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                                                                                ART, Page 74

When Spain Was Islamic


An exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum evokes the vanished culture
of the Muslim conquest of Iberia

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Auden had it right about Spain: "That arid square, that
fragment nipped off from hot/ Africa, soldered so crudely to
inventive Europe." One thinks of this while visiting
"Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain," the new contribution to
the 500th anniversary of Columbus by New York City's
Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a long time, Spain and North
Africa were one.

    Power abhors a vacuum. At the close of the 7th century
A.D., Iberia had almost become one. Its central administrative
order, that of the Roman Empire, had long since dissolved. Over
it, Visigothic laws and Christian rites had been superimposed.
But as a political entity, Iberia was on the verge of collapse.
Thus when the Arabs looked across the Mediterranean, they saw a
vast territory spotted with squabbling factions -- Christians,
Jews, Visigoths -- separated from Africa by a small strait and
ripe for conquest. In 711 a mixed force of Arabs and Berbers
under the command of Musa ibn Nusayr crossed the sea and
smashed through the patchy Visigothic resistance; within 50
years most of Spain, except for the pockets of Castile and
Catalonia in the north, had become al-Andalus, the farthest
western expansion of a vast Muslim empire run by the Abbasid
dynasty from Baghdad.


    The sons of the Prophet brought no Arab women with them;
they intermarried with Iberian ones. The conquering power
became an indigenous one in short order, although the successive
caliphs tended to retain a nostalgia for Baghdad. Out of the
Moorish conquest grew the first unified culture Spain had seen
since the collapse of the Roman Empire. It lasted until 1492,
when Catholic armies, under Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of
Castile, drove the last vestiges of Arab power back to North
Africa. If you want to grasp why Spain, traditionally, is unique
in Europe, you must begin with the fact that no other European
country was so permeated -- in language, customs and cultural
forms -- by Islam.

    "Al-Andalus," which runs through Sept. 27, is the first
large-scale attempt to supply American art lovers with a sense
of this vanished and brilliant culture. Given the ignorant
animus against the Arab world in America, it is a valuable show,
and its massive catalog is the best introduction to Spanish
Islamic civilization ever set before a general audience by a
museum. If the show itself, with its 120-some items, seems a
little thin to the casual eye, this is due to the extreme
paucity of works of art that have come down to us from the
Hispano-Islamic period. After the reconquest, bronze and gold
were melted down, jewels prized from their settings, manuscripts
burned, textiles left to rot, pottery smashed. Not much survived
the iconoclastic vengeance of Christians after the 16th century.

    The durable art of al-Andalus -- the Arabs' word for Spain
between their initial conquest and their final expulsion -- was,
of course, architecture. Of the 4,000 or so "castles in Spain"
that still stand (military buildings of all kinds, from
fortified palaces to watchtowers), fully a quarter were built
by the Arabs. Several of their buildings, from the Alhambra, or
"red castle," in Granada to the Great Mosque of Cordoba to the
towering Giralda in Seville, are among the key works of world
architecture.

    The cool water gardens, the arcaded patios, the
fractal-like proliferation of detail in the stucco domes, the
mind-defeating intricacy of the mosaics with their cordons de
la eternidad (literally, "ribbons of eternity") interlacing in
continuous patterns: such things cannot be crated, shipped
across the Atlantic and put in a museum. One fragment of a 14th
century mosaic dado from the Alhambra, however beautiful, is
only a detail and cannot convey the overwhelming effect of the
patterning on the palace's actual walls. Thus, although this
exhibition looks fine inside the pyramid of the Met's Lehman
Pavilion, its sum effect does not begin to equal the setting in
which the Spanish public saw it earlier this year -- the
Alhambra itself.

    Some important items from the original show, such as the
12th century ivory-inlaid minbar, or high preacher's throne,
from the Kutubiyya mosque in Marrakesh, were also deemed too
fragile to travel. When the Spanish authorities refused to lend
one of the spectacular amphora-type "Alhambra vases," with its
luster glazes and formalized handles like angels' wings, another
was lent by the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. But
even in its truncated form, "Al-Andalus" is not an exhibition
to miss.

    Partly, at least, this is because it gives such sharp
vignettes of cultural crossing. Islam the Destroyer is a myth;
in fact, much of what we know of classical Greek thought was
preserved by Arab scholars, without whose efforts we would know
little or nothing of Aristotle. In science, Europe until the
14th century was illiterate compared with the Arab world, and
a group of exquisitely made brass instruments in this show
reminds one that the universal astrolabe was invented in
al-Andalus around 1300.

    Hispano-Islamic culture was an extraordinary hybrid, built
over the vestiges of Rome, mingling Western with Middle Eastern
forms. This tension and merging shows itself everywhere in the
remnants of Islamic Spain. The architects of the prayer hall of
the Great Mosque of Cordoba, for instance, designed its sublime
forest of columns and horseshoe arches as a communal space
without the hierarchical orientation of a Christian basilica,
as befitted Islamic ritual -- but they also based its
double-arch system on the design of Roman aqueducts. "You have
taken something unique and turned it into something mundane,"
the Emperor Charles V is said to have remarked, on seeing the
mosque converted into a Catholic church after the reconquista.

    In the architectural fragments included in this show --
capitals and bases from the 10th century caliphal period, for
instance -- one sees the forms of Roman antiquity dissolving
into the Islamic taste for allover pattern; eaten away by deep
carving, a recognizably Ionic capital turns into a web of
exquisite stone lace, a sort of architectural counterpart to the
deeply incised ivory caskets and pyxes favored by the courts of
al-Andalus. One of the most impressive bowls in this show, a
deep conical form bearing on its inside surface a design of a
Portuguese nao, or trading ship, so powerful in its rhythms of
hull and sail that the concavity of the dish seems almost to
reverse itself under the visual pressure of the form, displays
a Christian cross on the boat's mainsail.

    Adaptation lay at the cultural heart of Islamic Spain. It
was not always benign; like the Venetians bringing back war
plunder to St. Mark's, the Arab rulers symbolized their victory
over the Christian infidel by taking bells from church spires
and converting them into mosque lamps. The most impressive
single work of sculpture in the show, the 11th century Pisa
griffin, is so hybrid that without a context, scholars seem
unable to decide where it comes from -- or even whether it is
from al-Andalus at all. It may equally well be Egyptian, North
African or Iranian, though the Pisans themselves (who installed
it on the facade of their cathedral) believed it was war booty
from their conquest of Majorca, once an Arab fiefdom. Severely
holed by bullets in the 19th century, it remains an
overwhelmingly authoritative image -- rigid, swollen, and yet
almost liquid in its linear rhythms, as in the rhyme between the
profile curve of its breast and the serpentine edges of its
wings: a guardian figure left stranded when the culture around
it drained away and was lost.