Download PDF | (New Directions in Byzantine Studies) Clare Vernon - From Byzantine to Norman Italy_ Mediterranean Art and Architecture in Medieval Bari-I.B. Tauris (2023).
289 Pages
Acknowledgements
One night in 2007, I slept on the deck of the ferry from Patras to Bari. Later that day, still cold and windswept, I walked into Trani cathedral and was captivated. I had written my undergraduate dissertation on the Cappella Palatina and was on my way to Sicily, when I was waylaid by the churches of Puglia, which were a complete surprise to me. Fifteen years later, still captivated, I have a lot of people to thank for helping me to understand them better. This book is very loosely based on my doctoral research, which was funded by the AHRC. I would never have finished the thesis, let alone the book, without Paul Binksi’s gentle and wise guidance and Lucy Donkin and Claudia Bolgia’s insightful critiques in the viva.
Early drafts of parts of the book were presented at the International Medieval Congress, the Cambridge Medieval Art Seminar, British Archaeological Association, the Northern Network for the Study of the Crusades and Birkbeck’s Murray Seminar, and I thank the audiences for their very helpful feedback. My students at Birkbeck on the module ‘Artistic Encounters in the Medieval Mediterranean’ have been the very best teachers. Their questions, ideas and enthusiasm improved this book no end. John McNeill, Eric Fernie, Nikolaos Karydis, Will Wooton, Jelena Bogdanovic and Bissera Pentcheva generously allowed their images to be published. Kate Cook and Andy Fox helped me translate some of the inscriptions. All the errors remain mine, of course.
Rachel Winchcombe, Francesca Young Kaufman, John McNeill, Rosa Bacile and Laura Varnam read sections of the manuscript. Above all, I need to thank many people for their moral support and scholarly community: Emma Edwards, Rosa Bacile and Francesca Young Kaufman for talking things through and cheering me on; Liz Gloyn, Amelia Dowler, Tony Keen and Ellie Mackin Roberts for days and long lunches in the British Library; Sophie Jones, Imogen Woodberry and Laura Cushing-Harries for Shut Up and Write at Birkbeck; Kate Cook, Josh Nudell, Andy Fox, Christine Plastow and Ellie Mackin Roberts on Slack during the coronavirus lockdowns; Lisa Morriss and Lily Green for Monday mornings on Zoom (an hour a week made all the difference!). When women succeed in writing books, it’s often because other women take on extra domestic work. I could not have written this book if it weren’t for the women who have helped me take care of my mother: Lindsay Saint-Alme, Catherine Le Fur, Jemma Carnell, Sanda, Yinka, Ying Suen and Isobel Taylor. Aly, Nick and Syd have been endlessly patient in the face of my obsession with medieval churches and have given me much-needed breaks so I could write or rest. Bohemond the cat mainly just walked on the keyboard.
Introduction
A Mediterranean city, c. 1000–1130 In May of 1087, a group of sixty-two sailors from Bari arrived home with cargo they had stolen from the city of Myra: the relics of St Nicholas. The arrival of the ship caused chaos and violence, as different factions fought for control of the relics. Ultimately, it led to the construction of a new church and to international prestige for Bari that would last for centuries. The arrival of the ship is re-enacted every year, when a statue of St Nicholas is borne on the shoulders of local sailors and dances joyfully through the streets of the city, to the port. It is then taken out to sea, where it stays all day, returning in the evening accompanied by dozens of fishing boats for a ceremonial entrance into Bari, a re-enactment of the arrival in 1087.
Three days of feasting and celebration conclude when the relics of St Nicholas emit a miraculous, healing manna that is collected and venerated by the faithful and, traditionally at least, distributed to pilgrims. Since St Nicholas is also the patron saint of Russia and one of the most popular saints among Orthodox Christians, his shrine in Bari is an important centre of ecumenical dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox churches. In the era of post-Soviet ecumenism, St Nicholas has become a bridge between eastern and western Christianities. This is apt because the church has always been a meeting point for different cultures. Even while the site was still a building site, eastern and western clergy gathered in it to try to resolve the differences that had caused the schism between them.
