Download PDF | Anderson, G.D. (ed.), Rosser-Owen, M. (ed.) - Revisiting al-Andalus (The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World)-BRILL (2007).
341 Pages
CONTRIBUTORS
Antonio Almagro Gorbea is Director of the Escuela de Estudios Árabes (CSIC-Spanish National Research Council) in Granada, Spain. He has published extensively on Islamic architecture, including a study of the Umayyad desert palace Qusayr {Amra, and on the domestic architecture of al-Andalus.
Glaire D. Anderson, Ph.D. (2005) in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is currently preparing a book on Córdoban Umayyad estates and court culture. Rebecca Bridgman (Ph.D., University of Southampton, planned submission 2007) employs scientifi c analysis to examine ceramic material culture and thereby explore the society and economy of Almohad alAndalus. She is currently guest-editing a special issue of the journal Al-Masāq dedicated to recent research on Andalusi ceramics.
María Judith Feliciano (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2004) is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Washington. She has published on the Mudéjar aesthetic tradition in medieval and early modern Iberia and the colonial Americas. Kathryn Ferry received her Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation explored the importance of travel to the formation of Owen Jones’ architectural career. Ferry was Senior Architectural Advisor to The Victorian Society, London (2005–2007) and is currently a freelance author and architectural historian.
Pedro Jiménez Castillo studied the History and Archaeology of Antiquity at the University of Murcia, and is a research associate at the Escuela de Estudios Árabes (CSIC-Spanish National Research Council) in Granada, Spain. He specialises in urbanism and Islamic glass. Julio Navarro Palazón (Ph.D., University of Murcia, 1999), is researcher at the Escuela de Estudios Árabes (CSIC-Spanish National Research Council) in Granada, Spain. He has published extensively on Islamic archaeology and urbanism, and directs excavations in Spain and Jordan.
Camilla Mileto (Ph.D., Universidad Politécnica, Valencia, 2004), is associate professor in the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain. She is co-editor with Fernando Vegas of the magazine Loggia: Arquitectura y Restauración, and has published extensively on the conservation of historic monuments. Antonio Orihuela Uzal (Ph.D., University of Seville, 1994), is researcher at the Escuela de Estudios Árabes (CSIC-Spanish National Research Council) in Granada, Spain. He has published extensively on Islamic architecture in Spain, and directs the restoration of Islamic monuments.
Jennifer Roberson (Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2004) is Assistant Professor of Art History at Minnesota State University Moorhead. Her primary area of research is contemporary mosque architecture in Spain and Morocco.
Cynthia Robinson (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1996) is Associate Professor of Medieval and Islamic Art History at Cornell University. Her publications include In Praise of Song: the Making of Courtly Culture in al-Andalus and Provence, 1065–1135 A.D. (Brill, 2002) and a forthcoming study of the Hadīth Bayād wa Riyād.
Mariam Rosser-Owen (D.Phil., University of Oxford, 2004) is Curator, Middle East, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her research focuses on ivory, and artistic patronage in the Islamic West. She is currently preparing a book on the V&A’s collection of Islamic arts from Spain.
Antonio Vallejo Triano (Ph.D., University of Jaén, 2004) has been Director of the Conjunto Arqueológico de Madīnat al-Zahrāx since 1985. He has published numerous studies on the material culture of the caliphate of Córdoba and the urbanistic evolution of Madīnat al-Zahrāx. Fernando Vegas (Ph.D., Universidad Politécnica, Valencia, 2000), is professor in the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain. He is co-editor with Camilla Mileto of the magazine Loggia: Arquitectura y Restauración, and has published extensively on the conservation of historic monuments.
INTRODUCTION
Glaire D. Anderson and Mariam Rosser-Owen
The present volume grew out of a desire to highlight the proliferation of Anglo-American scholarship which has developed during the decade and a half since the publication of the infl uential exhibition catalogue, Al-Andalus: the Art of Islamic Spain (ed. Jerrilyn Dodds, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), and to address historiographical issues which that publication raised. The editors organized a double-panel for the 2002 meeting of the Middle Eastern Studies Association of North America (MESA), entitled “Al-Andalus: A Decade of New Research on the Art and Archaeology of Islamic Spain”. We aimed to bring together emerging and established scholars working on Andalusi material culture, and thereby to create a forum for the discussion of directions taken in the fi eld since 1992. We were extremely fortunate that many of the original collaborators of Al-Andalus: the Art of Islamic Spain supported our sessions and joined our discussions.
