306 cecily j. hilsdale
that creatively adapted a wide range of artistic sources, both local and more distant.
Today scholars recognize Crusader Art as a dialogue among Byzantine, European,
and Islamic powers and artistic traditions and also simultaneously embedded within
the entangled agendas of the diverse local and Christian and Muslim communities of
the Levant across confessional and cultural lines. No longer understood as a strictly
European colonial endeavor, the visual culture associated with such centers such as
Acre or Jerusalem or throughout the countryside of the Levant is now seen funda-
mentally as a manifestation of cultural encounter. Rather than seeking to establish the
origins and training of the artists working in the eastern Mediterranean at the time of
the Crusades, the varied arts of the Levant creatively negotiate relations among local
communities in dialogue with pan-Mediterranean traditions. It is precisely this dia-
logue between the micro- and macro-level of artistic production that resonates for a
history of Mediterranean visual cultures. While some scholars have called into ques-
tion the whole category of “Crusader Art”, seeing it as inextricably linked to the
colonial endeavor, if we speak of Crusader Art as a Mediterranean art, we are invoking
a dialogue between local traditions and technologies of both varied indigenous
Christian and Muslim communities and more distant artistic and political centers.
A question of legibility lies at the heart of this discussion. Much of the scholarship
on Crusader Art focuses on determining the origins and training of the artists involved
and identifying their source material. Such goals certainly relate to the disciplinary
framework of art history and the desire to fit such visual culture into some sort of
classificatory framework. In contradistinction to this methodology, those arts that
resist east–west categorization are often described as a Mediterranean visual koine or
artistic lingua franca where the seamless integration of disparate elements results in a
wholly different original with indistinct components (Belting, 1978 and 1982). The
lingua franca model describes a thorough blending of visual referents that is common
in arts of the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, especially icons, where it is often
virtually impossible to localize a precise place of production. Such a model provides a
compelling explanatory model for many aspects of visual culture produced through-
out the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century in that it accounts for those aspects
that have received little attention due to their “hybrid” nature such as the rich corpus
of Italo–Byzantine icons. But it does not provide an explanatory model for all the arts
of the Mediterranean. For one, it stands in contrast to something like the Cappella
Palatina in Palermo where the different visual components—Western, Byzantine,
Islamic—were meant to be recognizable as distinct and separate artistic traditions.
The legible combination of such different elements—and to some eyes jarring con-
trast of difference—was part of its logic to index Norman sovereignty in Sicily. The
visual mixing at the Cappella Palatina thus should not be understood as a patois but a
clear mapping of distinct artistic traditions, again aimed at underscoring the relatively
new Mediterranean kingdom of Roger II.
Significantly, both these ways of describing a Mediterranean visual culture—that is
a seamless fusing of different elements into an artistic lingua franca or a selective
combination of those elements that keeps their lines of difference discrete—are pred-
icated on linguistic models. The artistic lingua franca derives from a linguistic reduc-
tion of vocabulary to the most common elements so as to be understood by merchants
across cultures. Such a simplification of elements creates a common koine. The idea of
Roger II’s power being cast in visual terms of “trilingualism” of three distinct