ANCIENT ARABIAN BATHS AT PALMA, MAJORCA.
MOORISH ORNAMENT
A NOTE ON THE ELEMENTS OF ARAB ART
IN art, precept is subservient; practice is supreme. The idea which may be hidden in a picture is of little moment; it is the design, fully accomplished, which is prized. Its inspiration may become a “light to shine before men,” but it attains its paramount value only when realised.
Refinement of manners and acuteness of intellect have, in the East, nothing in common with what we call education. In this social state, ignorance, which, among us, condemns a man, may be the condition of great originality. The Arab tent-dweller was, and is, often, a very superior man; for the tent is a kind of school, always open, where, from contact with educated guests who have seen men and cities, was produced an intellectual movement which led the Arab, in exchanging his nomadic life for a settled habitation, to translate the tent to a more solid form; to commute the tent-pole for a slender marble column; and to transform luxurious products of the loom, which had adorned his former dwelling, to a semblance of their golden tissues on fairy-decorated diapery.
If the poetry and refinement of the South of Europe in modern times cannot be traced, as many authors would have us believe—notably Father Andres, a learned Spaniard, anxious to give to his own country the honour of imparting to the rest of Europe the first impulse of refinement after the fall of the Roman Empire—to the Arabs of Spain, much must still be allowed to their influence; for their progress in refinement was hardly less brilliant and rapid than their progress in Empire. At the period of the glory of Cordova, which began about A.D. 750, and continued to the time of its conquest by the Christians in 1236, the scholars of Spain were in a higher state of cultivation than could be found elsewhere; and if the Kingdom of Granada—the last stronghold of the Moslem—which ended in 1492, was less refined, it was perhaps more splendid and luxurious. The public schools and libraries of the Spanish Arabs were resorted to, not only by those of their own faith at home and in the East, but by Christians from different parts of Europe; and Pope Sylvester the Second (Gerbet, a Frenchman, Pope 999-1003), one of the most remarkable men of his age, is believed to have owed his elevation to the culture he absorbed in Seville and Cordova.
Arab art takes its place with the arts of Greece and Japan as one of the three great schools into which all styles of ornament naturally fall. Beauty and simplicity—the restrained rhythm and order which form the essential foundation of Greek art—is as distinct from the vivacious realism and unsymmetrical, haphazard decoration of the Japanese, as from that elegance and complexity produced by geometrical involutions symmetrically constructed, which constitute the basis of Moorish art. These three styles have been compared by Monsieur J. Bourgoin, in his Elements of Arab Art, to the three kingdoms of Nature. Greek art he likens to the animal kingdom, the Japanese art to the vegetable kingdom, and Arabian art, from the symmetry which recalls the crystallisation of minerals in its uniformity of configuration, and its elementary structure, he compares with the mineral kingdom.