L’Italie méridionale et les ‘mondes normands’. Le cas de Brindisi et des Pouilles

Abstract

Taking into consideration a few religious sculptures dating back to the Norman conquest, this study investigates the clearly identifiable contributions about the role of Normans in creating the cultural identities of southern Italy. The starting point is represented by some sculptures of the monastery church of San Benedetto in Brindisi, Puglia. Brindisi belonged to the County of Conversano, assigned to Godfrey, the grandson of Robert Guiscard. During this period many other artworks were realized in the territories subjected to this family, for example, Laterza, Monopoli, Conversano. These works are different in style, but all of them are attributable to models which are unrelated to the Apulian artistic tradition. It was a heterogeneous culture that involved all the provinces of Bari, up to Canne and Barletta. Still between the 1130s and the 1160s, in these cities, which define the boundary with northern Puglia, some artworks reflect models of Norman origins by demonstrating that the Norman component in the southern society has contributed to the construction of the artistic identity of these lands.