It is fitting that Bari’s biggest religious festival connects the church to the sea because connections to the Adriatic and the wider Mediterranean have shaped Bari’s history. Bari has always been defined by its port, even more so before the advent of air travel, the formation of the state of Italy and its twentieth-century orientation towards the European Union. It has always been a city that looked out to sea and beyond the sea to other lands. It has been a pit stop for travellers, a destination for merchants and a prize for conquerors and pirates. This book explores how that mentality of looking out to sea shaped its art and architecture in the medieval period. The following chapters place Bari in a Mediterranean context for the first time, arguing that patrons and artists were constantly responding to and seeking out Mediterranean connections through visual culture. This book explores the art and architecture in the neighbouring cities of Bari and Canosa in the period c. 1000–1130 (Map 1). Although the title of the book refers only to Bari, the two cities cannot be studied separately. The two cathedrals were co-cathedrals in a joint archdiocese and were interdependent in terms of ecclesiastical structures, culture and artistic production.
At the turn of the millennium, both cities were part of the Byzantine Empire and Bari was the capital of the Italian imperial provinces. Over the course of the eleventh century, the whole of southern Italy was conquered by the Normans. The Normans (and other northern French immigrants), under the leadership of the Hauteville dynasty, established first the Duchy of Apulia and then, from 1130, the Kingdom of Sicily. This book deals with the period of the conquest and consolidation of Norman rule, stopping before the establishment of the kingdom in 1130, when Norman authority in southern Italy entered a new phase. Although the Norman conquest was a dramatic political shift in many ways, for Bari and Canosa it meant swapping one foreign ruler for another. Both the Normans and the Byzantines took a ‘hands-off ’ approach to ruling the archdiocese, allowing a strong sense of independent civic identity to flourish in both eras.
The Norman conquest was disruptive, politically and economically; it caused anxiety and threatened Bari’s commercial success. But the people of Bari used the disruption as an opportunity to assert their autonomy and to form new social, religious and commercial relationships, largely through the construction of a major new church for St Nicholas. The conquest was not the only dramatic change that took place in this period. The interrelated events of the first crusade and the ecclesiastical Gregorian Reform movement also had a big impact on the archdiocese and its visual culture. The aim of this book is to explore Mediterranean connections in the art and architecture of these two cities (Map 2). In doing so, it makes a contribution to five overlapping scholarly fields: Byzantine art, Norman Italy, the crusades, the international Romanesque and medieval Mediterranean studies. Art historical studies of Norman Italy have so far been dominated by the court of Roger II in Palermo, partly for good reason because Palermo offers a rich array of well-preserved and enticing evidence.1
To a lesser extent Campania has also been a focus, particularly the abbey of Montecassino and ivory carving in Amalfi and Salerno, but the mainland remains under-researched in comparison to Palermo.2 The period before Roger II has been neglected across Sicily and the mainland. Mainland artistic centres – such as Mileto, Venosa, Otranto, Monte Sant’Angelo, Trani and Bari – have received some attention, particularly from local scholars, but not as much as they deserve.3 It is important to elucidate the period before 1130 not only to contextualize, and therefore better understand, the court in Palermo, but also in its own right because it offers a different picture of Mediterranean art in this period. While studies of Palermo are limited to courtly art, the mainland gives us more scope to explore different kinds of communities, patrons and artists (cathedral, monasteries, merchants, laity and non-royal Normans). This book and other mainland studies add diversity to our understanding of Norman Italy, which is currently narrowly dominated by the royal court.
Bari is geographically and intellectually peripheral in scholarship on Norman Italy, and it occupies a similarly peripheral position in Byzantine studies (geographically, it is caught between the two and on the periphery of both). In recent decades Byzantine art historians have moved away from the traditional focus on Constantinople, to think more broadly about what constitutes Byzantine art and how the provinces and frontiers related to, or were independent of, the capital.4 For the western fringes of the empire, Sicily has tended to dominate that discussion, particularly studies of mosaics.5 Apulia, in some ways more of a ‘frontier zone’ than Sicily because it was actually part of the empire, has received little attention as part of Byzantine art history.
