the cassandra pages

A Beautiful Ending for the Summer

Our friend G. lives on a remote hillside in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where he has a garden of breathtaking beauty. Once every summer we drive out to spend the afternoon and evening with him. This year it was a perfect day - sunny, and still warm enough to eat outside, though by the end of our meal we were all bundled up in jackets and shawls. Here's J. on the deck overlooking the garden and the hills beyond, under the grape arbor. We spent some time trying and failing to find G.'s new glasses which had fallen or gotten snagged somewhere in the garden when he was picking the bouquet for the table-- he found them himself a couple of days later -- and I sat on a rock overlooking the pond for a while, watching frogs floating lazily on the surface, legs splayed. Aren't they wonderful, G. said, and I told him I aspired to the zazen of a frog. Then we had snacks and wine, and later, a cooperative dinner of salmon, corn picked that morning, fresh green beans, salad, strawberries.

G. gave me the flowers to take home, and of course I had to sketch them the next day.

What is it about certain landscapes that gives them their particular emotional resonance and feeling? G.'s place always feels the same to me, regardless of the weather or time of year: it's one of the calmest, most quiet and peaceful places I know, and I always feel restored after being there.  Some of that comes from the person who lives there, in an almost monastic lifestyle. It also comes from the way he has laid out the garden, with its stream and ponds, in the middle field, between the house and the distant mountains. Wherever you are, the garden beckons, and it is always present, like a symbolic home to which you can return but which also stays in one's memory, between the near and the far of our lives. It also contains a number of large standing rocks, and because I am tremendously fond of rocks, I revisit them each year almost like people with remembered individual personalities; I like laying my hand on them and feeling the retained warmth of the sun.

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Last week I also returned to the Sicilian landscapes that have gotten so far under my skin, and did this drawing of hills and a patchwork of orchards and fields, seen from the top of the hill near the Greek theater at Segesta:

Olive trees and fields from Segesta. Charcoal on toned paper, 8.5" x 5".

I've planned to paint this scene but wanted to draw it first. The pastoral landscape of olive trees and planted fields remind me of the subjects of some of Van Gogh's late drawings. As I work toward refining a style of my own for this sort of drawing, I look for the subject's internal rhythms and the ways the shapes interact. This is partly about finding patterns in the ways things grow or are arranged in the landscape, and partly --again -- something about the emotional temperature of the scene itself. I've always been astounded at how Van Gogh was able to convey these qualities of "IS-ness" as well as how he felt about particular places on particular days. Without imitating him, I hope to continue to work on my own language for doing something similar, because landscapes and the individual elements in them -- like trees or the pattern of an orchard -- do speak to me almost as people do. The drawing or painting thus becomes a portrait of the subject, and secondarily a portrait of the artist at a particular time of their life...

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees, Montmajour, 1888.

 

When black-and-white doesn't make it.

Here's a charcoal sketch of the view at Segesta, Sicily, that you see if you turn 90 degrees to the right from the angle in the previous post, the picture with the Artemesia bush. This direction looks into a deep gully, with areas of exposed rock that may have been a source for some of Segesta's ancient buildings. After two attempts, one in pencil and one in charcoal, I still felt that it was almost impossible to capture the essence of this landscape in black and white, so I thought I'd try a quick sketch in oil pastel. It ended up being more than a sketch, and I rather like the feeling of it. Here, the mountains came alive with both rocks and trees, the fields sparkled with color, and the abyss of the gully fell down and away.

View at Segesta. Oil pastel on paper, 9" x 6.5 ".

Here's a detail, close to life-size on my monitor, that shows a little better what the surface is like. 

Oil pastels are an interesting medium. Using them is more like painting in oils, I think, than drawing in dry pastels, but with some of the qualities of both. They're also very messy - I was covered with sticky pigment by the end of this and so was my work surface. Fortunately, all Rembrandt oil pastels are non-toxic. They never really dry, though, so an oil pastel painting has to be presented behind glass.

The good thing for me is that it's almost impossible to get fussy or tight with them, because the sticks are soft, large, and blunt. You can layer and mix colors on the surface, and scratch through the paint to add some detail or texture, as I've done here, but you can't draw like you would with a small pointed tool. The palette I have is limited - about 45 colors - but that's OK for these purposes. And it's a good change from the demanding tension of watercolor.

