Architecture, Materials, and Languages: From Stone to Marble and Vice Versa (Sicily, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries)

• In Event: Repositioning Art, Architecture, and Humanism in Renaissance Sicily and the Italian South I

Abstract

Between the second half of the fifteenth century and the early decades of the sixteenth century, architecture in Sicily offers rare case of the coexistence of two “worlds” of technique and stylistic languages linked to distinct cultural contexts: what traditional historiography has termed the ‘late Gothic’ and the ‘Renaissance.’ This paper proposes an unconventional approach that instead begins with the materials and professional prerogatives that defined these two architectural cultures –a perspective that lends insight into the shifting balance of power between the late Gothic and the Renaissance. Fueled by the naturalization of dynasties of sculptural marmorari on Sicily, the stone of the late Gothic period came to coexist with that of the white marble of classicism. These two materials and languages intertwined and hybridized, supplanted only with the advent of local polychrome marble, which signaled the rise of a new architectural language at the end of the sixteenth century.

Author

• Emanuela Garofalo, Università degli Studi di Palermo