They are thanked individually in the acknowledgements.1 Revisiting AL-ANDALUS 1992 commemorated the 500th anniversary of the end of Islamic rule on the Iberian Peninsula. One of the most important events marking this occasion was the exhibition, Al-Andalus: the Art of Islamic Spain, jointly organised and hosted by the Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This was “the largest and most comprehensive exhibition ever held of Spanish Islamic art during its period of highest accomplishment”,2 and brought together more than one hundred objects from nearly seventy institutions in fi fteen countries. They were fi rst exhibited within the palaces of the Alhambra itself, “providing an opportunity for many treasures to return to their place of origin for the fi rst time in fi ve hundred years”, and later in the halls of the Metropolitan Museum, to bring to the attention of the American public this “richly complex and relatively unknown civilization”.3 The catalogue, too, was the product of an international collaboration involving more than twenty scholars, coordinated by Jerrilynn Dodds, who was special consultant for the exhibition.
The major impetus for both was the recognition that “[Spain’s] Islamic artistic heritage has not received a fraction of the attention it merits, as if we still believe, with Washington Irving, that ‘the Moslem empire in Spain was but a brilliant exotic that took no permanent root in the soil it embellished’”.4 The catalogue aimed to correct this omission. As Jerrilynn Dodds and Daniel Walker stated in their introduction, The goal of this volume is to make a new place for the study of the art of Islamic Spain, to celebrate its value as part of an autonomous culture and also as a potent presence that had deep importance for Europe and the Muslim world . . . What we hope to offer here is a state of the question concerning the major achievements of art and architecture of al-Andalus, a volume that can serve both as an introduction to the visual world of a nearly vanished culture and as a point of departure for future scholarly study.5 The focus of the exhibition was inevitably the courtly arts, those objects which have been preserved through subsequent centuries of appreciation of their high aesthetic qualities. The catalogue aimed to set these into their “broader and richer cultural and historical context”, by including essays on a variety of aspects of the material culture of al-Andalus, which “synthesize[d] traditional wisdom . . . with recent technical and formal studies, some of which are undertaken in the light of new methods”.6 “Diverse scholarly approaches” were brought to bear on the monuments of Madīnat al-Zahrāx and the Alhambra, which combined archaeological studies with art historical and landscape analyses, to elucidate their truly multifaceted characters.
It was hoped that the catalogue would be “not only a record of the exhibition but also serve as a pioneering reference for the future study of the art of Islamic Spain”.7 The catalogue certainly fulfi lled these hopes, inspiring a new generation of Anglo-American scholarship; it still today provides an essential point of reference for those working in this fi eld. Its publication in both English and Spanish implied a desire to create a dialogue between the emerging Anglo-American scholars, and the long and esteemed tradition of scholarship in this fi eld in continental Europe. Together with The Legacy of Muslim Spain (ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Leiden: Brill, 1992), which appeared in the same year, it presented an alluring picture of Andalusi civilization to an English-language audience unaware of the European foundations upon which the volumes had been constructed.
State of the Question
There is a long and important history of scholarship on al-Andalus especially in Spanish, French and German, most of it produced in recent years by scholars associated with the Escuela de Estudios Árabes in Granada, and the Casa de Velázquez and Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Madrid, institutions which have stood at the forefront of the scholarship on al-Andalus since the early twentieth century. From the late eighteenth century, European (especially British) antiquarians, travellers and architects began to write on the art and architecture of al-Andalus, with studies proliferating in the nineteenth century.8 Numerous nineteenth-century works were devoted to the Alhambra.
The earliest study is probably that by British antiquarian Francis Carter, A Journey from Gibraltar to Malaga (1777), followed by the publication of the Antigüedades Árabes de España (1780) by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in Madrid, and later Voyage pittoresque et historique de l’Espagne, written by the French archaeologist Alexandre Laborde between 1806 and 1820. At about the same time the Irish architect and antiquarian James Cavanah Murphy (d. 1814) developed an abiding interest in Andalusi architecture during the seven years for which he lived and worked as a diplomat in Cadiz, between 1802 and 1809. His drawings of the monuments of Córdoba, Granada and Seville, were published in 1813–16 as The Arabian Antiquities of Spain. In 1832, French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, known for his daguerrotypes of ancient Mediterranean sites, published Souvenirs de Grenade et de l’Alhambra: Monuments Arabes et Moresques de Cordoue, Séville et Grenade.
The British writer Nathaniel Armstrong Wells, son of a wealthy West Indian plantation owner, wrote, among other works, the Picturesque Antiquities of Spain, in 1846. While travel accounts and antiquarianism dominate works written about Spain in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, by its last decades an approach informed by art history is discernible. The German poet and literary historian Adolf Friedrich von Schack, for instance, offered an introduction to Andalusi art and social history in Poesie und Kunst der Araber in Spanien und Sicilien (1865). The Spanish architect and restorer Rafael Contreras (d. 1890)—who was appointed “restaurador adornista” of the Alhambra in 1847, succeeding his father José who had served there as architect since 1828—published Del Arte Árabe en España, Manifestado en Granada, Sevilla y Córdoba, in 1875. The English traveller and author Albert Frederick Calvert (d. 1946) bridged this historiographical shift. A mining engineer by trade, Calvert is best known for his colourful career as a traveller in Australia, about which he wrote prolifi cally.10 By 1924, Calvert had written thirty-six books about Spain and Spanish art, among them Moorish Remains in Spain: Being a Brief Record of the Arabian Conquest of the Peninsula (1906), for which he earned knighthood in the Orders of Alfonso XII and Isabella la Católica.