--

Choir started again this Sunday, and it would be hard to express how glad I was to be singing again. During the summer, I'm glad of the break, but eventually I miss the music and the challenge of trying to do my best, and I miss my community of friends there. At our first rehearsal last Thursday, we sounded almost tentative to begin with, but quickly found our voices again. Yesterday's two services were very good, and it always feels like a miracle to me that with only fifteen or sixteen singers we can make as much sound as we do, or sing as subtly. This past weekend, Montreal celebrated "Les Journées du patrimoine religieux" so we had a steady stream of visitors through the doors, displays of historical photos and memorabilia, and volunteers on hand to give tours and answer questions. It also meant that we had quite a crowd of people for Evensong, which gives us a lift. This year we'll be experimenting with singing from the chancel steps so that we're not so far from the congregation as when we're up in the choir stalls or in the organ loft at the back of the church. The tricky thing is that this makes a physical separation from the organ when we do accompanied works, and there's a slight delay in the sound, so the organist has to watch the director in his monitor and play with the tempo he or she sees, which will be slightly ahead of the beat that is heard. Most listeners would not know this is going on, but it's a musical reality in many of the large cathedrals of the world.

The point of connection with painting is that in any art form, there are challenges, but also ways to overcome them!

--

This week I'm also remembering our friend Jenny, who died a year ago, and thinking of another friend whose husband died yesterday, while we were singing. He had been in difficult health for a long while, and in a crisis situation for two days, so it was not entirely unexpected, but it was still too sudden, and far too young. Suffering and death seem, at first, to be black and white, but in fact they aren't at all, because human lives are not monochromatic. We need to look at the difficult parts of life in all of their shades, not just in black and white, but in color too. Even an abyss has color and form in it, if we have the courage to look. Art, however, fixes a moment in time, while music always moves.

With its capacity to express such a wide range of human emotions, music is one of the best and only ways I can deal with death; I'm grateful for it always, but especially now.

Agrigento

Rock wall and olives at Agrigento. Watercolor on paper, 15" x 11".

The day we spent visiting the ancient Greek temples at Agrigento, Sicily, is etched in my memory less for the temples themselves, as spectacular as they were, but for the landscape and the feeling of the long walk that leads from one building to another. It was a beautiful day, struck with that strong, bright Mediterranean sun that sets shadows in sharp relief and shows colors at their brightest; as for generations of artists before me, that light and color are compelling to my northern eyes that, once experienced, I continue to long for them. Maybe that's why I keep coming back to these scenes, trying to capture something of that feeling.

The "Sicilian wall" in my studio.

The painting at the top of this page was done over two sessions, on two days. Below is the earlier stage, at the end of the first day. I was dissatisfied with my photographs of this painting. I think the reduction in size as well as the photographic process itself results in a loss of immediacy and vibrancy -- probably that's just an inevitable limitation of sharing work online. The bottom detail below captures it best, but it also looks more accurate in the photo of my studio above.

This is after about an hour of drawing and laying in the first washes.

 

Detail of the finished painting.

 

And another detail. 

 

A niche that once housed an early Christian burial, long after the Greeks occupied this valley.

The vibrant ochre color of the rocks at Agrigento, which were full of fossils, created a stunning but entirely natural contrast with the bright blue sky and the sea beyond, and yet that was softened by the silvery olive trees, some of which were very old, with their twisted trunks and branches. At the end of the ancient temple road was the oldest olive tree I've ever seen; I made a drawing of it recently that, I'm happy to say, was bought by a dear friend, perhaps for some of the same reasons I loved it in person. That tree seemed to embody the spirit of the Greeks for me. I went up to it, laid my hand on its trunk, and stayed with it for a while.

NOTE: In a radical move, I've changed the layout of the blog slightly, putting the sidebar on the right (better for phone viewing, since the images sometimes got cut off in mobile view) and taking away the sidebar's black background. Please let me know what you think or how it works for you. Do most of you read the blog in a feed reader anyway?

 

 

 

 

 

Oil Pastels: Further Experiments, and a Temporary Refuge

View toward Palermo, from Segesta. Oil pastel on paper, 12" x 8.5".

This is a picture I started last week. Yesterday I worked on it quite a bit more, and am ready to call it finished. 

