The Benedictine Cloister of Monreale

I could begin by describing that great church, the Cathedral of Monreale, which sits on a hillside above Palermo, in Sicily.  But it’s famous all over the world, and hundreds of writers have already written about it, including me, so you probably already know about it – maybe you’ve even been there.

So I don’t need to mention that the young Norman king, William II, ordered its construction in 1174, or that it was part of a new archdiocese and monastery that he persuaded Pope Alexander III to establish because William wanted to blunt the power of his ambitious former tutor, Walter of the Mill, Archbishop of Palermo.  And, of course, you probably already know that the king hired artists from Venice and Constantinople to cover the immense interior of the church with Byzantine-style mosaics illustrating biblical themes, and that these brilliant decorations cover a larger area than even San Marco in Venice, and required an estimated 2200 kilograms of gold to colour the tesserae.  Or that among the portraits of saints in the apse, you can see St. Thomas Becket, who was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral just four years before, even though William was married to Joan of England, daughter of King Henry II,  who supposedly growled “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” just days before his knights hacked Thomas to death.

No, I needn’t bore you with facts about the cathedral; let us turn to something with which we may be less familiar.  Next to the church there is a large cloister, 47 metres on each side, the same as the length of the Cathedral’s nave.  The cloister, though it is well-known, is not as famous as the church.  It was built at the same time, however, along with a large monastery compound.  The monastery buildings have all been destroyed or are in ruins, but the large and beautiful cloister survives.

I like cloisters just about as much as anyone can who’s not a monk; in fact, when I’m touring a monastery church, after an hour or two of frescoes and statues and carved pulpits, I sometimes furtively begin looking for that discreet door in a side wall through which I can escape to a quiet, arcaded haven with a patch of green in the middle.

I found that you can’t reach the cloister at Monreale through a discreet side door – you have to exit the church to find the cloister entrance, and then pay a small fee.  But the contrast with the glowing, almost overwhelming, magnificence of the cathedral is more than worth the price.  Bounded on all four sides by graceful arcades of slender, doubled columns supporting pointed arches, and with a lawn of green grass surrounded by low hedges, the space, despite its size, seems to enfold you with a sense of calm.  It is, figuratively, a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden, a symbol of the Virginity of Mary.  There are palm trees in the garden, symbols of faith and emblems of martyrdom; a couple of olive trees, whose branches symbolize peace; a fig tree, like the one in the garden of Eden whose leaves Adam and Eve used to cover their nakedness; and a pomegranate, one of the first fruits found in the Promised Land.

Many of the columns are decorated with mosaics in geometric patterns, perhaps created by Sicilian-Arab workers, who very likely created the geometric relief decoration above the arches as well – because among those who worked on both the church and the monastery were artisans from the local community, and Sicily had been under Muslim rule for more than two and a half centuries when William’s ancestors, the Norman Hauteville family, conquered the island in 1091.  It’s said, by the way, that William II admired certain aspects of Arab culture besides their art:  like his grandfather Roger II and his father, William I, he spoke Arabic and kept a harem.

The columns, 228 of them, are arranged in pairs atop a low support wall, and are topped by elaborate capitals, originally carved in high relief from pure white Parian marble. Now, however, most of the capitals wear a patina of centuries of red dust, which makes them look like sandstone.  Each pair of columns is served by one capital, which supports a shared impost block, the flat slab above the capital from which the arches spring.  The images are of marvellous quality, the work of master carvers.  There are biblical stories, mythological scenes, fantastic beasts, knights and warriors, dragons (of course) and even tumbling acrobats.  No one knows who carved them, although one bears an inscription: “I am the marble worker Romano, son of Constantino”.  In one corner of the garden there is an elegant small fountain, surrounded by its own miniature colonnade.  Legend says that William himself sometimes stopped there to wash his hands and face; the monks certainly did.

There are usually only a few people in the cloister, but the last time I was there, I was at first mildly annoyed by a large group of young people gaily entering the garden, chattering among themselves.  But soon they nestled like a flock of birds along the support wall between the columns, fell silent as they pulled out their drawing pads, and began earnestly copying the graceful forms of their surroundings; and I thought: this is how beauty becomes complete.  

Text © 2019 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2019 by Patricia Gartman. First published in Italia! Magazine, May 2019