The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Brochure Series of Architectural
Illustration, Volume 01, No. 03, March 1895, by Various

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Title: The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 03, March 1895
The Cloister at Monreale, Near Palermo, Sicily

Author: Various

Release Date: July 17, 2006 [EBook #18852]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE BROCHURE SERIES

OF ARCHITECTURAL ILLUSTRATION.

VOL. I. MARCH, 1895. No. 3.

THE CLOISTER AT MONREALE, NEAR PALERMO, SICILY.

The island of Sicily, being in form nearly an equilateral triangle, with
one side facing towards Italy, another towards Greece, and the third,
towards Africa, was a tempting field for conquest to the various nations
surrounding it. It was successively overrun by the Greeks,
Carthaginians, and Romans, and later, after the Christian era, again
successively by the Byzantines, the Moors, and the Normans. Almost all
of the architectural remains of the older periods belong to the time of
the Greeks, as neither the Carthaginians nor Romans left much to show
for their occupation of the island. With the exception of occasional
ruined examples surviving from the time of the Dorian Greeks who
colonized Sicily, most of the monuments now existing belong to the
Byzantine, Saracenic, and Romanesque periods. As would be natural to
expect, the latter influences are not clearly separable one from another
either in time or in locality. They overlap in all directions; but in
general the Byzantine, which was the earliest and most powerful element,
is found more strongly marked, and more frequently on the east coast. It
however forms the groundwork and is the main ingredient of all that
follows. The Saracenic work, which succeeds the Byzantine in date, found
a stronger foothold in the South, on the coast nearest Africa; and the
influence of the Normans appears in the North.

Every new race of masters in this frequent recurrence of conquest found
the island already oc