About Algeria: Algiers, Tlemçen, Constantine, Biskra, Timgad

by Charles Thomas-Stanford

There is an excellent Algerian museum at Mustapha Supérieur in a pleasant garden, close to the Governor’s Summer Palace, built with a court-yard, in the Moorish manner, an admirable form for a museum. It is laudably confined to Algerian antiquities and Arab art; there are no irrelevant South Sea Island curios; it has not been used as a receptacle for the rubbish of the local collector, a dumping-ground of the perplexed widow and the embarrassed executor. Algerian history is thoroughly represented; there are the flint implements of primitive man, a collection of Punic pottery from Gouraya, Roman antiquities of every kind, and numerous examples of Arab and Berber handicrafts. These treasures are exhibited with the taste which distinguishes the French in such matters, as is evidenced in their dressing of shop-windows. Of the Roman antiquities perhaps the gem is a bronze figure of a boy with an eagle, two feet high, and of fine style. It was found at Lambessa. From Lambessa come numerous other exhibits, including some gold coins of the period of Septimius Severus, an emperor of African origin, of Julia his wife (with filigree mounting), and Caracalla and his son, of Macrinus and Severus Alexander. These are in mint condition. And there is a very fine gold medallion of Postumus. There are numerous mosaics,—in Roman Africa mosaic pavements were very popular and well executed,—marbles of all kinds from Cherchel, and a very interesting stone tablet recording the rules for the distribution of water from an aqueduct to Roman colonists. The Arab portion includes arms, jewellery, the elaborately embroidered saddlery of Arab cavaliers, pottery, carpets, woven stuffs,—a fine assortment of Arab and Berber handiwork. Altogether a most creditable museum,—a very model of what a local museum should be. In a neighbouring building is a “Forestry” collection;—stuffed examples of Algerian wild animals, and fine specimens of Algerian woods, and so on. Some magnificent examples of slabs of the native Thuja are worth notice.

As with other public buildings in Algeria, the usefulness of this museum is somewhat curtailed by the short time it is open,—only in the afternoon and not every day,—and, what is worse, by the absence of any notice of the hours during which it may be visited. In my ignorance I tried to enter on two or three occasions. Goaded to desperation one morning I rang the bell, and found the amiable custodian at leisure to admit me, but only by favour. Such a collection is worthy of a notice-board in French, Arabic, English, German, Spanish, and Italian, setting forth the hours it is open, and to a foreigner (I make the suggestion with diffidence) it appears that the morning hours should not be forgotten. This is too good a museum to be circumscribed by such antiquated and provincial arrangements as prevail at present. The object of a museum should be to get people to come in, not to keep them out. I was informed that it was closed on Monday afternoon because there were too many people about! The British workman’s Monday is evidently not the insular institution I had supposed. But a museum is not a fortress.

We are wont to speak of “Arab Art,” but the term, if consecrated by usage, is incorrect and misleading. There is, in fact, no such thing. The Arab has never been an artist. The nomad had of necessity no architecture, and architecture is the mother of the arts. Artistic incapacity and an effort to break away from anthropomorphism in religion went hand in hand among the Semitic races;—“Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth.” And when Solomon builded his temple he turned for assistance to the King of Tyre; and one Hiram, a brassworker of Tyre, “wrought all his work.” To this day the Jews, who have excelled in finance and statecraft, in literature and in music, have made little mark in art.

The rise of Islam is an extraordinary phenomenon. In one generation the Arab is a wanderer, half patriarch, half brigand, pasturing his flocks on the verge of the cultivated lands of more civilized peoples, and snatching such prey as hazard brought within his grasp; in the next he is a conqueror ruling from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and threatening to extinguish Christendom. On the vanquished he imposed his religion and his social code; he had no art to impose. Having become by force of conquest and the exigencies of government a dweller in cities, he showed his incapacity to understand the work of his predecessors in such eccentricities as re-erecting their fallen buildings with the columns inverted, using the capital as base, and the base in the capital’s place. As architects he employed the natives of the countries he had overrun, in Egypt Copts and Greeks, who reproduced Byzantine forms and fixed the typical lines on which the development of “Arab art” was to take place. In this deference to local tendencies is to be found the origin of the wide divergencies of art in the Mohammedan world,—of Persian art in the east, and Moorish art in the west. The conquered and converted peoples continued to build, as far as the main plan was concerned, in the same way as they had built before their conversion, adapting their previous methods to present needs, and to the requirements of their conquerors.

In Barbary the development of art followed closely that of Spain. The Moorish art of Spain was chiefly Roman or Byzantine in origin; the first mosque built, that of Cordoba, is said to have been designed by architects from Byzantium. Columns used in its construction were brought from the ruins of Merida and other Roman towns, and even from distant parts of the Mediterranean. From this commencement sprang the later glories of Moorish art, exhibited in their most splendid developments at Granada in Spain, and Tlemçen in Algeria.

If in the scheme of its buildings Moorish architecture followed earlier examples, the Byzantine basilica and the Roman house, in its decorative features it was more distinctively Mohammedan. Yet if the Semite nourished his traditional aversion from the graven image, if the Prophet forbade idolatry and his disciples extended the prohibition to the portrayal of the human body, and enjoined that only trees, flowers and inanimate objects should be depicted; it is nevertheless necessary to seek some deeper cause for the objection of the western Mohammedans to any artistic representation of animal forms. This objection was by no means universal in the Mohammedan world. The Persian rejoiced in his pictures and statues. The explanation may be found perhaps in the zeal of the iconoclasts which had rent North Africa before the Arab invasion. Fathers of the Church had thundered against images; humbler Christians, such as the Copts in Egypt, had striven to dissociate their art from materialistic suggestions, and to find in geometric designs some expression of their aspirations for the infinite. But Hellenism, with its delight in nature, and especially the human form, was still dominant in Christian art. It disappeared before the onslaught from Arabia. The Coptic builder saw his opportunity. His abstract ideas fitted exactly with those of his new master. In his rhythmical representations of foliage, his polygonal figures and intersecting angles, may perhaps be found the germ of the characteristic motives of Mohammedan decoration.

ALGIERS: FOUNTAIN, RUE DE L’INTENDANCE

Its elements may be divided into three groups;—inscriptions in writing, and interlacements, rectilinear and curvilinear. It will be found that almost all Moorish decoration falls under one of these three heads. The inscriptions as a rule are not historic, but ornamental, verses of the Koran, pious sentences and so forth. The style is at first sober and monumental, more stately than the cursive hand in ordinary use. As we should expect, it became in time more elaborate and fantastic, harmonizing well with the decorative interlacements which commonly surround the lettering. The inscriptions themselves are often in geometrical form, so as to give at first sight the impression of a pattern; for instance, a sentence may be repeated four times around a central letter.

To the variety of geometrical and curvilinear interlacements there is obviously no limit. Angles, straight lines and curves are frequently combined in the style we denominate arabesque, a style which has prevailed far beyond the limits of Arab conquest, and is particularly a feature of Venetian art. Late examples show great development, especially on floral lines. Leaves of particular trees, notably the palm, are represented. But a mathematical suggestion does not cease to prevail. The passion for interlacement and for excessive decoration of surface gives rise to curious vagaries,—such are the intricate intersection of arches, the breaking up of the arch itself into subsidiary arches, and the “stalactites” which commonly adorn the roof of the mihrab, the Holy of Holies. It is not without interest when visiting a mosque to note these developments and to strive to trace them to their original elements.