The injunction of Mohammed concerning the representation of animal forms was disregarded almost from the earliest days of Moslem dominion. Even before the tenth century, Mussulman artists who depicted living beings seem to have abounded in the countries subject to Islam. A biography of them is given by Makrisi, in which great talents are ascribed to those of Egypt. Their works were displayed not only in wood and stone, but on silk, velvet, and cloth of gold. The treasury of the Fatimite Khalif, Mostansir, contained peacocks and gazelles of life-size, made of the precious metals enriched with magnificent gems. Al-Amin, the son and successor of Harun-al-Raschid, possessed a number of magnificent barges, fashioned like birds and animals and painted in imitation of their living models, whose oarsmen were concealed from view. As these monsters, apparently instinct with life, moved mysteriously over the Tigris, they excited the astonishment of the multitude as inventions of the genii. From the statement of the great historian, Ibn-Khaldun, who visited Granada in 1363, the representation of well-known events, as well as of the features of distinguished personages on the walls of houses in that city, must have been common. He was greatly scandalized by this unorthodox custom, which, although deriving its origin from the Castilians, was constantly practised by those who called themselves good Mussulmans, among whom were numbered many artists who had been instructed by the Byzantine and Persian residents of the capital.
Nor was sculpture, an art implying an even more flagrant violation of Koranic precept than that exhibited by the less conspicuous objects produced by the brush and the pencil, neglected by Mohammedans. Arabic histories are full of allusions to these productions. Khumaruyah, Sultan of Egypt, in the ninth century had a great hall in his palace filled with statues of the women of his harem. The knockers on the doors of many of the mansions of Bagdad were carved in the shapes of grotesque animals. Existing examples, few as they are, of the sculpture of the Hispano-Arab period show to what an extent religious prejudice was defied by the Mussulmans of Spain.
The doctors of the law disagreed as to the interpretation of the command of the Koran which banished from the realm of art one of its most useful and suggestive features. Some regarded it in the light of an absolute prohibition to be construed in its broadest significance; to others it seemed to refer only to the fabrication and worship of idols. The Spanish Arabs, who had greater liberality and a larger share of philosophical indifference than their Oriental brethren, apparently adhered to the latter opinion. At all events, the admonition generally respected as a cardinal principle of the orthodox believer was ignored from the very foundation of the khalifate, and even the sanctuary of Islam was defiled by the presence of sculptured forms of animal life; in the Great Mosque of Abd-al-Rahman, the Seven Sleepers and the raven despatched from the ark by Noah are chiselled upon the capitals; over the portal of Medina-al-Zahrâ stood the effigy of the beautiful favorite whose vanity had suggested the erection of that magnificent edifice; its principal fountain was embellished with the figures of twelve different quadrupeds of gold incrusted with precious stones; in the designs of its rich hangings were interwoven wild beasts and birds of brilliant plumage, whose forms, delineated with amazing skill, appeared to move with the swaying of the silken tapestry; in one of the squares of the capital stood a lion, cast in bronze and plated with gold, whose eyes were rubies, and from whose mouth gushed the refreshing waters brought from the springs of the distant sierra. In the fairy palace of Rusafah, equal to its rival in the splendor of its appointments and inferior only in dimensions, silver swans floated upon the glossy surface of the lakes, and the fountains displayed the effigies of men and animals carved in marble and jasper by a cunning hand. The talismanic horseman of King Habus, described in history and immortalized by fiction, is another instance of this disregard of Koranic injunction, again confirmed by the two marble lions of the Moorish mint and by the famous twelve of the Alhambra.
But the most curious of these examples of violated law are the paintings upon the ceiling of the Hall of Justice in that palace, and which are supposed to have been executed during the fourteenth century. Two of them represent scenes of war and the chase, but no data survive by which it can be determined whether they are historic or legendary. The third contains portraits of ten kings of Granada, whose rank is indicated by the royal blazons represented in the central painting. The faces, sober, dignified, majestic, are evidently drawn from life, and a tradition exists that the features of some of them were recognized by old Moslems of Granada when, after the Reconquest, they were for the first time exposed to public inspection; while the turbans, the flowing robes of various colors, the swords with curious hilts and scabbards of gold and silver, the yellow slippers, at once suggest the Orient; and place before the eye the exact costumes, and perhaps the lineaments, of those princes who long maintained in a corner of hostile Europe the legends, the belief, and the civilization of the Mohammedan world. These unique works are of Arabic origin, a fact established by the monograms traced upon them, which denote unmistakably the nationality of the artist. In numerous particulars they indicate lack of experience and cultivation. The figures are rudely delineated, the positions strained and awkward. None exhibit the slightest grace; some are absolutely grotesque; the colors are not distributed harmoniously; no attention is paid to the rules of perspective; the lines are sharply and unpleasantly defined; there is no symmetry of proportion, no dexterous imitation of those natural features which impart to a painting life and energy. The mechanical arrangement is as crude as the pictorial execution. Upon a wooden framework, pigskins were stretched and fastened, and over these a layer of gypsum was spread, forming the foundation for the colors. The flatness of the latter and the golden ground of the portraits are indications of Byzantine taste and influence.
