The Kingdom in the Sun (16 page)

'Thus,' concludes Archbishop Romuald of Salerno, 'Roger, most powerful of Kings, having crushed and destroyed his enemies and betrayers, returned in glory and triumph to Sicily, and held his Kingdom in perfect peace and tranquillity.' It sounds like the ending of a fairy story, and Roger certainly had every cause for satisfaction as he sailed for home. Yet he cannot have been happy. As his conduct at Troia and Bari had shown, he was sick to the heart. The past few years had left him with a legacy of bitterness and disillusion which he would never quite overcome. His generosity had been too often abused, his trust too often betrayed, the great plans he cherished for his Kingdom too often set at nought by the selfish ambitions of the Norman baronage. In Sicily, where there were no great fiefs, men of three religions and four races were living happily at peace and in steadily increasing prosperity; in South Italy he had achieved nothing; his vassals had thwarted him at every turn. He had begun to hate the peninsula. In future he would leave its affairs as far as possible to his sons and devote his attention, as he had never been allowed to devote it in the past, to his island realm.

When, in January 1072, Robert Guiscard and his brother had battered their way into Saracen Palermo, one of their first decisions had been to move the administrative centre of the capital. The Emirs had always ruled from their palace in the district of Al-Khalesa, down by the sea; but they had also maintained an old castle on the higher ground a mile and a half to the west, which had been built some two centuries before to protect the landward approaches. This castle was cooler, quieter, remoter from all the dirt and hubbub of the city; it was also more commandingly situated and more easily defensible in the event of trouble. To the new conquerors that last point was the vital one; no Norman ever felt truly at ease living somewhere that he could not adequately defend in an emergency. Thus the old Saracen fortress, repaired and strengthened, became the seat of the Norman government and, in due course, the palace of the Great Count of Sicily.

Over the years, Roger I and his son had put in hand various far-reaching structural alterations, until little of the original Saracen fabric was left. By
1140
the building was in essence a Norman palace; and though much has inevitably been added during the past eight centuries—
cortiles
and colonnades, loggias and baroque facades, to say nothing of all the ponderous trappings of the Sicilian parliament—much, too, still unmistakably proclaims its Norman origins. The
Torre Pisana,
in particular, at the north end—otherwise known as the Torre di Santa Ninfa after an early Palermitan virgin whose immoderate admiration of the Christian martyrs led her to follow their example—still stands much as Roger must have known it. Even the copper dome of the local observatory, perched somewhat insensitively on its roof, proves less offensive than one might expect. The crowning of a romanesque tower with a bulbously Islamic cupola is a characteristic tendency of Norman-Sicilian architecture, and the old Palermitan astronomers, whether they recognised the fact or not, were merely continuing the old tradition. It is somehow gratifying to learn that it was from this observatory, on the first evening of the nineteenth century, that they discovered the first and largest of the asteroids and named it Ceres, after the patron goddess of the island.

Yet the
Palazzo Reale,
as it is still called, ultimately captures neither the eye nor the imagination. As an ensemble, it is an architectural hotch-potch which fails to impose any overriding personality; even the
Torre Pisana
seems stilted and uninspired, so that the casual visitor might be forgiven for turning away with a shrug to the more immediately photogenic attractions of
S.
Giovanni degli Eremiti down the road. Forgiven, but pitied none the less; for in doing so he would unwittingly have deprived himself of one of the greatest excitements that Sicily, and perhaps Europe, has to offer him—his first, unsuspecting discovery of the Palatine Chapel.

As early as
1129,
before he became King, Roger had begun to build his own personal chapel on the first floor of his palace, overlooking the inner courtyard. Work on it had been slow, largely because his problems on the mainland allowed him only a few months of each year in which to superintend building operations. But at last, in the spring of 1140, though still unfinished, the chapel was ready to enter service; and on Palm Sunday,
28
April, in the presence of the King and all his leading Sicilian clergy of both the Greek and Latin rites, it was consecrated, dedicated to St Peter, and formally granted the privileges appropriate to its palatine status.

Roger had no more love for Byzantium than had any other member of his family; but both the manner of his upbringing and the oriental atmosphere in which he lived inclined him towards the Byzantine concept of monarchy—a mystically-tinged absolutism in which the monarch, as God's viceroy, lived remote and elevated from his subjects, in a magnificence that reflected his intermediate position between earth and heaven. The art of Norman Sicily, now suddenly bursting into flower, was therefore above all a palace art; and it is fitting that its brightest jewel—
le plus surprenant bijou religieux rive par la pensee humaine,
as Maupassant was to describe it
¹
seven and a half centuries later—should be the Palatine Chapel at Palermo.
²
It is in this building, with more stunning effect than anywhere else in Sicily, that we see the Siculo-Norman political miracle given visual expression—a seemingly effortless fusion of all that is most brilliant in the Latin, Byzantine and Islamic traditions into a single, harmonious masterpiece.

Its form is in essence that of a western basilica, with a central nave and two side aisles separated from it by rows of antique granite columns, all with richly gilded Corinthian capitals, drawing the eye along to the five steps that lead up to the choir. Western too, though whispering of the South, are the richly ornamented pavements and the coruscating Cosmatesque inlays of the steps, balustrades and lower walls—to say nothing of that immense ambo, proudest of pulpits, studded with gold and malachite and porphyry and flanked by a gigantic Paschal candlestick, a fifteen-foot high bestiary in white marble.
³

But if we look up now to the mosaics with which the whole chapel glows gold, we are once again brought face to face with Byzantium. Some, alas, of these mosaics, notably those in the upper part of the north wall of the transept, have disappeared; others have been drastically—and in one or two cases disastrously—restored over the centuries. Occasionally, as in the lower half of the central apse and the two side apses, we are confronted with eighteenth-century

¹
La Vie Errante,
Paris, 1890.
               
