In Sicily, less fortunate in this respect than Spain, not a single well-authenticated edifice of the Mohammedan domination is known to exist. The two great structures—the Ziza and the Cuba—in the vicinity of Palermo, assigned by doubtful authority to the tenth century, and certainly remodelled, if not entirely reconstructed, by the Normans, are the only examples by which we can form any conception of the architecture of a kingdom not inferior to the Cordovan khalifate in everything that implies an advanced state of intellectual culture and civilization. Their proportions are bold and massive; their exteriors, while by no means ornate, are decorated with a series of lofty recessed arches extending from the foundation to the frieze, the latter being formed by an Arabic inscription of gigantic dimensions which cannot now be deciphered. These buildings, with the exception of a few mosaics and some stalactitic ornamentation evidently of the time of the Normans, possess none of the distinguishing features of contemporaneous Saracenic architecture, a fact which has cast a well-founded suspicion upon their imputed Arab origin. The unprotected situation of Sicily, which exposed it to the incursions of every marauder, its succession of semi-barbarous rulers, its long and bloody civil wars, the unrelenting hostility of the See of Rome to everything connected with Mohammedanism, may account for the total disappearance of the superb architectural monuments which history informs us abounded during the Moslem rule. The same fate has befallen the productions of the mechanical and industrial arts, none of which, of any importance, or, indeed, of established authenticity, are preserved in either national museums or private collections. The memorials of Moslem civilization in Sicily, of which such copious and interesting details survive in the works of contemporaneous native authors, have therefore been practically annihilated. The absolute dearth of these objects of architectural and artistic ingenuity is the more extraordinary when the magnitude of the manufacturing and commercial interests of mediæval Sicily, the protection and encouragement afforded the Moslems by their conquerors, and the close relations they sustained with neighboring countries are considered.
The military structures of Mohammedan Spain exhibit the same general characteristics as do the other surviving examples of defensive architecture during the Middle Ages. As might be supposed from the purposes for which they were destined, and from their exposure to the uninterrupted warfare of many centuries, they have undergone radical changes, and at this distance of time it is usually impossible to determine which portions are of Arabic and which of Castilian origin. The only perfect surviving exemplar of Moorish fortification in the Peninsula is the Gate of the Sun at Toledo. The defensive works of the Spanish Arab were generally on an immense scale, and their construction was in strict conformity with the best known principles of military engineering. The walls were of great thickness and solidity, the towers square and disposed at frequent intervals, as, for instance, those of Granada, whose lines of circumvallation, while not of extraordinary extent, contained more than thirteen hundred. Covered ways and barbicans provided with battlements defended the approaches and protected the fortress itself from sudden and unexpected assault. The citadel, which frequently enclosed a considerable area, and whose precincts presented the appearance of a diminutive city, was at once the seat of the court with its numerous retinue, the head-quarters of the army, and the depository of the products of the mint and the arsenal. It communicated by means of subterranean passages, known only to certain officials of the government, with the other defences, and always with the outer wall of the city, thus affording a speedy and unsuspected means of escape in time of conspiracy or insurrection. With the exception of the Gate of the Sun at Toledo, Moorish citadels exhibit little attempt at ornamentation; the serious and important destination of these gigantic works is realized in their frowning aspect and their massive walls, which offered neither temptation nor opportunity for the exercise of decorative skill. Water was provided for the garrison not only by immense cisterns, but by galleries cut for long distances through the solid rock, below the bed of the stream which usually encircled the eminences upon which these strongholds were erected. Occasionally, when the situation of a tower afforded unusual security, its interior was finished with all the pomp and beauty of a royal residence.
