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The Art of Islamic Spain
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20660 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
1,415 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
In A.D. 711, Islamic Arab and Berber armies crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into what is today Spain. Within seven years they controlled nearly the entire Iberian Peninsula--all but Asturias and Galica in the far north. By 719, their raids had reached Toulouse in Southern France and even further north. Though they never got a foothold beyond the Pyrenees, adherents of Islam--the religion founded only a century earlier by Muhammad (570-632)--occupied the Iberian Peninsula continuously for seven hundred years. Not until 1492, the year Columbus discovered the New World, were the Muslims expelled from the territory they called Al-Andalus.
Forces aligned with Christendom and Islam have engaged in almost constant conflict over the ages, from medieval popes' Crusades to rid the holy land of the "Saracen infidel" to the Ottomans' resurgent forays into Renaissance and Baroque Europe. This perennial discord fosters mutual ignorance and misconception. Today, Islamic fundamentalism reinforces Western stereotypes of Muslims as a fanatic throng that menaces world peace. Yet Islamic civilization is far more noble than exemplars such as the ayatollah and Saddam Hussein suggest. The Islamic period in Spain, for example, was marked by religious tolerance (Muslims respect Jews and Christians as forebears of Muhammad), economic prosperity, scientific advancements, scholarship, and a flourishing of the arts.
If westerners know little of Islam, they know less of Islamic art. Fortunately, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Patronato of the Alhambra and Generalife in Granada, Spain, have devoted their attention to rectifying this situation. Under the joint patronage of the Junta Andalucia, the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and the Ayuntamiento of Granads, these institutions have assembled approximately a hundred works, including virtually all of the textbook masterpieces associated with the periods. The exhibition, Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain, was inaugurated by Queen Sophia herself at the Alhambra palace, Granada, perhaps the greatest architectural monument of Islamic Spain. Though such a condign setting is impossible elsewhere, a number of objects associated with the palace are on view in New York. A dome-shaped wooden ceiling carved with an immensely intricate pattern is on loan from Berlin, while a glazed mosaic tile dado and a carved plaster panel, both brilliantly polychromed, and a four-foot-tall luster-glazed earthenware vase from the Hermitage further conjure the Hermitage further conjure the Alhambra's splendid fourteenth-century interior.
What survives from Al-Andalus are the court arts--luxury
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