Stucco panel with medallions featuring animals

This panel was found with other fragments behind the altar of S. Maria di Terreti, in a room that was walled up during restoration work in the seventeenth century.

An uninterrupted rounded border demarcates two parallel rows of four medallions, joined where they intersect by roundels engraved with hearts which, to judge by the other panels in the same series, probably served as fixing points for gadrooned studs. In the intervening spaces four three-branched palm trees fan out in a rosette. Each circle contains a pair of animals : in the upper row are two facing peacocks, their heads turned towards the rear and each holding a lily-shaped palm twig in its beak ; in the lower row, there are two four-legged animals addorsed against a stylized tree of life, their heads turned towards each other and thus forming the shape of a palm tree.

The same decoration is to be found on at least two panels of the same provenance.[i] Nevertheless, here it contains inscriptions written in pseudo-Kufic script with pointed and curved[ii] or decorative[iii] strokes, situated in the centre of a larger composition including a plinth decorated with star-shaped indentations. G. Ventrone Vassallo (1994) likens this plaque to another fragment (inv. 11799) which has an arched band ornamented with a plaited motif and a border composed of pseudo-Kufic lettering[iv].

The addorsed or facing animals in the medallions recall the textiles and stuccoes of the Sassanid tradition, much copied in the Islamic and Byzantine worlds: these painted decorations, Umayyad stuccoes, and fabrics were produced from Spain to Eastern Iran from the tenth century onwards. Precious Oriental textiles were frequently replaced in churches by murals or stucco panels, which were less costly and served also as liturgical furnishings. At S. Maria di Terreti, this is how the apse and the presbytery were decorated[v].

According to Monneret de Villard, however, the pseudo-epigraphic surrounds of the majority of the panels in S. Maria di Terreti are related to Byzantine textiles[vi]. Similar borders surrounding a motif of medallions decorated with animals can be found in Calabria on the ornamental tiling of the S. Maria del Patire church in Rossano (1101-1105). They can also be found in Greece, where a very similar example can be observed in the Episkopi church in Volo[vii]. The same writer states that Byzantine fabrics were much in demand in the Norman lands (Sicily and Southern Italy), especially after George of Antioch’s expedition to the Peloponnese in 1147 which brought back a rich haul of precious textiles, and also caused the arrival in Palermo of captured cloth-workers, amongst them Jewish and Muslim weavers who were later employed in the royal workshops[viii].

While admitting the Byzantine influence, M.V. Fontana emphasises the presence in Southern Italy of large Greek monastic communities which had come from the Byzantine territories from the ninth century onwards, bringing with them their designs and techniques[ix]. U. Scerrato adds that the medallion on textiles cannot derive from Fatimid fabrics as they did not use this design, whereas the Ghaznavids had imitated on stone from the twelfth century onwards fabrics bordered with inscriptions[x]. G. di Gangi, in his turn, suggests stronger links with the Muslim tradition, based on his analysis of stucco fragments found in the church of S. Maria del Mastro in Gerace, dating from between the end of the eleventh and first half of the twelfth centuries and showing technical and stylistic features close to those of S. Maria di Terreti. In particular, certain panels show flying creatures addorsed in small circles. Pointing to the geographical proximity of Sicily, providing the possibility for contact with the Muslim tradition, and the wide circulation of an Islamic common language in Mediterranean countries, he puts forward the hypothesis that there were Arab-Muslim workshops working for the Normans, in Calabria as well as in Sicily[xi].

[ii] Scerrato 1979, ill. 304, 306 ; Orsi 1922, p. 554, f. 4-5, where it is specified that the pseudo-inscription is obtained  using  a 26cm. stamp, impressed several times, and in which the absolute similarity between the central motif with medallions of that panel and of the one described here is emphasized, even if in the latter case the inscriptions were never present.

[iii] Scerrato 1979, ill. 307 ; Orsi 1922, p. 552, fig. 2-3.

[iv] Ventrone Vassallo 1994, cat. 85. A comparison is established with a bacino of polychrome glazed ceramic from S. Piero a Grado in Pisa (Pisa, Museo Nazionale di S. Matteo, inv. 70) attributed to Ifriqiya at the beginning of the 11th century. The fragment of stucco in question is considered by Scerrato (1979, ill. 305) to be an element of architectonic decoration, whereas Orsi (1922, p. 555-556 e fig. 9) judges it to be part of the small ciborium which would have decorated the altar of the church or of a septum, i.e. a partition, closing it off.

[v]Orsi 1922, p. 560.

[vi] Monneret de Villard 1953, p. 167.

[vii] Fontana 1994, p. 456.

[viii] Monneret de Villard 1953, p. 167.

[ix]Fontana 1994, p. 456.

[x]Scerrato 1979, p. 355. The writer refers to marble panels which decorated the ceremonial part of the Palace of Masʿûd III at Ghazni. Cf; the one edged with a Kufic inscription in U. Scerrato, “The first two Campaigns at Ghazni”, East and West , 9 (1959), p. 23-55, fig. 33.

[xi]G. di Gangi 1994, cat. 304a-b; Id. 1995, p. 94-97.