The Arab-Norman Art of Palermo

Sicily had been for over two centuries a land of Islam, ruled by Muslim emirs and filled with a Muslim, Arabic-speaking population and a flourishing Islamic culture, before it was conquered in the eleventh century by the Normans, the adventurer-knights from the north who made it a kingdom. The remarkable thing is what the Norman kings did with their inheritance. Instead of effacing the Islamic civilisation they had conquered, the kings of Sicily, above all Roger II and his successors in the twelfth century, embraced and patronised it: they kept Arabic as one of the languages of their court, their chancery and their coinage, employed Muslim officials, scholars (among them the geographer al-Idrisi), physicians and artists, lived in part in the luxurious manner of the Muslim East, and set the Arab craftsmen of the island to work for them. The result was the unique art known as Arab-Norman, in which Islamic, Byzantine Greek and Latin Western elements were fused as nowhere else. Its masterpieces survive in and around Palermo: above all the royal chapel, the Cappella Palatina, whose walls glitter with golden Byzantine mosaics but whose ceiling is a true Islamic muqarnas vault of carved and painted wood, hung with little scenes of courtly life; and the pleasure-palaces such as the Zisa, cool pavilions set amid gardens of citrus and running water in the manner of the palaces of the East. In these works the high craft of Muslim Sicily lived on, in the service of Christian kings, in one of the most striking meetings of civilisations in the medieval world. This scene depicts the Arab-Norman art of Palermo; in keeping with the project's ethics the historic figural mosaics are shown as the artistic record and any figure is anonymous and at a distance.