²
Plate 5.

³
Plate 6. This candlestick was almost certainly presented to the chapel by Archbishop Hugh of Palermo when he crowned Roger's son William co-ruler with his father at Easter,
11
51. Carved on it, among the angelic supporters of the crucified Christ and roughly at eye-level, a single human figure emerges rather improbably from a palm frond. This figure, wearing a mitre and showing a disturbing resemblance to Mr Punch, was long believed to be a portrait of Roger himself; but since it also bears the papal
pallium,
to which the King was not entitled, it is more likely to represent the donor. (Schramm,
Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik,
vol. I, p. 80.)

monstrosities which a more enlightened administration would long ago have swept away. The best, however—Christ Pantocrator gazing in benediction from the dome, the circle of angels garlanding him with their wings, the evangelists studious in their squinches— all these are the finest, purest Byzantine, of which any church in Constantinople would have been proud. Over the choir nearly all bear Greek inscriptions, sure testimony of their date and workmanship ; by contrast the Virgin in the northern transept,
¹
the scenes from the Old Testament in the nave and those from the lives of St Peter and St Paul in the side aisles were added by William I some twenty years later, after his father's death. Here and elsewhere the Latin inscriptions, the preference for Latin saints and certain stylistic attempts to break away from the rigid canons of Byzantine iconography suggest that William was employing native artists—presumably Italian pupils of the original Greek masters. Other Italians, in the later thirteenth century, were responsible for the enthroned Christ on the western wall over the royal dais
²
and the two figures of St Gregory and St Sylvester inside the sanctuary arch, unpardonably introduced in the Angevin period to replace an earlier likeness of Roger himself.

These almost antiphonal responses of Latin and Byzantine, set in so lavish a frame, would alone have earned for the Palatine Chapel a unique place among the religious buildings of the world. But for Roger they were still not enough. Two of the great cultural traditions of his country had been dazzlingly reflected in his new creation, but what of the third? What of the Saracens, the most populous group of all his island subjects, whose loyalty had been unwavering—in marked contrast to that of his Norman compatriots—for more than half a century, whose administrative

¹
Seen from below she is inexplicably off-centre—for which the figure of John the Baptist to the upper left seems an awkward attempt to compensate. From the large window in the north wall, however, she appears in the dead centre of the visible wall space. From this it has been deduced that this window—which communicates with the interior of the palace—was used from about 1160 onwards as a royal box. (For this and much other fascinating detective work on Sicilian mosaics, see Demus,
The Mosaics of Norman Sicily,
London, 1956.)

²
According to an inscription on the wall of the north aisle, this was restored in the fourteenth century.

efficiency was largely responsible for the prosperity of the Kingdom, and whose artisans and craftsmen were renowned through three continents? Should not their genius also be represented? And so the chapel was further embellished with what is, quite literally, its crowning glory, surely the most unexpected covering to any Christian church on earth—a stalactite ceiling of wood, in the classical Islamic style, as fine as anything to be found in Cairo or Damascus, intricately decorated with the earliest datable group of Arabic paintings in existence.

And figurative paintings at that. By the middle of the twelfth century certain schools of Arabic art had been jockeyed—principally by the Persians, who had never shared their scruples—out of their old abhorrence of the human form, and the tolerant atmosphere of Palermo led them to experiment still further. The details of the paintings are difficult to make out from floor level, but a pair of pocket binoculars will reveal, amid a welter of animal and vegetable ornamentation and Kufic inscriptions in praise of the King, countless delightful little scenes of oriental life and mythology. Some people are riding camels, others killing Hons, yet others enjoying picnics with their harems; everywhere, it seems, there is a great deal of eating and drinking going on. Dragons and monsters abound; one man—Sinbad perhaps ?—is being carried off on the back of a huge four-legged bird straight out of Hieronymus Bosch.

Yet just as it is the ensemble, rather than the individual details, that makes the real impact on the beholder, so must the Palatine Chapel itself be considered not as the sum of its separate elements but as an integrated whole. It is also a work of profound devotion. No other place of worship radiates such incandescent splendour; no other proclaims with such assurance its origin and purpose. This is a chapel built by a king, for kings to worship in. Yet it is still, above all else, a house of God. The royal dais is raised to the level of the choir, but not to that of the sanctuary. Marble-balustraded, backed with inlays in
opus Alexandrinum
culminating in a huge octagon of porphyry to enhalo the head of the enthroned monarch, it stands at the western end, massive in its majesty. But immediately above it is another throne; this is backed not with marble but with gold; and on it is seated the risen Christ. All the brilliance, all the throbbing colour of this wonderful place, the interplay of verd-antique, ox-blood and cipollino, every inch of it burnished by the million glinting tesserae of the walls, create an atmosphere not of ostentation but of mystery, not of royal pride but of man's humility before his maker. Maupassant chose his metaphor well; entering the Palatine Chapel is like walking into a jewel. And, he might have added, it is a jewel from the crown of heaven.