304 cecily j. hilsdale
intricately carved stalactite design, whose niches are filled with figures generally taken
to reference the “courtly princely cycle” of Islamic art including scenes of dancers and
musicians paired with beatific Arabic inscriptions proclaiming power, victory, mag-
nificence, and fortune. In the Cappella Palatina, the Islamic and Byzantine visual idi-
oms stand in for the local Greek- and Arabic-speaking communities the Normans
came to rule. The diverse Mediterranean visual traditions are combined here in Roger
II’s palace chapel to legitimate Norman sovereignty. This point is underscored by the
building’s pavement of opus sectile or inlaid marble. In many ways it provides the the-
matic organizing principle of the entire structure as it encompasses both the sanctuary
and the nave. A contemporary encomiast of Roger II made reference to the pave-
ment’s marble to praise the Norman ruler’s eternal vitality, drawing on the same
ecological metaphor Paul the Silentiary used for the marble revetment of Hagia
Sophia: “Adorned with pieces of marble colored like flowers, truly like a spring
meadow except for the fact that flowers wither and die, and this is a meadow that will
never wither but will last forever, preserving in itself an eternal spring” (cited in
Tronzo, 1997: 30). The eternal spring of the Cappella Palatina’s meadow of marble
proclaims the longevity of Roger’s sovereignty in Sicily, whose Greek and Arabic local
populations provide workmen and visual idioms for the architecture of his royal chapel
and by implication his reign.
With its wooden muqarnas ceiling, Byzantine mosaic work, and marble inlaid opus
sectile pavement, the Cappella Palatina combines local and more distant traditions
to create a kind of visual polyglot landscape proclaiming Norman rule in the
Mediterranean. In its visual diversity, the Cappella Palatina best encapsulates the need
to think about multiple political allegiances and artistic filiations when dealing with
Mediterranean visual culture. According to traditional art historical approaches, the
building is dismantled and its constitutive visual idioms are distributed throughout
different studies. The muqarnas ceiling typically features in studies of Islamic art,
where it might be relegated to a section on Islamic art outside the Dar al-Islam and
formally linked with the Alhambra in Granada or even the great mosque at Isfahan,
thus ahistorically linking Norman, Nasrid, and Savafid traditions on the basis of form
alone. Whereas the Cappella Palatina’s mosaics might feature in Byzantine surveys as
part of a discussion of Byzantine art in Italy or a more general study of Byzantium and
the West or even Byzantine art outside Byzantium. A history of Mediterranean visual
culture would treat the Cappella Palatina as the product of one integrated artistic cam-
paign and, like monographic studies on the building, would pursue the relationship
between the diverse parts of the building in relationship to the larger Norman agenda
in Sicily. Such a history might also position this celebrated royal palace church along-
side more modest and disparate examples of architecture on the island that draw on
Byzantine and other vernacular local traditions as well as Islamic artistic traditions and
monuments so as to flesh out the diversity of the island’s artistic heritage. It would
also bring into dialogue the figural and “portable” or “minor” arts as well as media
such as early Norman stuccos typically overshadowed by more deluxe media (Caskey,
2011). Like other aspects of Mediterranean visual culture, which are products of
contact zones or high levels of “connectivity,” the arts of medieval Sicily evoke
regional traditions as well as more widespread visual styles, techniques, and iconogra-
phies and certainly in the case of the Cappella Palatina also wider Mediterranean
agendas of sovereignty.