Enfilade

From Lund Humphries:

Julian Treuherz, Art and Architecture of Sicily (London: Lund Humphries, 2023), 320 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1848226043, £40 / $80.

Sicily’ s strategic position in the centre of the Mediterranean led to settlement or conquest by a succession of different peoples—Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, Germans, French, Spanish—each one leaving its traces on Sicilian culture. This book provides a chronological survey, each section opening with a brief historical overview which is followed with an authoritative and engaging account of the development of the period’ s art and architecture. The leading architects, artists and stylistic currents are all discussed and outstanding individual buildings and works of art are analysed in detail, while archaeology, urban development, patronage and decorative arts are also covered. This is not a story of artistic conquests, but as a successive layering of different cultures: the way each one interacted with its predecessors produced art and architecture quite distinct from anywhere else in Europe.

Julian Treuherz is an art historian who was Keeper of Art Galleries for National Museums Liverpool between 1989 and 2007. He has written many books, articles and exhibition catalogues, and over the last twenty years he has spent part of each year in Sicily studying its art and architecture.

c o n t e n t s

• Introduction

• Prehistoric Sicily
• The Greeks come to Sicily: The Archaic Period
• The Greeks in Sicily: The Classical Period
• Punic Sicily
• The Greeks in Sicily: The late Classical and Hellenistic Periods
• Sicily, Province of Rome

• Early Christian, Byzantine, and Arabic Sicily
• The Normans in Sicily: A New Architectural Style
• The Normans in Sicily: The Royal Workshops, the Pleasure Pavilions, and the Later Cathedrals
• Sicily under the Hohenstaufen Emperors
• Late Medieval Sicily: German, French, and Aragonese Rule

• Sicily under the Spanish Viceroys: The 15th Century
• Sicily under the Spanish Viceroys: The 16th Century
• The Coming of the Baroque to Western Sicily
• The Earthquake of 1693 and the Rebuilding of Eastern Sicily
• Late Baroque Architecture in Western Sicily
• Baroque Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts
• Neoclassicism in Sicily

• The Search for a New Style: Sicily, 1840–1918
• Sicily after 1918