History of Art is delighted to share that PhD candidate Ariela Algaze has received the 2025-26 Singleton Prize for Outstanding Graduate Research Paper, sharing the honor with Jackson Hartigan in the Department of History.

In The Metalinguistic Image: Mediating Language in the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, Ariela Algaze considers the function of the inscriptions in Latin, Greek, and Arabic that accompany the spectacular mosaics and painted muqarnas vaults of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, Sicily (1132-ca. 1170). She argues that, in the context of Norman Sicily—where multilingualism was promoted as royal policy under Roger II, despite the fact that few were literate in all three official languages—the symbolic and performative function of these inscriptions relied less on their legibility than on their iconicity. That is, their recognizability as representing different languages overshadowed their content. The “metalinguistic image” serves as a theoretical framework to explore the royal chapel’s fundamental concern with linguistic mediation, a concern manifested visually by the depiction in the nave of the genesis of linguistic diversity associated with the Tower of Babel, by the representation in the transept vault of the apostles’ instrumentalization of language after the Pentecost to convert the gentiles (portrayed as Sicily’s Muslims and Jews), and by the presence of the Pantokrator in the apse holding a bilingual Gospel book. The multilingual inscriptions and metalinguistic images of the Cappella Palatina articulate a theory of language as an ambivalent but ultimately useful tool for the political legitimation of Norman rule in Sicily and, more broadly, and for the fulfillment of the evangelical mission of Christianity.

ConPlease join us in congratulating Ariela Algaze on this well-deserved recognition!