Prince of the Lilies

The Prince of the Lilies is a Minoan relief fresco from the Bronze Age palace at Knossos on Crete, dated to around 1550 BC in the Neopalatial period. Rather than paint applied to wet plaster, the figure was built up in low relief in plaster before being painted, showing a single figure wearing an elaborate crown and a necklace strung with lilies; the figure exact identity is still disputed by scholars. Only nine fragments of the original were excavated in 1901, and the archaeologist Arthur Evans reconstructed them into a single standing Priest-King, a reconstruction modern scholars regard as considerably over confident, with more recent proposals reading the fragments as a boxer, an athlete, a priestess, a deity, or even parts of more than one figure. The restored original is held at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete, and a replica with an added floral background is displayed at the palace site at Knossos. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/