 

I'm finding oil pastel to be a strange medium and hard to get used to, but I rather like how it fits somewhere between painting and drawing. The technique is more like drawing, but the result more like painting. These details are a little larger than life-size, so you can see how the creamy, crayon-like pigment functions quite a lot like artist's oil paint. It sits up on the surface, can be applied quite thickly, but also blended with a finger or a rolled paper stomp. You can scratch through it to reveal lower layers, or rough it up with a contrasting color, applied quite lightly and dryly.

These days, I find the news has required concentration on something else, a different world of values, especially for us up in Canada. I must say, I'm not one for being very nationalistic (a common trait up here) but there's nothing like being insulted and threatened to bring us together. Listening to male bullies also makes me want to find refuge in something that's flexible, pliant, under my own control, and has a chance at being beautiful and reflective of a better world.

A Sicilian Landscape

The first sketch, View from Caccamo with Norman Castle. 8.5" x 5.5", gouache on paper.

After finishing Luisa Igloria's book and sending the files off to the printer, I was anxious to do some drawing or painting. Winter being what it is around here, my thoughts kept returning to Sicily, and some of the beautiful landscapes we had seen. I decided to sketch a view from the village of Caccamo, high up in the mountains south of Palermo, with its 10th century Norman castle. It had been a dark day with some rain and dramatic clouds that came and went. As we stood in this spot and watched, the sunlight hit the field in the center, turning it chartreuse. The terracotta tile roofs were echoed in the rocks below the castle, and in pomegranate fruits growing in the nearby bushes. The river wasn't blue, but muddy from the rain, creating a line of beige that was similar in hue to the stucco and the rocky outcrop below the castle. The bright ochre hill at center right found cousins in the sunlit leaves and rocks. And if handled adroitly (which hasn't happened yet!) the darkest green vegetation could serve like drawing ink, leading the eye in sinuous curves across the foreground, up the outcrop to the castle, across the fields in multiple lines, and back across the bank of the river. In actuality, I didn't see that possibility until now.

I did these two sketches, which ended up being paintings in gouache, in a small sketchbook of toned paper -- and I wish I had done them larger, on good watercolor paper. That's OK: live and learn. And I did learn quite a bit about gouache, or opaque watercolor -- it's not a medium I've worked with very much, but I do like it for its saturated color, easy workability, and versatility when combined with other media.

The sketch at the top of the post was the first one, done very quickly -- I like its spontaneity and freedom.

Then I did a more detailed drawing:

And worked over it with gouache, then added some colored pencil at the end.

The second sketch, View from Caccamo with Norman Castle. 8.5" x 5.5", gouache on paper.

I don't think either of these attempts is better than the other, they're just different, and neither was intended as an end in itself. My goal was to have fun with the process and the medium, to try to capture the feeling of the landscape, to aim for harmonious rather than realistic color, and freely suggest the details and variation in the landscape rather than depicting them tightly. This would be easier if working at a larger size.

The details that follow are larger than life-size (this would have been a better scale to work at!)

It's interesting to use gouache rather than transparent watercolor - a medium with which I'm more adept and familiar. For one thing, you can work back into it - the color on the surface dissolves and you can play with it. It's an excellent sketching medium on uncoated, toned paper because the pigment binder makes it sits up on the surface, whereas transparent watercolor would sink in and lose its luminosity. Highlights and lighter details can be added later with other media, such as pencil, ink, acrylic, or with white-based gouache.

These preliminary sketches were a good way to begin familiarizing myself with this scene in case I decide to do a larger watercolor, pastel or oil, any of which would be worth trying. I learned more about what I liked about the composition, how the colors work together across the landscape, and what gives the scene "life," as well as what to leave out or de-emphasize.

One of the challenges of these Italian landscapes is that what attracts and leads the eye is strong, often dramatic, structure -- but also a lot of enticing and beautiful detail -- orchards and vineyards, patchworks of fields, outbuildings, ruins, hedgerows, rocks and outcrops, streams. If all the detail were lost, it wouldn't look like Italy, but we aren't Renaissance painters who want to paint every leaf, so there are choices to be made, and no one "right way" to do it. Drawing and color sketching are the best ways I've found to search out the elements in any composition (not just a landscape) that are the most compelling and that serve -- like elements of a novel's plot -- to move the picture, or the story, where it wants to go. What I haven't captured successfully here is the play of light -- and in this scene, the light was the character most responsible for the drama.