Though works in English by Calvert, August Meyer, and Georgiana King appeared in the fi rst half of the twentieth century,11 the French expansion into North Africa after 1878 probably initiated the decline of British writing on al-Andalus, and the ascendance of French, Spanish and German art historical scholarship. The establishment of government research institutions in Madrid and Granada in the early twentieth century marks the beginning of the institutionalization of art historical scholarship on al-Andalus in Spain. For example, the establishment of the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científi cas (known as the JAE) by the Spanish government in 1907, was followed shortly afterward by the creation of the University of Bordeaux’s École des Hautes Études Hispaniques, which from 1909 was known as the Casa de Velázquez. In 1910, the foundation in Granada of the Centro de Estudios Históricos de Granada y su Reino, followed by the Escuela de Madrid (which published the infl uential journal Al-Andalus) would set the stage for the foundation in 1932 of the Escuela de Estudios Árabes in Granada, partly dedicated to ‘Arab’ art and archaeology. During the turbulent years between 1936 and 1945, encompassing the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and World War II (1939–1945), the institutional study of Andalusi art, architecture and archaeology took on its present form. In 1938, Franco dismantled the JAE in Madrid, replacing it, nearly three months after the start of World War II, with the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científi cas (CSIC), now the Spanish government’s largest research institution.
In 1940, the Casa de Velázquez was re-established in Madrid, its premises having been destroyed in 1936 during the Civil War. Soon after, the German government established the Madrid branch of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. These three institutions today operate as the main international centres of scholarship on the material culture of al-Andalus. Between 1950 and 1970, the key Spanish scholars were the architect Leopoldo Torres Balbás, who succeeded Contreras as the restorer of the Alhambra, and wrote his seminal Arte Almohade, Arte Nazarí, Arte Mudéjar in 1949; art historian Manuel Gómez-Moreno (Arte Árabe Español hasta los Almohades; Arte Mozárabe, 1951), and epigraphist Manuel Ocaña Jiménez (El Cúfi co Hispano y su Evolución, 1970). In France, the key fi gures were Georges Marçais (L’Architecture Musulmane d’Occident: Tunisie, Algérie, Maroc, Espagne et Sicile, 1954), Henri Terrasse (1895–1971),12 and the Arabist Évariste Lévi-Provençal (1896–1956), who was arguably the most important twentieth-century historian of al-Andalus: his Inscriptions Arabes d’Espagne (1931) and Histoire de l’Espagne Musulmane (1950), among many other historical studies and textual editions, remain fundamental works in the fi eld.13 While studies on the material culture of Islamic Iberia up to the 1950s mainly followed antiquarian or traditional art-historical methodologies, works appearing in the subsequent decades reveal the increasing importance of disciplines outside art history—particularly the historical and social sciences—to the study of Andalusi material culture. Since the 1980s such scholarship is particularly associated with the Casa de Velázquez, CSIC/Escuela de Estudios Árabes, the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI), and the Conjunto Arqueológico de Madīnat al-Zahrāx.
The Casa de Velázquez’s regular publications include the journal Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, and conference proceedings from their many congresses.14 Pierre Guichard, Patrice Cressier, André Baz zana, Miquel Barceló, and Manuel Acién Almansa are among the key fi gures associated with this institution, whose archaeological and interdisciplinary approaches to the rural sphere has profoundly changed our understanding of the medieval Andalusi past.15 CSIC publishes the bi-annual journal Al-Qan¢ara, which continues and replaces the original journal Al-Andalus; the Estudios Árabes e Islámicos series (currently numbering eleven volumes), and the Estudios Onomástico-biográfi cos de al-Andalus series (currently at fourteen volumes). Fertile exchange between the Arabists Manuela Marín and Maribel Fierro of the CSIC and scholars associated with the Casa de Velázquez has resulted in important joint volumes.16 Scholars associated with the Escuela de Estudios Árabes (especially Antonio Almagro, Julio Navarro and Antonio Orihuela) have published numerous works on Andalusi architecture and urbanism, while the Conjunto Arqueológico de Madīnat al-Zahrāx, directed by Antonio Vallejo Triano, has published prolifi cally on the site. With the support of the Junta de Andalucía, they issue the journal Cuadernos de Madīnat al-Zahrāx (published since 1987), while the Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife has published the annual Cuadernos de la Alhambra since 1965. The DAI publishes the journal Madrider Mitteilungen (currently comprising 41 volumes), as well as the series Madrider Beiträge (currently 19 volumes) and Madrider Forschungen.