The few scholars who have explored the question of how Apulia fits into Byzantine art – mostly in the 1970s and 1980s – have largely concluded that it was not very Byzantine, although more recent work has discussed the blurry line between ‘Byzantine and ‘not Byzantine’.6 This study of Bari and Canosa takes a broad approach to Byzantine art, incorporating not only the narrowest definition (through the Byzantine governor’s palace in Bari, which might be considered ‘pure’ Byzantine art) but also the broadest, encompassing Byzantium’s continued cultural influence long after the end of Byzantine rule (through opus sectile pavements, mosaics and Byzantium’s allure for crusaders).
When seen through a Western lens, the material covered in this book has been considered as Romanesque. In the 1920s, Arthur Kingsley Porter used San Nicola in Bari as one of his examples in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, in support of his theories about artists and iconographies travelling from shrine to shrine across Western Europe.7 Since then the architecture and architectural sculpture of Bari and Canosa have been included in broad international studies of Romanesque architecture.8 The Italian scholarship tends to refer to il Romanico Pugliese, the ‘Apulian Romanesque’, and is dominated by the idea of regional Romanesque styles, often categorized according to the boundaries of the regions in the modern Italian nation state, rather than according to medieval boundaries (this approach is encapsulated by Jaca’s rigorous series, Italia Romanica).9
The question of whether the art of Bari and Canosa is Romanesque is as fraught as the question of whether it is Byzantine and is entirely dependent on how the terms are defined.10 If Romanesque is the art of the Latin church in the central Middle Ages then the material in this book is certainly Romanesque. But the term Romanesque, with its focus on the Latin church, can obscure the diverse influences on Apulia, including from Byzantium and the Fatimid Empire, and I have therefore avoided using it here. Although Romanesque can be too narrow a term to describe Apulian visual culture, this book does illuminate the intersections between art and the issues facing the Latin church. One of the major themes of this book is the ways in which Benedictine networks facilitated artistic production, enabled innovation and produced erudite inscriptions that merged visual and literary culture. Another theme pertinent to the Latin church is the intersection of art and the Gregorian Reform movement. In art history, there is some debate about whether or not Gregorian Reform had an impact on art and architecture.11
But there is no doubt that the reform movement coincided with a renewed interest in early Christian art and some have seen art as a key tool of the reformers.12 This book makes a contribution to that debate, arguing that San Nicola should be included in what we might call ‘reforming art’. Recent research on the movement has stressed local variations, and Bari is emblematic of that. San Nicola is not typical of reforming art because of the particular local circumstances, but it is nonetheless participating in the retrospective gaze back to early Christianity and other reform issues.
Gregorian Reform is closely related to the schism between the eastern and western churches, the Latinization of southern Italy after the Norman conquest and the expansion of the Latin church through the first crusade. One of the conclusions of this book is that the first crusade had a significant impact on the art and architecture of San Nicola and Bohemond’s burial chapel in Canosa. Although some art historians have touched on the subject, nobody has written the art history of the first crusade.
The term ‘crusader art’ usually refers to the art produced in the crusader states, mostly from the middle of the twelfth century onwards.13 Broadly speaking the first crusade is the dominion of military, social and literary historians. As this book will show, art history should be part of that conversation as well. In the last twenty years, the new field of ‘medieval Mediterranean studies’ has emerged out of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s influential book, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, and focusing on the interconnectedness of the Mediterranean region, across political and religious boundaries.14 In some ways the focus on connectivity solves some of the problems discussed earlier in parcelling art into categories like Romanesque or Byzantine. But, as Horden and Purcell themselves note, in other ways it creates as many problems than it solves.
