1 On the inner walls this lime plaster
was often painted with frescoes — in black, white, red, yel-
low, and blue — and many fragments of these frescoes have
been found with their colors still fresh and bright. The
most notable fragment from the Tiryns palace represents a
bull coursing at full speed with a man apparently swinging
himself on to the animal's back and seizing him by the
horn,—a subject repeated with slight variation in the Bull
Hunt on one of the Vaphio cups. Another fragment (Fig.
13), belongs to a border which offers a remarkable parallel
to the design of the carved ceiling at Orchomenos.
The flooring of the palace is a concrete of lime and
Fig. 12. The Tiryns Bull (Fresco from Palace)
pebbles. In the more exposed places —as the men's court
and the outer propylaea — the pebbles so predominate as
1 "Only in aqueducts do the Greeks in early times seem to have used lime
mortar."— Dorpfeld, Tiryns, p. 255.