A great exhibition that offers an in-depth look atspiritual aspect of the Royal Palace of Palermo, a journey through a substantial corpus of the famous 'Treasury of the Palatine Chapel'. AND' 'Thesaurus', the exhibition with which a 'secret' heritage, until now known to few, shines again. Alongside the treasure of the Palatine Chapel, other finds support the continuity, perhaps the immortality, of the meaning of that page of history, which not surprisingly has become a World Heritage Site. The exhibition offers a careful and non-random selection of treasures: 56 artefacts which together create a true document of the universal cultural message, capable of keeping the complexities alive. These are caskets, very refined silver, parchments, baptismal fonts, works depicting the Madonna Odigitria, jewels belonging to Constance of Aragon, a bull depicting Roger II, a Mesopotamian seal found in one of the caskets, which catapults us back to Babylon, to third millennium BC
'Thesaurus', which will open to the public tomorrow and will remain open to visitors until 30 September 2024, was presented today at Palazzo Reale. It is the result of a synergy between the Federico II Foundation and the Fund for religious buildings (Ministry of the Interior) and of the collaboration with the Prefecture of Palermo, the regional department of cultural heritage and Sicilian identity, the Archbishopric and the Diocesan Museum of Palermo, the Archbishop's Palace and the Diocesan Museum of Monreale, the Superintendence of Palermo, the Superintendency of Archival Heritage, the Regional Museum of Messina (MuMe), the Regional Library of Palermo and the Paladino Archive. The treasure takes on the concrete and fascinating function of 'history keeper'. The refinement and magnificence of the finds becomes the key to access a timeless journey to discover a 'wonderful' period: the treasure seems to contain and want to tell the story of that immaterial aspect that brought together workers of different cultures and religious perspectives. In this sense the treasure of the Palatine Chapel can be defined as the 'Treasure of Mediterranean civilizations'.
Gavagno, 'heritage to be safeguarded and preserved for humanity'
“The Federico II Foundation continues with the 'Thesaurus' exhibition in the work of revealing and valorising the infinite contents of the Royal Palace – says the president of the Sicilian Regional Assembly and of the Federico II Foundation, Gaetano Galvagno -. The initiative takes place with a view to ever-increasing usability of the important Sicilian building, in line with the mission of a UNESCO site. The artefacts in the exhibition tell stories of distant times and evidence of great cultural events that have made Sicily the nerve center of the Mediterranean”. For Galvagno “the treasure of the Palatine Chapel, in particular, symbolizes the identity of a people with multiple heritages cultural and geopolitical issues collected over the centuries. The Thesaurus exhibition, beyond its aesthetic value, is evidence of a heritage to be safeguarded, made known and preserved for humanity”, says Galvagno who thanks the Fund for religious buildings, the Ministry of the Interior and all the lending bodies for “having believed in this cultural operation, which represents the telling of a page of history with eternal values”.
“The initiative of the Federico II Foundation is full of scientific awareness, but also of a passion and civil urgency that are striking – underlines the central director of religious affairs and for the administration of the Fund for religious buildings, prefect Fabrizio Gallo – The objects exhibited in the 'Thesaurus' exhibition are the result of different cultural and religious traditions, sometimes even in conflict, but which found their original synthesis in southern Italy, governed by the Normans. I believe that the civil urgency of Frederick II – he adds – starts from this consideration and from the conviction that that historical experience, witnessed by silent yet eloquent objects, still has a lot to say to our country and the South today. This is an urgency that also characterizes the action of the Cult Buildings Fund, the body that owns the Treasury of the Palatine Chapel, administered by the Ministry of the Interior, and is aimed at satisfying the need to make the enormous cultural, civil and religious heritage possessed accessible to an increasingly wider public, in belief that beauty and knowledge must be available to all and that every type of positive action must be promoted so that the cultural tradition of the past enlivens the present and prepares for the future”.
Monterosso, 'Universal and transgenerational heritage'
“When we planned the creation of the 'Thesaurus' exhibition – explains Patrizia Monterosso, general director of the Federico II Foundation – we were already aware of the importance that an exhibition of this magnitude should have with respect to the valorisation process, understood as improving the conditions of knowledge and as an incentive for use capable of transmitting values that the heritage on display bears. We have designed an installation capable not only of placing the visitor in relation to the works in relation to aesthetic perception, but also of promoting the understanding of a a legacy corresponding to a universal and transgenerational heritage. In fact, the UNESCO recognition of the Royal Palace and the Palatine Chapel as World Heritage Sites has precisely this meaning”.