Drawing in Sicily

In my studio, before the trip, I indulging in one of my life's pleasures, putting together art supplies for travel. This is a tiny kit of hard pastels, about the size of my phone, from a box of NuPastels I've had (I kid you not) since high school. I used to sketch with compressed charcoal a lot, but lately it's been pen and watercolor, and I thought maybe it was time for a change. Pastels, of course, are one of my studio mediums of choice. After doing some Conté sketching in Mexico City last year, I wanted to expand on that. It was a surprise to be able to get thirty colors into this little box, including Conte in black and sanguine, and a soft graphite pencil. dithered about the paper, though, and finally packed a delicious hemp-and-rag handmade paper block from the Montreal paper-maker, St-Armand. I added a package of hand-cleansing wipes, and a mini-can of hairspray to use as fixative.

I did a few test sketches at the studio. The paper seemed a bit too soft, but I convinced myself it would work, maybe even force me to be looser.

So, one of our first evenings in Palermo, I sat down with the new kit and did this sketch of the artichokes we planned to eat for dinner. No problem with the graphite, but when I began to work with the pastels I found, to my dismay, that the lovely paper in my sketchbook was just too soft. The hard pastels kept tearing up little bits of fiber if I pressed hard enough to leave strong marks, or else they skipped over the surface if I applied too little pressure.

After an hour of struggling, I realized I would have to abandon my idea and just use ink or pencil for the rest of the trip. Looking sadly at all the beautiful colors in my box, I realized I had been seduced by the handmade sketchbook paper, but I had been wrong. I did discover that I really liked having a toned background, rather than white or cream, and it encouraged me to see the values of the subjects differently, and to experiment, so all was not lost! And the artichokes were delicious.

Monreale 2: the Duomo

The cathedral, however, wasn't open, and we began to internalize an important Sicilian lesson: shops,  churches, and museums close for a long mid-day break. Instead, we took the opportunity to walk around the small town looking for a lunch place that served something besides pizza, and was open during this non-tourist season. Eventually we found a little cafe with a white-aproned waiter proffering a tray of cheese and charcuteries at the door. We took the bait -- it was delicious -- and a blond woman who seemed to be the owner gestured us to one of two small tables at the back. "Perhaps you'd like a sandwich?" she suggested, in English, pointing toward a deli case full of cured meats and cheeses. "We have different Sicilian hams, cheeses...a glass of Sicilian wine?" An hour later we had consumed two delicious prosciutto, cheese and tomato sandwiches, some of that fine Sicilian wine, two almond cookies, and an espresso and a cup of lemon tea, and enjoyed a conversation with the proprietor and her husband, while watching the couple at a neighboring table eat an antipasto platter that looked even more delicious than our panini. Fortified and happy, we headed back down the cobblestone street, past a little market brimming with tomatoes and oranges, and down to the cathedral again, which had just re-opened.

"We should have visited in the morning," was our first thought when we entered the dark interior of what must be, in brighter light, glittering and brilliant. The huge, illuminated Byzantine mosaic in the apse, of Christ Pantocrator (παντός pantos ="all", κράτος, kratos = strength, might, power) dominated our sight for the first minutes, but as our eyes adjusted, we began to be able to see the mosaics all around the walls, and the golden coffered ceiling.

These mosaics were completed somewhat later than the building, and they illustrate biblical stories  -- on the top panel in the picture above, you can see Adam and Eve, and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Below is the story of Noah and the Ark. It didn't matter at the time if many of the worshippers were illiterate: the cathedral itself was a picture book that they could read.

The floors are covered with the same sort of Cosmatesque pavements as in the Martorana in Palermo, and every inch of this huge interior is gilded or encrusted with stone inlays or mosaics. Because of its size, the space is overwhelming, and I found myself glazing over, unable to take it all in. But perhaps that was also in contrast to the light, airy, enchanting cloister, just a few hours earlier. We had a choice of going into an inner chapel, or climbing up into the northern tower. "Let's go up now, while there's still light," J. said, and I quickly agreed.

In the image below, you can see the southern tower that stands over the town's piazza. From the interior of the cathedral, we bought tickets from a clerk, bundled in scarves, and began climbing ancient stone stairs. On the first landing, we reached a window that looked out into the cloister, and then continued climbing until we came out on the walkway behind the green dome, and continues to the right of the picture, following the great nave of the cathedral.

