Quick Overview
The Cappella Palatina’s place within the history of art is unique for it represents the visual amalgamation of three distinct cultures. The chapel combines a Latin basilica plan with a Byzantine central plan where the domed sanctuary and the walls of the nave and aisles are covered with Byzantine mosaics, but the ceilings of the nave and aisles are distinctly Islamic.
The provenance of the craftsmen and artists who constructed and painted the spectacular ceilings has remained a question of speculation among scholars for more than a century and a half. Most contend the artists and craftsmen were imported from other areas of the Islamic world. Here the author questions long-accepted scholarly paradigms to consider the possibility that the central ceiling’s construction and its painting are Sicilian innovations that were fostered and developed while the island was under Islamic rule (ca. 831–1072).
The second issue explored by the author is the meaning of the ceiling’s construction and program of decoration, one that expresses the marvels and wonders—the ‘ajā’ib—that is integral to Islamic thought and philosophy. The paintings comprise a visual manifestation of the oral traditions of the ancient Middle East and of their increasingly written documentation that occurred in the early Islamic period. In the Cappella Palatina they constitute a continuation of imagery that was used in the Muslim palaces of Palermo. They celebrate the worldly authority and magnificence of a highly cultured court and the myriad pleasures and duties of this royal majlis, and by extension, the Islamic vision of the heavenly realm.
Here is a book for scholars in any discipline who aspire to question academic precedent and seek new methodology. The author takes a post-colonialist approach to considering a subject and encourages looking at things in new ways—of thinking creatively and outside the box—in ways not bound by the visionless acceptance of dependent thinking and professorial precedence.
The book begins by establishing the historic background, including political, social, and economic, leading to the construction and painting of the Cappella Palatina. Based on scientific analysis of the wood gleaned from conservation reports, the author, in contrast to other Islamic historians, determines that the ceiling is a technological innovation that could only have been created in Sicily where a natural resource, a particular wood, was plentiful and where a tradition of construction had developed during Islamic times.
Iconographic meaning and attribution are the central themes running throughout the extensive text of a sensitively designed book that reflects 11th/12th century Islamic book production. The author takes a thematic and conceptual—rather than a traditional linear—approach to discussion of the imagery. Nevertheless, careful drawings establish the location of the nearly 400 photographs, all of which more accurately capture the current color and dimensionality of the ceilings than other publications. The book concludes with an appendix of over 100 color photos of comparative Islamic and medieval works of art, an extensive bibliography, and index.
Tom Klobe is professor emeritus of Islamic and medieval art history and of courses in museum studies at the University of Hawai‘i.