View of the Cathedral of Palermo

(Charles-Leon Vinit)

The ancient city of Palermo was the capital of the island kingdom of Sicily from 1072 when it was ruled by the Normans, until the unification of Naples and Sicily into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1815. The original settlement in the center of the Conca d’Oro below Mount Pellegrino, was founded by the Phoenicians in the 8th century B.C. Later settled by the Carthaginians it was captured by the Romans in 254 B.C. and remained part of the Empire until Sicily fell to Arab invaders in 831. The Normans, who invaded Sicily at the end of the eleventh century, brought Christianity to the city and in 1185 began construction of the Cathedral which houses the tombs of Roger II de Hauteville, King of Sicily, and the Hohenstaufen Emperors and Kings of Sicily Henry VI and his son Frederick II. The Cathedral was altered slightly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and again at the end of the eighteenth but remains substantially as it was when the Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa made the city his southern capital.

Although the principal architectural source is that of Byzantium, the influence of Arab architecture is also apparent, the castellations along the roof line recalling those of buildings in Moorish Spain. The cupola, however, built in high renaissance style was added later and sits somewhat incongruously on the long, straight roof. The Florentine architect Ferdinando Fuga redecorated the interior of the Cathedral in a restrained neo-classical style for Ferdinand IV and III between 1770 and 1809, but of this there is no external evidence. In the foreground the Piazza del Duomo (still little changed today from when Vinit painted it), is surrounded by a balustrade on which are mounted plinths for statutes of Palermo’s bishops. The figures scattered across the foreground include typical Palermitan citizens, a cross section of society from the gypsy with his mule-drawn cart, three priests in black, men in regional costume and the carriage of a more substantial citizen moving towards the viewer. On the extreme left an elegant young woman looks down from a balcony over which a large carpet is carelessly hung. It is a brilliant sunny day, and the city is at peace; just over twenty years later the capture of Palermo by Garibaldi changed Italian history forever, bringing the Two Sicilies kingdom to an end and uniting Italy for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.

LITERATURE: Le Journal des Artistes, 1838, XIIth year, Vol. I, no 17 of 29 April 1838, p. 232.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Salon, 1838, no. 1774, ‘Vues de la cathédrale de Palerme, même numéro.’