Beside the walkway, this slanted roof of beautiful glazed tiles. At the end, a small door led into a dark passageway, just wide enough for one's shoulders. Light filtered in through arrow-slits on the cloister side, and also on the cathedral side. I peered through: we were above the choir stalls and organ, and then above the crossing, almost at eye-level with Christ Pantocrator. It was not only a place of worship, but a fortress: the Bishops's archers would have lined this passageway if the cathedral had been attacked, able to shoot down into the sanctuary. Two people descending from the tower met us in the passage, we all turned sideways, and squeezed by one another. J. and I kept going down to the far end, and then out onto the roof, where more steps, lined with intricately-glazed tiles, led up to the tower, with its pointed arches and geometric Arab patterns of tile and stone.

The view, toward Palermo and the sea, was magnificent, but also strategic. In those days, long before airplanes were even imagined, high ground was the best defense, and I began to understand why Italy had so many medieval hill towns. Thoughts of wars and sieges soon gave way to the wonder of standing in such a place.

That wonder increased when I later learned that King William II of Sicily, builder of this cathedral, had given refuge to friends and kinsmen of Thomas Becket, after the newly-consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury refused to do the will of his former friend King Henry II of England, and was forced to flee to the Continent. King William had become betrothed to Henry's youngest daughter, Joan, in 1168, when she was still a child. When Becket returned to England, and was murdered in 1170 by the King's men in Canterbury Cathedral, the marriage was called off, but after Henry did public penance at Becket's tomb, and Beckett was made a saint and martyr by the Pope, the relationship between the two royal houses improved again, and Joan was sent to Sicily where she and William were married, in 1177, just a few years after this cathedral was built, and by all accounts lived happily together.

Joan's mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and her brothers -- of whom Richard I (the Lionhearted), and King John (of the Magna Carta) were two -- had plotted to overthrow Henry; one of the younger brothers had been sent to live with Thomas Becket, and wrote that "Thomas showed me more kindness in one hour than my father did in my entire lifetime." It's almost certain that Joan's sympathies were with the murdered archibishop.

In any case, the earliest known depiction of Thomas Becket anywhere in Christendom, which bears the inscription "Saint Thomas of Canterbury," is in the apse of the Monreale Cathedral. I imagined Joan standing here, looking out over the sea toward England, turning to William, and saying, "We must memorialize Thomas, who was always kind to me."

Monreale 1: the Cloister

We took our first excursion out of Palermo on a bright November morning after buying a ZTL pass that allowed us to take our car in and out of the limited traffic zone for one day. This time, in daylight, armed with our phone GPS and better prepared, we managed to find our way out of the tangle of streets that had snared us the first night, and soon were driving south, and already uphill, through Palermo's suburbs. Small trucks loaded with neatly-arranged purple cauliflowers, tomatoes, or artichokes were parked near intersections, and the farmers stood nearby, waiting to sell their produce to local residents who lived in these poorer, crowded neighborhoods. Soon we were out of the city, and heading upward into the mountains.

The piazza outside the Duomo, Monreale

The piazza seen from the opposite direction. The Duomo is the central building behind the tall palm trees.

Monreale is located only about 9 kilometers from Palermo, but the drive takes a while because it goes so far uphill. We encountered our first switchbacks, and stopped at a pull-off to look down on a valley full of orange trees and tiled roofs, and back toward the sea. When we reached Monreale, a medieval hill town, all the streets were sharply angled and narrow, and only the very top of the town was flat. We parked in a commercial lot far below the street level, and climbed back up to the Duomo, or cathedral, in the town's central piazza, through tunnels formed by the tall walls of the old buildings, now full of lung-choking diesel fumes.

The extraordinary main doors of the cathedral, with Arab, Norman, and Italian/Byzantine elements.

The large bronze doors of the cathedral were shut when we arrived, and it was unclear where to enter. On a wall at the right, we pushed open an ancient wooden door to find ourselves in a gift shop that had been set up inside thick stone walls. This room opened onto a courtyard -- and as we stepped out of the stony darkness, we gasped. We were in the cloister of the Benedictine monastery that had been established after the cathedral was constructed, a square bordered by marble columns, each decorated with inlaid mosaic decorations and carved capitals, arranged around four quadrants of lawns inside clipped hedges.