Among the works on display there are also two by Mimmo Paladino: a bronze sculpture (2018) and an octagonal painting (2011), both large and entitled 'Stupor Mundi'. A sign that the charm of that culture exerts a strong timeless impulse, to the point of stimulating one of the greatest contemporary international artists. Returning to the treasure of the Palatine Chapel, among the caskets on display, the rectangular-shaped casket (12th century) is particularly significant as it is a clear testimony to the coexistence between Christian and Islamic iconographies. These iconographies are a perfect evocative palimpsest of the Roger Room of the Royal Palace, of the wooden muqarnas ceiling of the Palatine Chapel. The elliptical casket (12th-13th century) is unique in its kind in the Middle Ages for its ornamentation. The shape of the domed lid is a true rarity in Islamic art. It is one of the most valuable pieces of the Palatine Chapel treasure, it is characterized by an epigraphic text with Arabic inscriptions in Naskhi characters.
Among the finds also the royal bull of Roger II and the baptismal font
The rectangular-shaped casket with wooden slide closure and covered in ivory (9th-11th century) represents, however, the typical stylistic features of Byzantine culture. Each character represented is framed in a space delimited by small stylized flowers with eight petals, capable of recalling the starry decorative sections of the muqarnas ceiling of the Palatine Chapel in Palermo. The Mesopotamian seal was the most welcome and unexpected surprise that the so-called Cofano inside this small cylinder-seal of hard stone (aragonite) dating back to the distant third millennium BC. The dating, which takes into account the iconography and the lack of epigraph, is unanimously considered to be from the third millennium BC, it is the first Mesopotamian seal entered into the collection in Europe.
The royal bull of Roger II was created starting from the acquisition of the title of king of Sicily (25 December 1130) to accompany the documents issued by his chancellery in order to give them legal value. It also served the function of materializing the physical presence of the king depicted there to the subjects of all the lands of the Kingdom. Despite the small size of this lead bubble (35 millimeters), the image of the king is very detailed and stands out effectively. The baptismal font (1135), exhibited at the Thesaurus exhibition, comes from the Church of the SS. Salvatore di Messina and today kept at the Mume and is similar to another baptismal font, once located at the Abbey of Santa Maria del Patìr in Calabria and currently exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Commissioned by the archimandrite himself and both created by Gandolfo, a sculptor active during the reign of Roger II.
In the catalog book – 396 pages – contributions from Italian and foreign scholars
During the Norman-Swabian phase, the Royal Palace was a place of artistic synthesis between Latins, Byzantines and Muslims, as told by official documents, travelers and members of the court. An example of this is the marble stoup with mosaic inserts, dating back to between the 12th and 13th centuries, which recalls in the mosaic inserts the typical decoration defined as Arab-Norman with geometric motifs made with stone, gilded and glass mosaic tiles that lead back to the elements geometric shapes present in the Palatine Chapel or inside the Hall of King Roger. The book-catalogue – 396 pages with an edition in Italian and one in English – offers a further page of in-depth analysis according to a multidisciplinary approach thanks to the contribution of important foreign scholars (Henri Bresc, Vera Falkenhausen, Kristian Toomaspoeg and William Tronzo) and Italians (Fabrizio Agnello, Maria Giulia Aurigemma, Monica Chiovaro, Roberta Civiletto, Franco D'Angelo, Maria Concetta Di Natale, Antonio Di Maggio, Antonio Giuffrida, Marco Masseti, Carlo Aloe Nero, Giuseppe Sarcinelli, Lucinia Speciale, Giovanni Travagliato, Lucia Travaini, Mirko Vagnoni). The result is a historical, art-historical, anthropological, semiotic, archaeological, archival, architectural, zoological and paleological analysis with reference to the Near East and the Mediterranean. With the exhibition and in particular with the book-catalogue, the Federico II Foundation pays homage to the memory of Vlado Zoric, a historian in love with Sicily who passed away in 2021, with whom the Foundation collaborated.
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