Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Map
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Story of Designing Norman Sicily
- 1 Roger II and Medieval Visual Culture
- 2 The Interplay of Media: Textile, Sculpture and Mosaic
- 3 ‘The True Nature of His Lands’: Strategic Information on Sicily in the Book of Roger
- 4 Patronage and Tradition in Textile Exchange and Use in the Early Norman South
- 5 Imperial Iconography on the Silver Ducalis: Cultural Appropriation in the Construction and Consolidation of Norman Royal Power
- 6 Sicily and England: Norman Transitions Compared
- 7 Beyond ‘Plan bénédictin’: Reconsidering Sicilian and Calabrian Cathedrals in the Age of the Norman County
- 8 Designing a Visual Language in Norman Sicily: The Creation Sequence in the Mosaics of Palermo and Monreale
- 9 Remembering, Illustrating, and Forgetting in the Register of Peter the Deacon
- Index
- Already Published
2 - The Interplay of Media: Textile, Sculpture and Mosaic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Map
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Story of Designing Norman Sicily
- 1 Roger II and Medieval Visual Culture
- 2 The Interplay of Media: Textile, Sculpture and Mosaic
- 3 ‘The True Nature of His Lands’: Strategic Information on Sicily in the Book of Roger
- 4 Patronage and Tradition in Textile Exchange and Use in the Early Norman South
- 5 Imperial Iconography on the Silver Ducalis: Cultural Appropriation in the Construction and Consolidation of Norman Royal Power
- 6 Sicily and England: Norman Transitions Compared
- 7 Beyond ‘Plan bénédictin’: Reconsidering Sicilian and Calabrian Cathedrals in the Age of the Norman County
- 8 Designing a Visual Language in Norman Sicily: The Creation Sequence in the Mosaics of Palermo and Monreale
- 9 Remembering, Illustrating, and Forgetting in the Register of Peter the Deacon
- Index
- Already Published
Summary
What I would like to offer in this chapter, with two cases briefly put, is the sketch of the contours of an object world – a manner of producing, using and thinking about things in twelfth-century Palermo, which cuts across the boundaries of media in a performative sense, in the sense of reaching out across space to create a form of enchainment. I have come to see this phenomenon as profoundly and synthetically visual in the multifariousness of its operations, in which one might discern the impress of reception in the very act of production on the part of a community of makers and users. As such it sets itself against our conventional modes of discourse, which are logocentric and rather dis-aggregating in orientation. Thus I believe they must be revised. The key is to go beyond the comfort zone of the parameters set by modes of analysis to which we have become inured.
My first case is one of the greatest works of the textile arts to have survived from the Middle Ages. It now graces the Treasury of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, having arrived there by means of a circuitous route of imperial inheritance (Fig. 2.1). Dürer even depicted it being worn, quite anachronistically, by Charlemagne himself. But its origin was actually in twelfth-century Palermo, with the first of the Norman kings to rule the island, Roger II. The textile was the king’s Mantle, a magnificent expanse of scarlet samite, embroidered with pearls and enlivened with gold thread. The Mantle was created in 1133–34, as is laid out in an inscription in Arabic along its hem, which reads:
Here is what was created in the princely treasury, filled with good fortune, illustration, majesty, perfection, longevity, superiority, welcome, prosperity, liberality, brightness, pride, beauty, the achievement of desires and hopes, the pleasure of days and nights, without cease or change, with glory, devotion, preservation, protection, chance, salvation, victory and capability, in the capital of Sicily, in the year 528 H. [1133–1134].
Insofar as I have been able to determine, the concept of intermedial performance has never been entertained by scholarship in the study of the Mantle, which has proceeded along essentially two lines.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Designing Norman SicilyMaterial Culture and Society, pp. 47 - 59Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020