We recently spent a few weeks in Otranto, the easternmost city of Italy’s mainland whose geographical situation—close to the Balkan peninsula—has shaped much of its history. For the Romans it was a convenient departure point for Apollonium, their town in the land now called Albania. For the Ottomans, it was the foothold for a planned invasion of Rome. In 1480, Ghedik Ahmed Pasha and his men successfully took the town and massacred and enslaved the entire population.
Apart from its natural setting, which looks much more like a slice of the Peloponnese than the lush landscapes of other parts of Italy, Otranto is famous for its historical centre and particularly for the cathedral that was built by Normans in the eleventh century.
The Stormin’ Normans
The Normans were on a high in the eleventh century. Although their most spectacular achievement was the invasion and occupation of England, they also kicked up some dust in the Mediterranean. There was no decisive Battle of Hastings in the Mezzogiorno, but piecemeal, with the encouragement of various interested local parties (including the Pope), the Frankish Northmen conquered Sicily and Southern Italy.
In 1000, Southern Italy looked like this:
In 1050, it looked like this, the green indicating Norman control:
The hero of the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy was arguably Robert ‘Terror Mundi’ Guiscard, Count of Apulia and Calabria (c. 1015 – 17 July 1085). It was during his reign, in the year 1068, that a Norman bishop named William founded Otranto’s Cathedral of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary. Although it has been restored and decorated over the years, the cathedral’s Norman heart remains intact.
About thirty years later, Guiscard’s son Bohemond I of Antioch, now the new Count of Apulia and Calabria, donated land and money to Basilian Monks to build a monastery near the city. The Abbey of Saint Nicholas of Casole would soon become one of the most famous centers of learning in Italy.
The Basileans were well known for their fine penmanship and the copying of manuscripts. Their monasteries were often essentially studios of religious art where monks produced exquisite miniatures, paintings and goldsmith work. Monasteries at St. John the Baptist of Stoudio, at Mt. Athos, the Isle of Patmos and Rossano in Sicily had some famous workshops.
It is no surprise, then, that the Abbey of St. Nicholas of Casole became known for its scriptorium and that its library was one of the richest in Europe at the time, holding a large number of Greek and Latin manuscripts. Some of the monks were tasked with translating texts—both sacred and secular—from Latin, Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic.
Effectively, the abbey was a kind of university and study residence. Monks learned the finer points of rhetoric, astronomy and philosophy. It even had its poetry school in the circle of Greek-language poets (Abbot Nettario, Giorgio di Gallipoli, Giovanni Grasso, and Nicola di Otranto). And, naturally, it had its own ‘school’ of religious art.
Pantaleone’s Mosaic
When the bishop wanted an artist to make a mosaic floor for Otranto’s Cathedral in 1163, he looked no further than the Abbey of St. Nicholas of Casole. He engaged a priest named Pantaleone, the head of the faculty of painting at the abbey. In two years, Pantaleone (and presumably a team of helpers) had created a mosaic made up of more than 600,000 tesserae.
The mosaic’s overall structure is that of, simultaneously, the Tree of Life, the Cross and Christ’s body. The tree trunk goes straight up the middle, dividing the nave into two rectangles.
At the top of the nave is the story of Adam and Eve, their banishment from the Garden of Eden. At the very bottom, he has drawn three elephants (two adults and a baby).
Why elephants, exactly?
In designing his mosaic Pantaleone, he had access to the wealth of inspiration at the abbey. It’s tempting to imagine him wandering into the library, poring over texts to get inspiration for his masterpiece. One of the books he handled must have been the Physiologus graecus, a forerunner of the medieval bestiaries that would become incredibly popular in the next century. This was work compiled in Alexandria in the 2nd century BC. The title means ‘Greek Naturalist’ because most of the encyclopaedia-like entries being by saying ‘According to the naturalist…’ Each entry focuses on one animal (real or mythical), which features in a parable that is then explained to show the animal’s significance in the Christian universe. This is the book that gave us the story about the Phoenix rising from its ashes (a type of Christ) and the Pelican killing its rebellious brood only to revive them three days later with her own blood (mimicking Salvation).
The entry for ‘elephant’ hinges on the damnfool belief that they don’t have joints, meaning that once they fall down they can’t get up again. For this reason, they have to lean against trees to rest. In the parable, a ‘hunter’ takes advantage of this weakness by cutting the tree in half and propping it up to look solid so that the elephant will think it’s safe to lean on. The elephant falls down to be caught by the hunter or (hopefully) saved by other elephants. Here is the explanation:
Question: Who is the elephant? Answer: Adam. Who is the female elephant? Answer: Eve. ….The way he leaned and fell, he will not be able to rise. And the hunter comes and catches him. Had the hunter not done so, he would never have caught the elephant. And if the hunter does not come on time, [the elephant] shouts and a great elephant hears him and comes to raise him up. But he cannot, so they both shout. Four elephants came to raise him and could not. All shouted and twelve elephants came and could not raise him. And they all shouted and a small elephant came who raised him.
[translated from Bulgarian by Olga M. Mladenova and Vesselin Stoykov]
Most Christians of that period would have been trained to recognize the hunter as Satan, the ‘four elephants’ as the four evangelists, the ‘twelve elephants’ as the twelve disciples, the small elephant as the Christ child. Once you know this background story, and that they are some kind of zoological code for Adam and Even, it no longer becomes quite so weird that elephants would feature in this mosaic.
