wow. Very interesting article. Rosa Menocal mentioned in the article has written a very interesting book about this issue - something along the lines of “Ornament of the world - how Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in Islamic Spain” (something along those lines)… very fascinating book. Washington Irving’s “Alhambra” is a must as well.
Calips and Kings: The art and influence of Islamic Spain – Through Oct. 17 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. 202-633-1000 or www.asia.si.edu. Metro: Smithsonian. Open daily 10-5:30.
Islam’s Spanish Eyes, Blake Gopnik
Washington Post, 16 May 2004
“Caliphs and Kings: The Art and Influence of Islamic Spain,” a new show at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery, has a few exquisite objects in it.
An ornamental silk brocade, covered in geometric patterns, is one of the most gorgeous textiles I have ever seen. It was woven by hand 600 years ago in the last years of the Muslim enclave of Granada. It is so pristine and perfect, however, that it looks like it was made yesterday on the latest in computer looms.
A carved ivory perfume box, about as big around as a coffee tin, was made 400 years before that, when Cordoba’s Muslim caliphate controlled almost all of Spain. Its domed lid is hinged in ornate silver and luxuriant foliage crawls across its entire surface. It seems to celebrate the good things in life. A lovely bit of Arabic verse runs under the half-sphere of its top, letting the box speak for itself: “The sight that I offer is the fairest of sights, the still firm breast of a lovely young woman…”
Despite these and a few other gems, however, this exhibition isn’t really about art. It is about history. Guest curator Heather Ecker uses its objects to open a small window onto a patch of the European past most of us have barely glimpsed.
For centuries after its consolidation in the 750s of our era, Islamic Spain – known in Arabic as al-Andalus – had the richest culture, by far, of all of Western Europe. The Christian north, still emerging from the ruins of the fallen Roman Empire, could only gape at the wonders found south of the Pyrenees. In economy, technology, learning, cultural diversity and artistic sophistication – in literature, philosophy, science, music, architecture, cuisine and all the decorative arts – there was nothing like Islamic Spain. If the northerners at long last caught up in the later Middle Ages, it had a lot to do with what they had been able to beg, borrow, buy and steal from their neighbors to the south.
This exhibition’s 89 objects include works of decorative art in cloth, stone, wood and ceramic as well as manuscripts, astronomical instruments, maps and many coins. All but a handful are from the collection of the Hispanic Society in New York, which agreed to this rare loan show in celebration of its 100th birthday. Though this is said to be the country’s finest collection of art from Islamic Spain, it’s still small and full of holes. (The exhibition lacks any examples of the fantastic metalwork developed by Spanish Muslims, for instance.) Shown without loans from other institutions, the Hispanic Society’s holdings can provide only a hint of that culture’s surviving treasures. But for the purposes of calling to mind the illustrious and complex history of the Spanish Middle Ages, even an assortment of minor objects can do the trick.
Staring at a vitrine full of old coins, for instance, is not most art lovers’ idea of a good time. But for those with even a passing interest in Europe’s past, the coins in “Caliphs and Kings” are irresistible. Anyone who has seen the coarse coinage of early medieval Europe – even when struck for such famous leaders as Charlemagne or the German emperor Otto I – will be impressed by the exquisite refinement of the gold dinars minted in Islamic Spain in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. When the nascent Christian kingdoms of far northeastern Spain first try to copy their neighbors’ coinage – in the years around 1050, the dinar was the prestige currency for international trade – the results are laughably bad. The exquisite Arabic calligraphy on the Cordoban coin becomes an illegible blur. The northern mints couldn’t hope to rival the Islamic original; their goal was simply to nod in its direction, so the world would know the kinds of people they rubbed shoulders with. Even in 1215, when the Catholic king of Castile struck one of the gold coins in this show, its Christian inscriptions were entirely in Arabic: The pope is invoked as “The Imam of the Christian faith.” After all, many of this king’s most powerful allies, rivals, vassals and subjects would have been brought up speaking the language of the Koran.
Scholar Maria Rosa Menocal has argued for the thorough interpenetration of medieval Spain’s cultures. She claims that Alfonso VI, the Christian king who conquered Toledo in 1085, might have been literate only in Arabic. He had spent years of exile in Toledo when it was still Muslim. His legendary champion Rodrigo Diaz, “El Cid”, might have spoken Arabic. Like many of Spain’s medieval warriors, both Christian and Muslim, he fought on both sides of the religious divide; his famous nickname comes from the Arabic for “lord.” And an entire class of Christians, the so-called Mozarabs, had long lived and worked in Arabic, and would have read the Bible in it, too.