ALCAZAR—COURT OF THE DOLLS.
SEVILLE
ALCAZAR—COURT OF THE DOLLS, MOORISH STYLE, BUILT 1369-1379.
that picturesque Italian author, De Amicis, to people the gardens of the alcazar with Mo’temid and his beautiful favourite, Itamad, who had been dead nearly a century before the alcazar was erected, failed to create any impression in the mind of Mr. John Lomas, whose strictures upon the place in his Sketches of Spain must ever be a standing reproof to those who dare to see Oriental beauty in this Sevillian castle. “Greater far,” says Mr. Lomas, “is the alcazar in reputation than in intrinsic worth. Like the Mother Church, it forms a sort of sightseers’ goal, and it shares equally in the good fortune of so entirely satisfying the requirements of superficial observers, that it is esteemed a kind of heresy to take exception to its noble rank as a typical piece of Moorish work. Yet it is just a great house, of southern and somewhat ancient construction—say the fifteenth century—with a number of square rooms and courts, arranged and decorated after Arab models as far as was possible in the case of a building designed to fulfil the requirements of Western civilisation. Nothing else. Of course, if the courts and towers of the Alhambra have not been seen—or are not to be compassed—there will be found here an infinity of fresh loveliness in design and colouring, together with a vast amount of detail which will repay study. But even then it must all be looked upon as an exceedingly clever reproduction of beautiful and artful forms, not as their best possible setting forth, or type. There are dark winding passages—evidently dictated by the exigencies of the work—but they yield none of the delicate surprises which form so great a charm of the old Moorish monuments. There is any amount of rich decoration and Moresque detail; but never the notion of the luxury and voluptuousness of Eastern life, or a suggestion of its thousand-and-one adjuncts. There are, here and there, indubitable traces of the original Eleventh Century alcazar of Yakub Yusuf” (it was not built until the latter part of the twelfth century) “but there is nothing either distinctive or precious about them, and the rest is a record rather of Christian than Arab ways.”