Each quadrant of this garden had a small tree at its center, and the walkways joining them met at a large, low palm at the central point. It was a monastery cloister, to be sure, but unlike any monastery I had ever seen in Europe; the feeling was Arab, Spanish, Andalusian, and yet the carvings were Italian, and Christian. In one corner, a second room of columns formed an open "room" that contained a fountain with a broad basin: clearly reminiscent of an ablution fountain at a mosque.

These were conscious choices. King William II of Sicily, the grandson of Roger II, built the Montreale cathedral in 1174, and dedicated it to the Virgin Mary; today it's one of the most important and justifiably famous monuments on the entire island, but in an oddly remote location. The reason goes all the way back to 831, when the Arabs -- Islam would have only been 200 years old then -- took control of Palermo. The cathedral of Palermo was immediately converted to a mosque, and the Bishop of Palermo was allowed to go into exile in the hills. He settled in the small village of Monreale, overlooking Palermo and the sea, and built a modest church to keep a witness to Christianity. It remained so until the Norman conquest of the island in 1072. The Palermo cathedral was re-consecrated; many of the Norman royalty, including Roger II, were buried there. Partly to honor the memory of the exiled bishop, and partly because the Norman aristocracy was beginning to use this rural area as a hunting retreat, King William II built his great cathedral in Monreale. He also brought a community of Benedictine monks to the area, whose mission was to proselytize and convert the Arabs who formed the majority of the population. As in Palermo, Arab craftsmen were employed in the design and building, and, as we can see all over the world, the new religious leaders incorporated elements of the local religion in order to make it more familiar and acceptable. It's unclear how many Muslims actually converted, but the years of the Norman reign in Sicily were largely and deliberately peaceful for people of different faiths.

King William II of Sicily and his wife, Queen Joan of England, the daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. More about them in the next installment.

I have never been in a space that affected me quite like this cloister. It was one of the most beautiful and calm places I have ever experienced. We wandered through the colonnades and paths for a long time, studying the mosaic inlays and individual carvings, and absorbing the calmness that seemed to emanate not only from its history as a refuge from the outer world, but from the scale, colors, and harmonious placement of the individual elements, which achieved something close to perfection.

This was true for the courtyard as a whole, and also when one looked at the details: the stories carved on the column capitals had been carefully chosen, the inlaid mosaics which never seemed to repeat the same patterns. And instead of flower beds and vines, here were four single trees that reflected this particular place as well as the scriptures common to all the Abrahamic faiths: an olive, a date palm, a pomegranate, and a fig. I thought of my father-in-law saying, "When I think of the Arabs, I like to think of them in Spain." This was not Andalusia, but a place he would have loved just as much.

I washed my hands and forearms in the fountain basin, and we left to go inside the cathedral. 

Palermo's Mosaic - 2

Next door to St. Cataldo stands the Concattedrale Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio, also known as the Martorana. Its founding charter dates from 1143, written in Arabic and Greek, and the church must have been completed by 1151, when its founder George of Antioch - an admiral and minister to King Roger II - was buried there. When the Arab traveller Ibn Jubayr visited the church in 1184, he described it as "the most beautiful monument in the world." 

Although I had seen pictures of individual elements of the Martorana, I was unprepared for the effect of the interior when I walked inside. Every inch of every surface is decorated, often in minute detail. On the far end of the church, the original Byzantine mosaics in glittering gold set off figures, patterns and scenes in celestial blue, reds, pinks, lighter blues, greens, browns and white. On the nearer end, the columns and ceiling were decorated in a Baroque style between the 16th and 18th centuries, with paintings and architectural details covered in intricate patterns of carved and inlaid marble. The visual effect is overwhelming: you have to sit down.

We were greeted by one of the most famous pieces of art in all of Sicily: a mosaic portrait of Roger II being crowned by none other than a levitating Christ himself.

This portrait was commissioned by Roger himself, and originally placed on the Norman Facade of the building. The Sicilian kings had a longstanding feud with the Pope, who would normally crown them himself -- by bypassing the Pope in this representation and going straight to Christ, Roger was making a bold statement about his right to the throne. His coronation robe has been preserved and is now in a museum in Vienna. On the opposite side is another portrait, also from the original facade, of the church's founder, George, prostrating himself at the feet of the Virgin.

