Idealizing the medieval Mediterranean? Creation, recreation and representation of Siculo-Norman architecture

The search for a national identity through the revival (or invention) of a medieval past is a pan-European phenomenon, which occurred between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in opposition to French monarchical neoclassicism and Napoleonic imperialism. The recovery of a medieval past in Italy, however, is distinct from what happened in other European nations. The Italian peninsula during the medieval and early modern period was a disjointed territory, a land without a national history, in which the past was imagined locally, as piccole patrie (small homelands). According to Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, political fragmentation, the presence of the papacy, and the presence of the Kingdom of Sicily are themselves elements determining these differences. The Italian phenomenon is one of a double cultural identity: one national, the other regional or local. The latter began before Italian national unity in 1861 and persisted during the post-unitarian period. Thus, a national(ist) vision of history and a national(ist) history of art and architecture were forced to reject elements of local identity. This configuration is even more complicated in the case of Sicily since medieval Sicily, and especially Norman Sicily, originated from an overlapping and syncretic combination of different cultures and cultural identities. Furthermore, while a reaction against monarchic and imperialistic tendencies percolated in many countries during the second half of the eighteenth century, both the French and Bourbon Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily recovered Roman classicism—especially after the discovery of Pompei in 1748—with an imperialistic bravura. It is under these circumstances that, already in 1767 in the time of Charles III, the archbishop of Palermo, Serafino Filangeri, instructed the Bourbon court architect Ferdinando Fuga to design a neoclassical renovation (restaurazione) of the Palermo Cathedral. Between 1781 and 1801, after Fuga’s death in 1782, Giuseppe Venanzio Marvuglia (1729–1814), an important neoclassical architect from Palermo, directed the execution of the project, including the insertion of a dome over the cross of the transept with the assistance of the engineer Salvatore Attinelli. However, after the visit of the king, the same architect, G. V. Marvuglia, probably with the help of his son Alessandro Emanuele, designed in 1802 a neo-Gothic covering for the dome. This project was never carried out, but it is attested by our wooden model in the Museo Diocesano di Palermo, while drawings and two prints are preserved in Palazzo Abatellis and in another private archive. Marvuglia’s project represents one of the earlier examples of the Gothic revival in Europe. His project is something between a formal Gothic revival and a philological recreation of the original aesthetic values of the monument. The architectural and ornamental features are not an original invention; the project is clearly inspired by the fourteenth-century towers standing at the four corners of the church, themselves a Norman revival of the Aragon period, being almost a replica of the Norman bell tower of Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio, described in 1184 by the Andalusian traveler Ibn Jubayr. The Gothic—especially Norman—revival was by then a shared trend in southern Italy and beyond.