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Jewels in the Seams of Cardiff Castle: William Burges’s Arab Room and Transcultural Citations of Norman Sicily
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Jewels in the Seams of Cardiff Castle: William Burges’s Arab Room and Transcultural Citations of Norman Sicily
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Journal Article
Jewels in the Seams of Cardiff Castle: William Burges’s Arab Room and Transcultural Citations of Norman Sicily
2026
Overview
William Burges's late nineteenth-century designs for the Arab Room at Cardiff Castle are based on the Cappella Palatina, built during the reign of the Norman King of Sicily, Roger II (1095-1154). In the twelfth century Sicily was home to Muslim, Jewish, Latin Christian, and Greek Christian communities. Seven centuries later, in multi-ethnic Cardiff, Burges replicated the aesthetic possibilities of iconographic polyvalence in a polycultural and multi-ethnic society not dissimilar to the tessellated communities of Norman Sicily. Where previous studies of Burges's Arab Room were contented with the homogeneous label 'Arab' to describe the source material for his designs, this article is an important contribution to the study of transcultural networks of pleasured aesthetic exchange across spatial and temporal zones and within heterogeneous communities.
Publisher
Open Library of Humanities