The late and much-lamented Christian Ewert (d. 2006) was for many years the key fi gure at the DAI, and is known particularly for his work on North African mosques, the Aljafería palace, and architectural ornament.17 The recent volume edited by Martina Müller-Wiener et al., entitled Al-Andalus und Europa: Zwischen Orient und Okzident (Düsseldorf: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2004) honoured his many contributions to the fi eld of Andalusi material culture, and illustrates the interdisciplinary and international character of his former students’ scholarship. In contrast to the wealth of material produced by these institutions, contributions from scholars based in the United Kingdom and United States constitute a comparatively recent historiographical phenomenon, and an outgrowth of the rise of Islamic art history as an academic fi eld. Various scholars—principally Oleg Grabar, Renata Holod and the academic family which grew up under their tutelage—have treated Andalusi themes within the context of their wider specialisms.
The catalogue Al-Andalus: the Art of Islamic Spain, marks the moment of catalyst for the formation of a specialist discipline of Andalusi material culture within the Anglophone world. Since 1992, however, scholarship on the material culture of Islamic Iberia has advanced dramatically, thanks to the prolifi c work of Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Italian scholars in the fi elds of archaeology, urbanism, architectural study, the recording and classifi cation of epigraphic and numismatic evidence, the translation and commentaries of key primary texts, among many others. In addition to uncovering new evidence, new methodologies have developed, which are increasingly interdisciplinary in nature, and new scientifi c analysis techniques are being applied, with results that could not even be imagined in 1992. Recent publications in English in this fi eld have focused on a single object or group of objects: for example, The Minbar from the Kutubiyya Mosque, ed. Jonathan Bloom (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), contains essays discussing aspects of the minbar’s artistic and historical signifi cance, its structure and decorative scheme, and its recent restoration, a project stimulated by the inclusion of this iconic object in the Al-Andalus exhibition.
The recent double volume of the Journal of the David Collection (vol. 2, 2005) presents a range of essays focused on the study of Andalusi ivories, which developed out of the symposium “The Ivories of Muslim Spain: An International Colloquium at The David Collection, Copenhagen”, 18–20 November 2003. Important interdisciplinary monographs on Andalusi palace culture and landscape, by D. F. Ruggles (Gardens, Landscape and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) and Cynthia Robinson (In Praise of Song: the Making of Courtly Culture in al-Andalus and Provence, 1005–1134 A.D., Leiden: Brill, 2002) have also appeared. These scholars are now leading the way in Anglo-American scholarship through conferences and collections, such as Under the Infl uence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, ed. Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi (Leiden: Brill, 2005), and Interrogating Iberian Frontiers, published as a special supplement of Medieval Encounters vol. 12/3 (2006), and guest-edited by María Judith Feliciano, Leyla Rouhi and Cynthia Robinson. These collections address many issues around a single, developing theme within Andalusi studies, but there has been no English-language publication in the last decade comparable to those regularly produced by European scholars, which address a wide range of issues in order to showcase new perspectives and methodologies that are reshaping the study of Andalusi material culture. Exhibitions staged since 1992 (principally Les Andalousies de Damas à Cordoue at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, 28 November 2000–15 April 2001, and El Esplendor de los Omeyas Cordobeses: la Civilización Musulmana de Europa Occidental at the Conjunto Arqueológico de Madīnat alZahrāx, 3 May–30 September 2001—essentially two legs of the same exhibition) have given a wider public, and those who had not attended Al-Andalus: the Art of Islamic Spain, the opportunity to see many of the objects which were exhibited there, together with some which had not, as well as showing objects which had come to light since 1992.
The main contribution of these exhibitions was to place greater emphasis on the Syrian Umayyad ancestry of Andalusi material culture. Their accompanying catalogues followed the 1992 model of including object entries alongside thematic essays—a substantial supplementary volume in the case of El Esplendor de los Omeyas Cordobeses—which brought local scholars together to summarise (in French and Spanish) the work they had accomplished to date on a wide range of subjects. The exhibition Caliphs and Kings: the Art and Infl uence of Islamic Spain (at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., 8 May–17 October 2004) used the masterpieces in the collection of the Hispanic Society of America, New York, to tell the story of the legacy of Andalusi art in Spain, and how it inspired what is fi nally becoming recognised as a subject of scholarly discourse in its own right—Mudéjar art and culture. The catalogue includes an important essay on the continued infl uence of Islamic Spain beyond the scope of the exhibition, and the romantic receptions of al-Andalus into the nineteenth century.
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