The "Mash-Up" Church of Monreale

Moving from the Greeks of the 5th Century BC, we now have an interlude to visit the great buildings of Norman Sicily of the 12th Century AD. The Normans, the French descendants of the Vikings, took advantage of the power vacuum in the Mediterranean at the time and established themselves in Sicily. The Norman kings built this church about 12 km south of central Palermo high in the hills. I have to admit that on this day, our guides were completely incomprehensible too me as they spoke for 30 minutes at a time in rapid Italian. I got about 10% of it and the rest I just dozed off. The study of Byzantine art means lots of mosaics, flat figures and scenes of Jesus and whatever rules co-mingling to indicate church and state head being one and the same. I think that's the gist, but I might be wrong as I kind of zoned out during this part of Art History class.

You walk into Monreale and are taken by the sight of Christ as pantokrator, ruler and judge of Heaven and Earth. This is clearly a Byzantine form of art, but it is place in an semi-dome apse at the end of the church. Traditional Byzantine churches have hemispherical domes at the center of the building. This is also a step away from the Greek and Roman worlds where temples were built to worship in a monastic way, whereas this is the glorification of monarchs.

The layout of the church, is a large cross, with a long nave and apse along the longitudinal axis. In addition, the nave as corridors to the side of the central seating area.

The church at Monreale, unlike many churches of the time that were created and finished over long periods of time, was erected and decorated in a short span of time, about a decade. The Norman kings, used Islamic workers who put their own touches on the churches with their amazing geometric mosaics.

So, we have a Christian church, with Byzantine art, church/state overtones and iconography, built and decorated with Islamic details. Mash-up.

Upon closer inspection, you can see the amount of labor done by the the workers. These tilings aren't perfect in the least. No mechanized stone cutting here. Each piece was cut and placed by hand.

Being a Geometry teacher, the mosaics and tilings were most interesting to me.

I want to say that each and everyone of them was different, but I didn't actually look closely enough. The general effect was what we call in Art History class, "spallodire", or "WOW."