The mosque, one of the most characteristic types of Arab architecture, preserved to the last in its plan and principles of construction the striking peculiarities of its origin. Although its design has been supposed to have been derived from the basilica, there can be little doubt that it was modelled after the Hebrew temple. Its rectangular form, its rows of colonnades, its mihrab, corresponding to the holy of holies, the fountains for ceremonial lustration, are all suggestive of the numerous points of resemblance existing between the Moslem and the Jewish faith. In spite of inherited prejudice, but a vague and ill-defined boundary has always separated these two great divisions of the Semitic race, which trace their common origin to Abraham. The simple luxuries of the Desert were commemorated, not only by the grateful sound of rippling waters, but by the perfume and the shade of the orange-trees of the court, which refreshed the senses of the worshipper and suggested to his vivid imagination dreams of a material and voluptuous paradise. The moderate height of the building exaggerated its already vast dimensions; the eye, bewildered by the forest of columns, vainly attempted to penetrate its interminable depths; and the impression of the infinite was heightened by superimposed tiers of interlacing arches, whose combinations recalled the graceful foliage of their prototype, the palm grove of Arabia.
The Moorish architecture of the Peninsula, as the reader has no doubt already observed, is remarkable rather for elegance than for grandeur. It was not like that of Egypt, dependent for its effect upon the lofty, the imposing, the colossal. The spirit of Grecian art, which found expression in structures whose perfect symmetry of form and correctness of detail have never been equalled, furnished to the Arab architect none of those artistic conceptions which were the inspiration of painters, sculptors, and builders in subsequent ages. The genius of the Arab was in general rather adaptive than creative, rather imitative than original. But while many of its ideas can be traced to the examples of former civilizations, a people who profited by and improved upon the suggestions of a score of races can hardly be said to have borrowed from any. While art, especially as applied to architecture, is an infallible index of the sentiments and mental peculiarities of the people by whom it is developed, none can claim absolute originality for its productions; all are necessarily dependent upon their predecessors for much of the creative influence by which they are actuated. This is particularly true of the Arabs of the Occident. Every nation of antiquity as well as of the contemporaneous world paid intellectual tribute to the great Moslem Empire of the West. Its mosques were Jewish, its fortifications Roman, its minarets Byzantine. The finest ornamentation of the exterior of its magnificent temple was derived from Ctesiphon, that of the interior from Constantinople. Its stuccoes came from Syria, its enamels from ancient Nineveh. The infinite combinations of its geometrical designs and its method of hanging doors had been familiar to the Egyptians three thousand years before they were employed in Spain. The capitals of the earliest columns are clumsy imitations of Grecian models. The researches of antiquaries have disclosed the germ of the pendentive vault in Persia, and the carved and painted ceiling of wood was used in the Orient long before the appearance of Mohammed. Even rubble-work, the basis of every kind of Arabic architecture, was a process which had been adopted in the construction of edifices from a remote antiquity.
Hispano-Arab architecture is ordinarily divided for convenience into three arbitrary and ill-defined periods,—the age of its origin, embracing the works attributable to the Ommeyade Khalifate; the age of its transition, which includes all constructions erected by the principalities which arose after the dismemberment of the Moslem empire; and the age of its culmination, which began with the rise of the independent kingdom of Granada in the thirteenth century and closed with the unrivalled excellence of the Alhambra. The monuments of the first period, of which the Mosque of Cordova is the most striking, and, indeed, practically the sole perfect exemplar, are widely scattered and incomplete.
The sumptuous edifices which abounded in every city have disappeared or have been mutilated almost beyond recognition. Barbaric violence has annihilated the palaces which lined the Guadalquivir, and whose richness and beauty were the admiration of the world. Ecclesiastical malignity has demolished to their very foundations or sedulously effaced the characteristics of the innumerable temples raised for the propagation of a hostile religion, and the extent of this systematic enmity may be inferred from the suggestive fact that of the seven hundred mosques required for the worship of the Moslem capital, but one has survived. Diligent antiquarian research has failed to establish even the sites of all but three or four of the remainder, of whose existence and splendor both history and tradition afford abundant and indisputable evidence. The ignorance and prejudice of successive generations have, in addition to the above-named destructive agencies, contributed their share, and no unimportant one, to the obliteration of these memorials of Arab taste and ingenuity.
