Fighting Knights and Sirens: The Cloister, Monreale

The cloister at Monreale is dated to c. 1175-89. Grandiose in design and execution, it is aptly described as the richest, largest in scale, and most complete of its kind. If the immediate impact upon the tourist of the late twentieth century is one of size and splendour, how would the Monreale cloister have been viewed by contemporaries?

Few pieces of art criticism have been more often quoted than the words of the great Cistercian, St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153):

How, in the cloister where the monks do their reading, can that ridiculous monstrosity be justified, an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity? What place have obscene monkeys, savage lions, unnatural centaurs, creatures part man and part beast, striped tigers, fighting knights, or hunters sounding their horns ...? With such an abundant and bewildering array of contradictory forms on show, one would rather read in the sculptured stones than in the books, and spend the whole day wondering at them than meditating on the law of God. Good Lord] if we are not ashamed by the folly of it all, surely the expense must stick in our throats?