There are many other depictions of animals throughout the mosaic, some of them pretty goofy.
Water Stories
Two biblical stories that feature prominently in the mosaic are those of Jonah (of Whale fame) and Noah and the flood.
The story of Jonah (the Prophet who predicted the fall of Nineveh, then fell off a boat, got swallowed by a whale and then was spat up on a beach after three days) is depicted in the apse, which is the holiest part of the church—being closest to the East (where the sun rises), and (if we imagine the floor plan as a cross) corresponds to the position of Christ’s head on the cross.
The fact that Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale before being vomited onto dry land is a symbolic reflection of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. In Christian theology, Jonah’s experience serves as a premonition of the upcoming death and resurrection of Christ.
The story of Noah and the flood is another watery tale of rebirth after extinction, and it is presented here in its various stages, with Noah getting God’s instructions, he and his family making the ship (using timber from the Tree of Life) and ushering all the animals aboard the ship, which doesn’t seem totally seaworthy from this angle but does look cosy.
It’s tempting to imagine that these nautical stories were partly foregrounded because Otranto was a port town. That is probably a less important aspect than the fact that, spiritually speaking, water was a purifying element: the necessary Even apart from that, though, they are good stories and were depicted in early Christian art very often.
The Tower of Babel
Just as the Tree of Life provided timber for Noah’s Ark, it is also used to build the Tower of Babel, a distinctly unholy project where Noah’s descendants try to construct a tower that touches Heaven, arrogantly challenging the power of God.
King Arthur and Alexander the Great
In another set of juxtaposed pairs (elephants & Adam and Eve, Jonah & Noah, the Ark & the Tower of Babel), there are two model emperors in King Arthur from the far West and Alexander from the East.
The legend of King Arthur probably had its roots in pagan oral tradition. This legendary king led the post-Roman Britons against Anglo-Saxon invaders in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The first mention of his existence appears in the 6th-century Welsh poem Y Gododdin but he entered the popular European imagination with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittanniae (c.1135-1139), The History of Kings in Britain, which became one of the most popular texts of the Middle Ages.
In Monmouth’s version, King Arthur created a large empire, married Guinevere, was advised by the visionary madman and shape-shifter Merlin, and came to his final rest in the mythical island of Avalon. Other details, such as the Holy Grail, Lancelot and his romance with Guinevere and Camelot, were invented by the French writer Chrétien de Troyes in books such as Yvain, the Knight of the Lion (1180) Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart (1177-1181), Perceval, the Story of the Grail (1182-1190)
There are several parallels between Arthur’s life and that of Christ’s. He had a supernatural birth, he performed miraculous feats, prophecies were spoken about him (by Merlin), he was buried in a cave stopped up with a stone,
The fact that King Arthur’s tomb was never found suggested to some that he may never have died and was just hanging around waiting to make a comeback. This belief was disturbing for some because it seemed to blasphemously suggest that that power of deathlessness and resurrection did not belong to Christ alone. In 1113 a small group of French churchmen travelled to Bodmin, Cornwall and explained to the locals (who considered themselves Arthur’s descendants) that King Arthur was dead. The locals did not take this in the kindly spirit in which it was meant and a riot broke out. The French clerics reportedly barely escaped with their lives.
Whether or not Arthur was immortal, it was clear that he was considered a devout upholder of the Christian faith and a good role model.
Another pagan ruler was upheld as a model by Byzantine Christians (and considered a saint by believers in various eastern districts): Alexander the Great.
It is said that St. Basil the Great (330-379) held Alexander up as a model of self discipline, and it appears to have been a common Byzantine view. Corinne Jouanno points out that the Byzantine education included Greek and Roman texts, which were rich in anecdotes about the conqueror. Two of the most influential works are Plutarch’s ethical writings and Dio Chrysostom’s On Kingship.
Sometime before 388 CE, an unknown author composed the Alexander Romance in Greek. Although the story had an historical core, most of it was pure fiction. Between the 4th and 16th centuries, it was translated into almost every European vernacular as well as Latin, Coptic, Ge’ez, Middle Persian, Byzantine Greek, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Syriac and Hebrew. As time went on, it grew into many different versions and was almost considered a genre rather than a single work.
So eager were Christians to claim Alexander for their own that they started seeing his name where it wasn’t. The Book of Daniel chapters 2 and 7 describe four evil empires that are crushed by God’s kingdom. Some commentators interpreted the third of these as the Hellenic empire of Alexander the Great. Furthermore, in the Book of Daniel there is a mention of Gog and Magog, evil forces opposed to the people of God. The Alexander Romance upholds a popular legend that the Gates of Alexander were constructed by him in order to keep Gog and Magog out, so conflating the legendary general with a vague Biblical prophecy.
Zodiac
In the crossing between the transept, above the depiction of Adam and Eve, is a section consisting of twelve tondos, each one containing the name of a month, the appropriate star symbol, and an agricultural activity appropriate to the season.
This is just a tiny sample of the mosaic, which in some ways prefigures Dante’s Divine Comedy in the scope of its erudition, its humor, symmetry and the compression of theological knowledge into a unified artistic universe. You can browse all of the mosaic in detail here.