There were as many connections in and out of the Mediterranean as there were within it, and a Mediterranean focus can be as limiting as a Byzantine, Latin or Islamic focus. But, since southern Italy is at the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, the Mediterranean focus works in its favour. Seen through a Mediterranean lens Apulia, which is on the periphery of so many other fields, is suddenly at the centre of a network of connections. Yet, with very few exceptions, Apulia’s place in the wider Mediterranean has not been investigated.15 This book will incorporate Bari into medieval Mediterranean studies. The book is divided into three parts. Part one examines Bari and Canosa during the period of Byzantine rule, from c. 1000 until the Norman conquest of Bari in 1071.
It explores the visual culture surrounding the Byzantine governor’s palace; the reconstruction of Bari cathedral; Latin manuscript production; the use of textiles as diplomatic gifts and the commissioning of new liturgical furniture for Canosa cathedral. Byzantine Bari was a place where Greek and Latin cultures came into contact with one another and where the distinction between the two could be blurred. These chapters evaluate how the majority-Lombard population and the Byzantine officials chose to engage with each other culturally and how the Lombard population retained their distinctive Latin identity while also appropriating elements of Byzantine culture. Unfortunately, artistic and contextual evidence from the Byzantine period is far from plentiful. The Byzantine palace and the eleventh-century cathedral are no longer standing, and Canosa cathedral was altered quite significantly in the postmedieval period.
This means that Part 1 is necessarily short and the conclusions are partial and sometimes tentative. Nonetheless, surviving sculptural fragments, manuscripts, archaeology and documents do allow us to piece together a picture of artistic production during the Byzantine period, which significantly enhanced our understanding of the culture on the western frontier of the Byzantine Empire. Evidence for the Norman period is much more ample, with two major monuments still standing: the church of San Nicola and the burial chapel of Bohemond I of Antioch.
Part 2 focuses on the most ambitious and well-known building project in Bari’s history: the basilica of San Nicola. When the citizens of Bari stole the relics of St Nicholas and brought them back to Bari, they demolished the Byzantine governor’s palace and built a church to house the relics in its place. The chapters in Part 2 chart how the construction project changed as it progressed. It began as a civic enterprise, a symbolic appropriation of the site of Byzantine authority but, as time went on, it incorporated the ideas of the first crusade, the Gregorian Reform movement and new influences introduced by crusaders, pilgrims and merchants.
Part 3 focuses on Canosa and the burial chapel of Bohemond I, Prince of Antioch. Bohemond was the lord of Bari and Canosa and the son of the Norman ruler Robert Guiscard. He was also the leader of the southern Italian contingent of the first crusade. During the crusade he became the ruler of Antioch in the Levant. When he died in Italy, he was buried in a small chapel in Canosa cathedral. In Part 3 I will argue that the chapel was commissioned by his widow, Constance of France, and that it is an imitation of the aedicule, Christ’s empty tomb, in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The chapel has a pair of bronze doors which are notable as the first cast in southern Italy in the Middle Ages. This book reminds us that Mediterranean history has always been a story of connections across the sea, but the course of those connections did not always run smoothly.
Mediterranean connectivity looks different from an Apulian perspective than it does from Sicily. The plentiful studies of Norman Palermo emphasize the relationship between art and monarchy, in the context of a court that is often portrayed as successful and stable. Bari and Canosa may not be among the great metropolises of the Mediterranean; they cannot compete with Constantinople, Cairo, Cordoba or Palermo, but therein lies the value of this book. Studying smaller, less influential cities demonstrates how more ‘ordinary’ urban communities negotiated the transformations and continuities of the era. Looking at a single archdiocese through Byzantine rule, the Norman conquest and the first crusade enables us to understand change over time, through several eras.
The history of Bari and Canosa is one in which art was often used to manage and mitigate conflicts, disruptions and anxieties. In all three parts of this book, we see the construction of new buildings instigated by a threat (a threat to the Byzantine frontier, a threat to Bari’s economy, a threat to Constance of France’s authority). This book sets out to amplify our understanding of southern Italian art by redirecting some scholarly focus away from the royal Palermo and towards the mainland and the period of the conquest. In doing so, the picture becomes messier and less glamorous and evidence is more fragmented and challenging to interpret, but the buildings are no less interesting. They help us to understand what it is like to live on the periphery of an empire, through a time of tumultuous change.
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