Because I can read some Greek, the mosaic lettering all over the walls and ceiling attracted me like a cereal box: I couldn't help but try to read what was written. Here the letters read "Rogerios Rex" but I was confused until I realized that the Greek "S", or Sigma (Σ) that I expected to see was replaced by a C. I learned later that this is a simplified variation of Σ that was used in Hellenistic handwriting, and on coins, called the "lunate sigma" because of its crescent-moon shape  -- it appeared in all the inscriptions in the Palermo area, and must reflect its Greek heritage as well as common usage in religious contexts during that period.

The floor, and all the walls not given to mosaics, are covered in geometric Cosmatesque patterns in colored stone, typical of the Byzantine period in Italy but also reflective of Arab style and crasftmanship. This church contains inscriptions in Arabic, and like St. Cataldo and other monuments we would see later, its architecture derives from Islamic styles also found in north Africa.

This one is shown just slightly smaller than life-size. The red and green starbursts reminded me of poinsettias.

Overhead: full-length portraits of all the apostles, busts of lesser saints and contemporary figures, and the archangels surrounding Christ on a throne, while Biblical stories are depicted on the sides of the arches. My neck began to ache -- a feeling I'd have many times during our stay in Palermo.

Some of my favorite images were, not surprisingly, botanical. I loved this tree growing on rocks: it felt like  a place to rest my eyes, but it also gave the same quiet feeling, on a larger scale, as depictions of nature in Ottoman and Persian miniatures.

A French tour group entered the church while we were there, led by a local guide. When he was finished with his introduction and the people were looking around on their own, I sat down and talked to him for a while: he was a young man, and told me he specialized in the Arab-Norman heritage of the area. If we had had more time, and if J. were more fluent in French, we might have hired him to take us around for an  afternoon, but I enjoyed our conversation.

Only halfway through our first day, we began to see that "mosaic" was both a literal and figurative term in Palermo, describing not just these Byzantine, 12th century wonders, but the city's past and present history. Africa was never very far away, nor was Greece, nor was the Middle East. The Phoenicians had sailed here first, from Tyre, followed by Greeks and north Africans, then Romans, then Arabs, then the Normans who originally were, of course, "Norsemen" or Vikings. All of these cultures had left their marks and their patterns, and during some periods -- especially the 12th century under Roger and his descendants -- they had coexisted peacefully. During much more of its history, the island had known experienced terrible violence or, at best, constant tension. And yet, these monuments of a better time had been preserved, perhaps as a reminder of what was possible.

Palermo's Mosaic - 1

The obscurity of the previous night was banished by a glorious sunrise, and we stood on the balcony of the apartment, looking out over steeples and domes, tiled roofs, and below us, winding cobblestone streets where people began to go about their day. It was time for coffee.

We walked past still-closed shops to find the small cafe recommended the night before by our host. The colors and styles of the buildings were reminiscent of Rome, but where Rome was grand, Palermo seemed grittier, worn, rougher. The light off the sea bathed the stuccoed walls and Baroque facades in a stronger brilliance, while casting the tiny alleys into deep shadow. Old Italian men wearing dark caps stood in groups, bantering, while younger men and even small boys raced by on Vespas and motorcycles. There were few women anywhere, but many tall dark-skinned men also walked or gathered in groups, looking restless, some in western dress and others in North African attire: tunics over flowing robes, small round caps. In the side streets near us we passed small shops selling halal kebabs, couscous, Indian food. None of these people spoke to us, or even looked at us closely, and I tried not to appear to be paying much attention to them. We had never been in southern Italy before, and certainly not in Sicily. The first 24 hours in a new place are for acclimation: getting the lay of the land, and also trying to take its emotional temperature: what's going on, what's safe and what isn't, where should we walk, is there hostility toward tourists, westerners, North Americans; how are the women behaving, are people walking alone, what does their body language say? We have pretty good antennae, and had read up on these places ahead of time, but a lot of the things that create comfort or discomfort are subtle, and even personal. As we walked, I knew that we were both paying close attention, and that we'd compare notes soon.

