This event is free but advance registration is required to participate.

TO REGISTER VIA ZOOM, CLICK HERE

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the lecture and brief annual meeting.

The Normans in Sicily create a visual culture that relies on an assemblage of forms now perceived as culturally diverse, a perception, which may not have been the case in twelfth-century Sicily.  The historical definition of the muqarnas nave ceiling as Islamic, the chapel’s mosaics as Byzantine and its columns as Roman, for example, suggests a kind of compound in which each element retains its own identity. While this seems self-evident, given the way in which these vocabularies map on to the Muslim, Byzantine and Latin Christian religious affiliations of Roger and his subjects, this talk will explore the question of how what we clearly now see as distinct vocabularies would read at the time.

Lisa Reilly is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, University of Virginia. She is the author of An Architectural History of Peterborough Cathedral (1997) and Vassar College (2004), editor of Skyscraper Gothic (2017), and served as the editor of Gesta. In 2020, Reilly released The Invention of Norman Visual Culture (Cambridge University Press), which establishes a new interpretive paradigm for the eleventh and twelfth-century art and architecture of the Norman world in France, England, and Sicily.

Please note that this lecture will not be recorded.