Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Tuesday, January 30, 2018 in Events, HART, Lectures, News, VRC.

Lisa Reilly, associate professor of medieval art and architecture, University of Virginia, will deliver the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Thursday, February 15, at 4:10 pm in 203 Cohen Memorial Hall.  Her presentation is titled “The Multilingual Mediterranean: The Cappella Palatina in Palermo and the Court of Roger II,” with a reception afterward in the atrium.

Reilly notes that the Normans in Sicily created a visual culture that relies on an assemblage of forms now perceived as culturally diverse, a perception that may not have been the case in twelfth-century Sicily.  This assemblage includes what seems to many modern observers to be a disparate set of Roman, Muslim and Byzantine elements. 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. In this view, distinct Muslim, Byzantine and Roman vocabularies are all evident in what can be seen as a visual evocation of Roger’s kingdom and his monarchy.

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 II and his subjects, the question remains of how what we now clearly see as distinct vocabularies would have been read at the time. Closer examination reveals that these categories are in fact blurred at best and not really viable for the Mediterranean. Just as the chapel itself cannot be described as simply Islamic, Byzantine or Romanesque, neither can its parts. Given the understanding of the Arabic, Greek, French and Latin-speaking Norman court as multilingual verbally, it should also be realized that it is multilingual visually, albeit speaking a network of languages with shared and interconnected vocabularies.

Reilly publishes and lectures chiefly on Norman architecture and is currently completing a book on Norman visual culture throughout the Romanesque world. Her chief research interest is in the history of Norman architecture in England, France and Italy. Her monograph, An Architectural History of Peterborough Cathedral (Oxford University Press, 1997), clarifies the obscure and tangled building history of one of England’s most interesting medieval monuments, expanding the traditional use of formal and archaeological analysis to include a discussion of the building’s social and political context. She and Kevin Murphy, professor and chair of Vanderbilt’s department of history of art, are co-editors of Skyscraper Gothic: Medieval Style and Modernist Buildings, a volume published last year by University of Virginia Press.

Reilly teaches courses on early and later medieval architecture, including urban planning, vernacular architecture, the medieval Mediterranean and lay piety as well as ecclesiastical and secular monuments. She is a leading user of digital humanities technology in teaching and research. Her ongoing research project investigates the medieval design process using digital analysis.

“We are pleased to benefit from Prof. Reilly’s pioneering scholarship on Norman material culture and its relationship to Mediterranean identity, as well as her groundbreaking use of digital methods in architectural history–a central concern of our department,” said Murphy.

Free and open to the public, the Goldberg Lecture is sponsored by the Department of History of Art. Limited parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall on the Peabody campus. For more information, call (615) 322-2831.