The Mosque of Cordova represents every phase of Arabian constructive and decorative art during the period of two centuries which elapsed between its foundation and completion. It is, therefore, to that extent an architectural epitome of the development of Moslem civilization, in which, in a measure, can be deciphered the history of the race under whose auspices it was erected and adorned. While the technically independent character of Moorish architecture in the Peninsula has been long established, its originality is, as has already been stated, for the most part dependent upon ingenious combinations of elements afforded by the examples of former civilized nations. This fact becomes evident when the various portions of the Great Mosque are examined in detail, and is especially apparent in the magnificent decorations of the sanctuary. Here, while the plan and the designs were clearly of Arabic origin, the materials and the method of their application, and, indeed, even some of the artisans, were Byzantine. But these precious mosaics bear but little resemblance to those of contemporaneous Christian churches, which were identical with them in composition and in the manner of attaching them to the walls. What in the one instance seems the perfection of artistic beauty and excellence, in the others appears glaring, harsh, and grotesque; the sublime artistic genius, alone capable of creating these marvels, is absent. The Mihrab of the Mosque of Cordova had no prototype in Islam or elsewhere, and both its plan and details have defied all imitation.
The evolution of Arabic art in Spain is one of the most curious problems in the annals of its exotic civilization. Its origin and the impulse that first prompted its development, as well as the principal models from which it obtained its ideas, are buried in obscurity. No country in Europe contains such a variety of gigantic and well-preserved memorials of Roman imperial greatness as the Peninsula. But with the exception of the city walls and the castles, there is no evidence that the Arabs were ever so impressed with their grandeur as to make even an ineffectual attempt to imitate them. The isolation of Mohammedan Spain, whose dominant sect was discredited, and whose dynasty was proscribed by the ruling Houses of Syria and Persia, was long unfavorable to the maintenance of those relations by means of which an interchange of ideas and the rapid progress of a nation in the arts of peace is ordinarily effected. The steps by which the architectural conceptions of many Oriental nations became the inspiration of the builders of the Western Khalifate are therefore undiscernible. It is possible, however, that these ideas, apparently borrowed but developed under similar conditions along the same lines of thought, are after all original. The great importance attached by the Arabs to mathematics, in the study of which they attained to such unrivalled proficiency, must, as already suggested, have contributed more to architectural improvement than any other cause. The application of algebra to geometry—an invention ascribed, with a considerable degree of certainty, to the Spanish Moslems—immeasurably facilitated the development of every art dependent upon mechanical and mathematical conditions, and none is more indebted to it, in this respect, than the art of construction. Long anterior to the tenth century, the epoch of the most advanced civilization of the khalifate, the schools of Cordova, Seville, Valencia, Malaga, and Toledo gave instruction in geometry, drawing, and other branches of mathematics pertaining to architecture, the lessons being supplemented by practical demonstrations of the application of their principles under the direction of experienced masters. Under such circumstances, the standard of Moorish taste was formed, and its ideas of constructive excellence definitely established in the first and most important stage of its development. The genius which inspired its early creations, the dreams which spurred on its youthful ambition, were never lost until the crowning glory of its achievements fell before the conqueror, and its artisans and their productions alike were trampled in the dust by the ruthless chivalry of Castile.
The age of transition has left no memorials from which an intelligent idea of its progress can be obtained. The Giralda of Seville is the only one which exists in tolerable preservation, and it affords an example of exterior ornamentation alone. In the Alcazar may be observed labors which were evidently completed at different epochs; but no information is available of the dates at which they were executed, nor can it now be ascertained how much is of Arab origin and how much should be attributed to Mudejar influence. The damage this palace has suffered, and the material alterations it has undergone at the hands of monarchs devoid of taste and of appreciation of the noble works of the Moors, have practically destroyed its identity, and have rendered it, on account of its absurd and incongruous additions and reparations, the despair of both the archeologist and the architect. The characteristics of Arabian art are better preserved and more easily traced in the edifices of Granada erected by the dynasty of the Alhamares, and which represent the final period of its development.
