The Exotic West

Increased contact between Byzantium and Western Europe found a variety of architectural manifestations. In Venice, an economic competitor with Constantinople, the imperial Church of the Holy Apostles was replicated at S. Marco as Venice constructed a legendary past for itself. In Norman Sicily of the twelfth century, with its multiethnic, religiously heterogeneous population, a new architecture developed that artfully juxtaposed Byzantine, Western European, and Islamic forms.