302 cecily j. hilsdale
A history of Mediterranean visual culture: what constitutes
Mediterranean art and architecture?While the Parthenon and Persepolis sit at the center of the canon of ancient art, certain
areas and categories of visual culture are better defined as “Mediterranean” than by the
traditional disciplinary field designations. In the medieval Mediterranean, for example,
many works of art and architecture fail to fit neatly within art history’s sub-fields of
Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic or Islamic art. A history of medieval Mediterranean
visual culture attends to such works that are at odds with the taxonomic and teleolog-
ical framework of the discipline of art history in that they are frequently described as
“hybrid” or “syncretic” due to the difficulty in classifying them. In this regard, it is
instructive to briefly acknowledge the inherited institutional taxonomies of the disci-
pline. Robert Nelson argues that the main professional apparatuses of the discipline—
ranging from survey textbooks to the dissertation census to library call numbers—reveal
fundamental tensions in the relationship between the eastern and western Mediterranean,
that is, between Early Christian, Byzantine, Islamic art and Western European medie-
val art (Nelson, 1996 and 1997). Survey textbooks in particular point to the ambiva-
lent role of the eastern Mediterranean within the western art historical narrative. At
stake is the place and chronological sequence of Byzantine and Islamic art within the
larger western art historical survey; put another way, the space and time of the eastern
Mediterranean are at odds with traditional art historic periodization fundamentally
rooted in the unified historical progression of Hegelian dialectics.
Using the Mediterranean as an organizing principle is one way of thinking across
art history’s traditional sub-headings to think beyond periodization—that is, it pro-
vides one compelling way of moving away from teleology. The visual cultures of medi-
eval Sicily, Iberia, Cyprus and the Levant, for example, cannot be explained adequately
from the perspective of singular fields. To attempt to do so misses their logic entirely
as they are the products fundamentally of cultural encounter and hence in dialogue
both with local realities as well as more distant Mediterranean traditions. Without fit-
ting neatly within the teleological canon of art history, traditional survey textbooks
and courses position such Mediterranean traditions as mere adjuncts or digressions to
the main narrative of medieval art history. This same point generally holds true for
other periods of art history where a model of center and periphery governs the narra-
tive progression of modern art, privileging the Parisian avant-garde or New York
abstract expressionism, for example, at the expense of a broader contextualization of
various modernist traditions.
A dedicated history of Mediterranean visual culture would bring those objects of
analysis deemed more canonically peripheral due to their “Mediterraneanness” to its
core narrative. Such a survey of medieval Mediterranean art would likely showcase the
arts associated with the trilingual Norman court of Roger II in Sicily, perhaps featur-
ing Palermo’s Cappella Palatina on its cover to illustrate the possibility of fusing
diverse Mediterranean visual idioms in one monument (Figure 19.4).
The late-eleventh to early-twelfth-century royal chapel exemplifies a sort of visual
“trilingualism,” all in the service of proclaiming Norman rule in Sicily as vast and all
encompassing (Tronzo, 1997, Dittelbach, 2011). The chapel can thus be seen as a
profound statement of Roger II’s consolidation of power in Sicily in that it draws on
and imaginatively reconceptualizes pre-existing visual traditions of the conquered land.