A tale of two ceilings: the Capella Palatina in Palermo and the Mouchroutas in Constantinople

I shall argue that Mouchroutas was the name that Mesarites, who alone uses the word, gave for literary purposes to the royal hall built by the emperor Manuel Komnenos in or before the late 1150s. The Manouēlites, as it was known in the 12th and 13th centuries, was a long, rectangular building of two...