Italy
In Italy the critical role played by Byzantine art is clearest of all. It is evident both in the north, particularly in Venice, and in the south at Montecassino, where Byzantine artists were summoned by the abbot Desiderius in the 1060s to work on the decoration of his new abbey church. The wall paintings commissioned by the same Desiderius at Sant’Angelo in Formis, near Capua, are the outstanding surviving example of the consequent fusion of Eastern and Western traditions. In Rome and central Italy in the first decades of the century, the dominant fashion was for figures whose garments hung in a multitude of fine parallel pleats (as in the triptych of the Redeemer in the cathedral at Tivoli and in the wall paintings at Castel Sant’Elia di Nepi and in Santa Pudenziana in Rome). In the 12th century Italian artists took an increasing interest in ancient Roman art, nowhere more so than in Rome itself, where there was a veritable renaissance of classical and early Christian compositional formulas, motifs, and even styles.