Cappella Palatina, Palermo

Cappella Palatina, Palermo, painted in oil on canvas in 1875 and held at Leighton House, depicts the most celebrated interior in Sicily — the twelfth-century palatine chapel of the Norman kings of Sicily, renowned for its extraordinary Byzantine-Sicilian mosaic decoration that covers virtually every surface. Leighton visited Palermo during his Italian travels and was clearly struck by the chapel's extraordinary synthesis of Byzantine, Islamic, and Norman Christian visual cultures in a single architectural space. The Cappella Palatina represented a uniquely complex visual environment: gold mosaic grounds, Byzantine Christ figures, Arabic stalactite ceilings, and Norman Romanesque architectural structure combining in one interior. For a painter with Leighton's wide cultural interests, the chapel was an exceptional subject.

The technical challenge of depicting the Cappella Palatina's interior was formidable: the gold mosaic grounds create an ambient luminosity quite different from natural daylight, and every visible surface is covered in complex decorative programmes that must be rendered with sufficient precision to convey the chapel's overwhelming ornamental richness. The palette is dominated by the warm gold of mosaic ground, the deep blues and greens of figural mosaics, and the cooler tonality of marble column shafts.