The Alhambra—a structure in whose luxurious elegance are embodied the results of seven centuries of progress—is the type and crowning triumph of this epoch. In its sumptuous apartments are to be found none of the peculiar features to be observed in the buildings of the first era of the Moslem domination; none of the severe dignity, the sombre majesty, the fatalistic conceptions, the tendency to exclude all but the simplest forms of ornamentation, which distinguish the earliest portions of the Djalma of Cordova. The horseshoe arch has disappeared or has been radically modified; its importance as a talisman is apparently no longer recognized; and it has given place to other symbols of less obscure origin and meaning. Here one of the most important of Koranic precepts is violated; animal forms are represented in paintings as well as in sculpture; and the curiosity of the artist is gratified by a delineation of physiognomy, costume, and manners, unique of its kind, and still abhorred as idolatrous by the orthodox zealots of the Mohammedan world. The conditions of domestic life, exacted by and dependent upon the traditions of the harem, are everywhere observed,—in the frowning exterior; in the isolated courts; in the guarded communications; in the ponderous doors; in the mysterious lattices; in the exquisite decorations; in the distribution of appliances for physical enjoyment which have exhausted the resources of Oriental luxury. The Arabic love of variety and magnificence, so characteristic of an impulsive, a versatile, a highly romantic race, is visible on every side; in the arrangement of columns, now single, now grouped; some smooth, others belted with rings, the majority once covered with gilding, a few still encased in an enamel of sparkling mosaic; in the composite curves of the arches, each disclosing the distinctive traits of its original type,—horseshoe, ogival, semicircular,—some engrailed, others stalactitic, all of incomparable grace and symmetry; in the spandrels, at short distance, apparently identical, yet upon close inspection moulded in a score of fantastic designs, through whose lace-like interstices the rays of sunlight diffuse a mellowed glow; in the maze of polished tilework, whose bewildering combinations are but broken sections of the nine polygons of geometry, arranged by the aid of algebraic science; in the fretted walls with their gorgeous arabesques; in the intertwined mottoes, doubly legible; in the cupolas, whose decorations of azure, scarlet, and gold sparkle in the semi-obscurity of the interior like a setting of precious gems. The eye of the hypercritical architect sees in the Alhambra but a confused jumble of incongruous ideas; a construction without recognized precedent; a monument which belongs to no order of architecture, and which transgresses the established rules of that science as radically as the productions of many authors, whose genius is the delight of millions, do the unities of time and place, once universally considered the essentials of poetic excellence. But it is this very irregularity, this independence of the arbitrary and inflexible principles of art, that, to the unprofessional observer, constitutes its greatest charm. The originality of its component parts when analyzed may be disputed, but no question can arise as to the consummate skill that arranged and combined them in a whole, which, although it may offend the canons of artistic criticism, if strictly construed, is yet beautiful, harmonious, enchanting. The famous Arabian palace is the masterpiece of the Moorish architects of Spain; the crowning achievement of the labors of twenty generations; the embodiment of the most elegant conceptions of the art, the industry, and the intellectual culture of that polished age. So long as the slightest portion of it survives, it will convey an instructive lesson to the student and the antiquary, and call up memories of that great empire, whose literary remains, whose scientific discoveries, whose large tolerance, whose inquiring spirit, were at once the harbingers and the incentives of modern civilized life. All that is valuable in the economic institutions of society, in its multitudinous inventions, in its facility of intercommunication, in the excellence of its fabrics, in the perfection of its agricultural operations, has long been recognized as dependent upon the practical and judicious application of the principles of science. Of these considerations, the Alhambra, which was the centre of the most accomplished and progressive community of the Middle Ages, is particularly suggestive. It is a monument of national genius. It is a symbol of national progress. It looked down upon the libraries which sheltered the fragments of that civilization whose learning had enlightened the mediæval world. In its halls the prodigal luxury of the Moorish princes daily exhibited exquisite specimens of the experience and dexterity of the artisans of the kingdom,—the masterpieces of the weaver, the cutler, the armorer, the jeweller, the enameller. Its painted battlements towered above the lists where Moslem and Christian knights had competed for the prize of chivalry and daring, bestowed by the emir surrounded by the pomp of arms and the beauty of the seraglio. Thus was the Alhambra the emblem of the greatness and splendor of Granada, the boast of its monarchs, the wonder of strangers, the pride of the people. Its glory has departed, its lustre is tarnished, but the mournful traditions with which poetry and romance have invested its history can never pass away; and its fate is emphasized by the mottoes of the sovereigns who respectively founded and mutilated it, still emblazoned upon its walls, the arrogant vaunt of the Spaniard, “Plus Ultra;” the pious device of the Moor, “There is no conqueror but God.”