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Church of Santa Maria

The Church Of Santa Maria Of Maniace, typical  basilica church, is included in the volumes disposition of the Nelson Duchy complex.

Rose together with the Benedictine abbey about 1173 on the ruins of a Basilian pre-existent building, wanted by the Queen Margherita, to lasting memory of the battle won by Giorgio Maniace against the Saracens.

As it was done at the time, the abbey and the church came provided  with a castle or defensive tower.

The church can be accessed from a little courtyard set between the principal façade and the arcade portion of the Dukedom.
The left prospect in the median part of the perimeter is visible only externally.

The side prospects are characterized by Gothic windows with splay modeled in brick and  elements worked in lava stone.
On the rear prospect are visible the ogival arches linked to the apse parts.

Splendid example of Norman architecture, with a precious portal in limestone and three naves supported by mighty pillars in lava stone, inside contains pictures of big value, between which a Gothic tripthic.

The most complete testimony of how a church had to be until the XVII century is of Giovanni Angelo De Cocchis which visited the monastery about 1741 and took a few testimonies given by other visitors again in 1579, before the terrible earthquake of 1693.
The monastery had a big tower attached to east at the apse of the church.

A transept inside was  giving origin to a big arch at the center and to two smaller ones in correspondence of the two secondary naves.

The devastating earthquake of 1693 struck eText1ly the eastern side of the monastery structure.
Destroyed the big tower of defense attached to the apse of the church and the apse itself (whose remains are today visible, having been brought to light by the excavations made  inside the granary).

From 1693 until the first years 1800, when it was restructured and deeply changed by the Nelson heirs, the church remained in a ruinous state.


The Gotic portal
The wonderful Gothic portal, which is worth becoming a national monument, is work of great artistic value going back, probably, at the first years of the foundation of the abbey.
The Gothic disposition of volumes follows the nervous modulation of the bases on which it is set up. The frame is adorned with several cordons, big and small, vaguely shaped and jutting out.
Three of the moldings plants reproduce big sea cables.
Two groups of side smooth and round little columns, of sandstone, marble and granite, support the big arch.

The capitals

which connect the structure have a stylistic form which sends again to analogous works executed in Monreale, seat of the Episcopal jurisdiction.

The sculpted figures are little caryatids leaning on splendid basins adorned with acanthus leaves worked to embroidery.
Depict scenes of the world creation, but also scenes whose interpretation remains very mysterious (like the woman's bodies mingled with monstrous beings), in spite of the precise description that  Benedetto Radice made.
Similar sculptures were found in  churches and  Benedictine  monasteries risen in the XII century in Sicily.

Are in a particular way the disquieting figures represented in the left capitals (for who looks) to place the question of the real meaning of this sculptural representation.
Inspired to the "medieval bestiaries" the figures describe  monstrous beings, misshapen, maybe symbols of the vices of the human kind.

They tell histories of lust seen through the weaving of the female body with satyrs, from the inflated belly and hairy legs of griffon, and wrapped snakes to the members.
Hopeless scenes of damned and terrifying scenes of bodies and misshapen faces and every other physical monstrosity.

Instead the figures of the capitals at right, symbolically composed,  tell the events of the human kind starting with the expulsion from the Terrestrial Heaven and Abel's killing.
Every capital develops a different theme: the work in the fields, the hunt, the war.
While the right capitals tell, those of left are the logical contradiction, the negation of any narration and history itself, the allegory of the human kind carried away by the temptations and the sin.

The inside of the church

If it is possible to recall of the entire monastery only a functional and constituent outline, of the church it is possible, by means of typological analysis and with the supply of architectural remains, to advance a more consistent reconstruction hypothesis.
The sandstone elements on the back wall of the church (the posts of the central nave and the Gothic arch on the nave of the right) the ruins of the apses dug up during the repairs, the memory of the two elements in front of the church, of which only the one on the right remains, traces of a probable front portico, identify the architecture of the Santa Maria of Maniace’ church as a clear work of Benedictine school, brought in Sicily during the Norman period by the Cluny’s monks.
The church, with its basilical, longitudinal body with a nave and two side aisle, wooden roofing, high presbytery with three apses looking east, shallow transept and vestibules realized as two towers alongside the prospect, had nearly double the dept it has now and was characterised by the two-colour in the lava stone ashlars of the squat hexagonal and circular pilasters placed over cubic base and the shape of the pointed arches, only trace of oriental derivation.
The intersection must have been covered with a square lantern tower, as the dimension of the cross-shaped pilasters set in yellow sandstone ashlars doesn’t justify the existence of a dome.
The high presbytery and the edifice’s remarkable length probably gave a certain grandeur to the space that should have given also a great rustic sensation, non showing traces of internal or external decorations or coverings.
The spatial affinity of Santa Maria di Maniace with the cathedral of Cefalu’, erected from 1131 to1148, and with the contemporaneous Monreale cathedral, erected in 1174 by Guglielmo ii, appear evident.