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
8 - Designing a Visual Language in Norman Sicily: The Creation Sequence in the Mosaics of Palermo and Monreale
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
The ‘Paradigm’
The manner of how the story of Creation was depicted in Western medieval church decoration has been a point of concern since 1888, when Johann J. Tikkanen analysed the atrium mosaics of San Marco in Venice with reference to the so-called Cotton Genesis. The Cotton Genesis was a sumptuous early-Christian manuscript of the first Book of the Septuagint Bible, heavily damaged during a fire in 1731. The codex had some 360 pictures on 221 folios, which are today only partially known from fragments – a few watercolours and engravings – thanks to a formidable achievement of philological reconstruction (Fig. 8.1). In his major study of the manuscript, Kurt Weitzmann sharpened Tikkanen’s observations, and in doing so provided ‘a heavy superstructure of assumptions concerning the very origins of Christian art’.
Weitzmann thought that early-Christian illustrated manuscripts were the primary sources for much of the monumental art created during the Middle Ages, and that the Cotton Genesis played a principal role because it seemed to be the centre of a vast family of similar manuscripts. The Cotton Genesis became the ‘paradigm’, displacing the Vienna Genesis and the Ashburnham Pentateuch, which Weitzmann argued had little influence on the majority of medieval Genesis cycles. In other words, the Cotton Genesis was widely considered to be the closest derivation of an archetype believed to lie at the root of a stemma codicum of a central pictorial tradition. This Cotton Genesis ‘recension’ also encompassed two Creation sequences produced in Norman Sicily, one preserved in the Cappella Palatina in Palermo and the other in the nearby cathedral of Monreale. We must consider first the issues surrounding the identification of early visual models and their transmission before we can turn to the specific context that made these exceptional mosaic programmes possible.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Designing Norman SicilyMaterial Culture and Society, pp. 184 - 206Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020