There were lacking in the twelfth century the poetic and imaginative elements which flourished at the court of Frederick II, but on the scientific and philosophical sides there is clear continuity in the intellectual history of the south from Roger II and William to Frederick II and Manfred. At one point it is even probable that an actual material connection can be traced, for the collection of Greek manuscripts upon which Manfred set great store seems to have had its origin in codices brought from Constantinople to Palermo under the first Norman kings; and as Manfred’s library probably passed into the possession of the Popes, it became the basis of the oldest collection of Greek manuscripts in the Europe of the humanists. Within its limits the intellectual movement at the court of King Roger and his son had many of the elements of a renaissance, and like the great revival of the fourteenth century, it owed much to princely favor. It was at the kings’ request that translations were undertaken and the works of Neilos and Edrisi written, and it was no accident that two such scholars as Aristippus and Eugene of Palermo occupied high places in the royal administration. In their patronage of learning, as well as in the enlightened and anti-feudal character of their government, the Sicilian sovereigns, from Roger to Frederick II, belong to the age of the new statecraft and the humanistic revival. The art of the Sicilian kingdom, like its learning and its government, was the product of many diverse elements, developing on the mainland into a variety of local and provincial types, but in Sicily combined and harmonized under the guiding will of the royal court. Traces of direct Norman influence occur, as in the towers and exterior decoration of the cathedral of Cefalù or in the plan of that great resort of Norman pilgrims, the church of St. Nicholas at Bari; but in the main the Normans, in Bertaux’s phrase, contributed little more than the cement which bound together the artistic materials furnished by others.[70] These materials were abundant and various, the Roman basilica and the Greek cupola, the bronze doors and the brilliant mosaics of Byzantine craftsmen, the domes, the graceful arches and ceilings, and the intricate arabesques of Saracen art; yet in the churches and palaces of Sicily they were fused into a beautiful and harmonious whole which still dazzles us with its splendor. The chief examples of this ‘Norman’ style are to be found at Cefalù, King Roger’s cherished foundation, where he prepared his last resting-place in the great porphyry sarcophagus later transported to Palermo, and where Byzantine artists worked in blue and gold wonderful pictures of Christ and the Virgin and stately figures of archangels and saints of the Eastern Church; at Monreale, the royal mount of William II, commanding the inexhaustible wealth of Palermo’s Golden Shell and serving as the incomparable site of a great cathedral, with storied