After we crossed Via Maqueda, a main street that runs, uncharacteristically, straight and parallel to the harbor, we found ourselves in Piazza Bellini, a broad paved square bordered by two historic churches. It had just begun to rain. Cafe Stagnitta was around the back of the piazza, and we entered the typical, rather elegant Italian coffee-bar: narrow, with mirrors on the walls, a glass display case filled with sweets or sandwiches beneath a high counter, several busy clerks in aprons, and a huge, shiny espresso machine. You stand at the counter to drink your espresso and eat a pastry, or pay more to sit at a table. We stood, taking the place of two regular patrons who were just leaving. There were no tables in this tiny room anyway; probably in better weather there were several out on the piazza. I ordered my usual cafe latte decaffeinato and a small lemon-filled pastry, while J. asked for an espresso and a croissant filled with green pistachio cream - a Sicilian specialty. The small white cups clinked in their saucers; the barista smiled at us; the coffee was dark, rich, delicious. I scraped the last bits of foam from my cup with the small spoon, and we paid our bill and stepped out into the drizzling rain, careful not to slip on the slick marble pavement.

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What had brought us to Sicily? Perhaps it was J.'s obsession with pizza, at first: we kept trying to get to Naples but always seemed to end up in other destinations. I had become even more curious about southern Italy after reading Elena Ferrante's four Neapolitan novels. There was our attraction to volcanos: Vesuvius, of course, south of Naples, but here on Sicily, the continually-active Mt. Etna. But it was the intersection of Sicily's history with our own that had sealed this decision. For me, there was the fact that this island was a major part of Magna Graecia -- the Greeks had established city-states here in the 5th century BC, and fought nearly continual wars with their great rival, Carthage, on the north coast of Africa, close to Sicily's southern coast; I was anxious to visit these ruins. For Jonathan, the Palermo area in particular had unique architectural monuments that blended the Norman kings' Christian religion and Byzantine art with the traditional work of native Arab craftsmen -- the island was mostly inhabited by Arab Muslims when the Normans arrived. Two of those Arab-Norman sites were right here, in this piazza.

 

We stood outside these buildings for a while, under a tall bell tower covered with geometric Arab motifs, and a towering date palm laden with branches of dark orange fruit. Dark pink bougainvillea bloomed in a courtyard behind a wrought iron fence; along the walls were agaves, palmettos. Where exactly were we: Damascus? Spain? Mexico? Florida?

 

A narrow path led along the side of the wall, above the piazza, and there we found the entrance to the smaller building, the Church of St. Cataldo, a straight-sided cube with three red domes. St. Cataldo, named after the medieval Irish Saint Cathaldus who came through southern Italy, was built in 1154 by Maio of Bari. Maio was magnus ammiratus ammiratorum or "great admiral of admirals" under the Norman King William I of Sicily , a title derived from the Arabic word "amir": he was an admiral but also a chancellor who wielded a great deal of influence. His primary legacy was to complete the centralisation and consolidation of Sicily that the earlier kings had begun, and he was responsible for a treaty that finally put an end to conflict between Sicily and the Pope. Maio is described variously as a totally honest, upright man and a corrupt womanizer who was the Queen's lover and involved in a plot to kill the King; in any event, he was assassinated not long after this church was built, and for that reason the interior was never finished.

The feeling, as we sat down under the stone domes, was of coolness, solidity, and immense calm. Two young women sold tickets in front of a curtained doorway, and serious conservation work was quietly proceeding in the altar area by white-coated technicians. Another couple sat quietly in wooden chairs. A middle-aged man paid, entered, took one look around, and loudly demanded his money back -- "This is all there is?" he shouted, in a mixture of English and Italian. "And it's under construction? You expect people to pay to see this?" The older of the two women politely and firmly refused to refund his money. "You have entered, you have to pay," she said, "It is how we finance the conservation." He finally gave up and stormed out; the rest of us exchanged amused glances.

The altar itself was original, as was the elaborate mosaic floor, but many of the interior decorations had been lost over the centuries, when the building had been used for other purposes such as a post office. The red color of the domes was probably an error of restoration from the 1800s.

Later I was glad we had seen this church first, both because of the emotional intensity that derived, I thought, from its simplicity, and because we could see the architectural structure so much more clearly than in interiors encrusted with Byzantine mosaics. The windows here, in particular, stood out for their varying, geometric Arab lattice motifs, which gave a lightness that contrasted with the massive arches. I had never been in such a place; Jonathan said it reminded him very much of buildings he had seen in Damascus.

Next: Byzantine mosaics, and King Roger of Sicily.