Veronika Ushakova
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
The integration of Romanesque art tradition into Byzantine culture on Apulian territory was a complex process extending over several centuries, in which the two coexisted in astonishing harmony with each other. The Norman conquest of these domains entailed social and cultural changes, and this by-turn initiated the process of consolidating the traditions of Eastern Christian and Western Christian art. The influence of the Occident started to make itself felt with the advent of church buildings on Apulian territory, whose portals were carved with monumental schemes derived from Romanesque art. It seems that the basis of this sculptural decoration was a set of images that appeared on the pages of Norman Romanesque illuminated manuscripts dating back to the early 11th and late 12th centuries.
One of the most widespread motifs is the leafy ornament composed of figures, animals and acanthus that can be observed in the splendid plastic ornamentation of basilicas in Trani, Bari and Barletta. It would be useful to look at some early examples, for it can be seen that both the general composition and single figures have a very respectable ancestry. One of these ancestors must have been a late antique mosaic with compositions similar to those found in a mosaic pavement in Antioch during the 1st century. Another possible source of borrowing may be seen in the representation of the same motif in a couple of manuscripts derived from the scriptorium of Citeaux in Burgundy in the early 12th century.
So far, then, there is no overwhelming evidence to prove that the plastic and figurative language, which appeared in Romanesque sculpture in Apulia, is a faithful copy and combination of certain ancient elements. It could be only supposed that the source of some motifs ultimately goes back to the Late Antique and early Christian pictorial prototypes, as well as to the illuminated Norman manuscripts. From these examples it will be seen that composers of Apulian sculptural decoration did not necessarily invent all of the details that they incorporated into it. They may well have collected them from other sources and combined them with modern Romanesque motifs. This may account for some of the obscurities in the decorations, because the vocabulary of one story is being used to tell another.