Tra mito e modello. Le cattedrali normanne nell'architettura religiosa del Cinquecento in Italia meridionale

Sometimes cloaked in a mythical halo and always celebrated by the historiography of the early modern age, the foundation of the cathedrals at the time of the Norman domination for the religious architecture in Sicily is a true year zero. The primacy in the basilica typology, on the one hand, and their role as places of topicality, on the other hand, made those cathedrals the privileged terms of reference for religious architecture at the beginning of the early modern age. This can be noted, in particular, in a wide and varied series of churches created during the sixteenth century, which re-propose and reinterpret compositional and spatial themes of the aforementioned cathedrals, such as the preference for columnar supports and the creation of large bipartite transepts. These solutions are often declined in contexts of linguistic hybridization that escape any stylistic classification. A similar phenomenon can be traced in Apulia, especially in the area called Terra di Bari, with a surprising variety of outcomes, only partially comparable to the Sicilian ones. However, in both contexts, the re-proposal of specific design solutions, rather than a long inertia, configures real revivals that can be interpreted through a common reading key.