Among the architectural decorations employed by Moorish artists, none were more popular or more susceptible of variety of arrangement and harmony of effect than those formed by the letters of the Arabic alphabet. The inscriptions on the walls of Moorish edifices constitute no inconsiderable part of their choicest ornamentation. Those of the Peninsula are principally devoted to mottoes of a religious nature or to legends illustrating the grandeur and munificence of the sovereign. In some instances, a poem, evidently composed for the purpose, and celebrating the virtues of the prince or the beauty of the building it adorned, glittered upon the panelled walls or encircled the apartment with characters of living fire. The square Cufic letters used in the first buildings of the khalifate were eventually superseded by the graceful curves of the Neshki, of African script, which is seen in all its perfection in the Alhambra. So admirably are these characters adapted to the purposes of decoration that Spanish and Italian workmen, ignorant of their significance and supposing them to be arabesques, have frequently inserted Koranic inscriptions among the carvings of Christian churches; and it is said that they are even to be seen upon the proud façade of St. Peter’s at Rome. What a circumstance of exquisite irony it would be, as a French writer pertinently suggests, if, over the portal of the grandest temple of Christendom, the fountain of trinitarian orthodoxy, the stronghold of Catholicism, the seat of the infallible Vicar of Christ, should be found inscribed the Mohammedan declaration of faith proclaiming the mission of the Arabian Prophet and the unity of God!
The colors most affected by the Spanish-Moslem in his interior decorations were vermilion and ultramarine, both esteemed by artists as much for durability as for brilliancy; and the permanence of those used by the Moors of Granada, whose vivid tints have been perfectly preserved through the lapse of ages, attest their extraordinary purity and excellence. While these remained the basis of artistic coloring, others—such as green, black, yellow, and purple—were sparingly employed, excepting in the mosaics, which blaze with a mingled mass of gorgeous hues.
No feature of Moslem civilization has lingered more persistently in the Peninsula than its architecture. The scanty knowledge of the Visigothic builder was swept away by the Conquest. The pride of the Castilian, bred to arms and incompetent by education and experience, revolted at the restraints and drudgery incident to such an occupation. As a result, Arabic artisans constructed most of the edifices erected for years after the fall of the Saracen power, and the predominance of their artistic ideas gave rise to a new style called Mudejar, whose creations are often difficult to distinguish from those of the original Moorish order. No more flattering tribute can be paid to their accomplishments than the circumstance that no class of buildings profited so much by their talents as those erected under the auspices of the Church. After the capture of Cordova by the Castilians, Moorish masons and carpenters were compelled to work for a specified period every year on these sacred structures, in consideration of which they were exempted from the payment of taxes. Turbaned artificers, vassals of the clergy, assisted in the construction of some of the noblest piles of the Peninsula; the walls of great monasteries, the windows of lofty spires, exhibit the engrailed and horseshoe arches of the Moor; his skill was exercised in the chiselling of the intricate designs which cover the fronts of magnificent cathedrals; a chapel in the grand metropolitan church of Toledo, the seat of the Primate of Spain, which dates from the thirteenth century, is a beautiful specimen of Mudejar art. This influence is also apparent in many of the finest ecclesiastical edifices of France,—in the churches of Maguelonne, in the cathedral of Puy, and in the ancient abbeys of Provence and Languedoc. It is said by Dulaure, in his “Histoire de Paris,” that Moorish architects assisted in the construction of Notre Dame.
The absence of all remains of sepulchral architecture dating from the Mohammedan period deprives posterity of one of the most reliable standards by which the customs, the sentiments, and the characteristics of a nation may be determined. In common with all Semitic races, the Arabs seldom reared imposing monuments to the dead. No trace of a tomb which enclosed the body of any of the Ommeyade khalifs has been discovered; the very place of their erection was lost in the tempest of ruin which accompanied the Almoravide conquest. The few existing in the Alhambra were simple marble sarcophagi, without ornament, upon whose lids were sculptured long inscriptions in letters of gold on a ground of blue. Of these slabs but one remains, for the tombs, abandoned to the curiosity of the rabble when Granada was taken, perished, and the bones of the princes who had illumined all Europe by their genius and learning were unceremoniously cast outside the walls.
Deprived to a great extent of the artistic resources to be obtained from the representation of the forms of animal life, the Moslem utilized with unrivalled skill the segments of geometrical figures and the graceful foliage of the vegetable world for the manifold purposes of decoration. Every line in the complex designs of mosaic is the side or the curve of a polygon, a circle, or an ellipse; the eminently beautiful domes of wood and of stucco were suggested by the symmetrical productions of nature,—the hemispherical were modelled after the section of an orange, by which name they were known to the Arab; the stalactitic were striking adaptations of the pomegranate divested of its seeds. The arabesques are but reproductions of vines and tendrils combined in wonderful mazes of tracery; the lotus, that sacred emblem of India and Egypt whose mysterious significance was long a secret of the sacerdotal office, is sculptured upon panel, cornice, and capital; the rose nestles amidst the entwined ornamentation of the walls; the frondage of the palm is simulated by the sweeping arches which cross and intersect like the drooping branches of the date-forests of the Nile. By other classes of natural and inanimate objects, by the jewels of the firmament, and by the denizens of the sea, was contributed the inspiration that imparted to architectural adornment its choicest forms of elegance and beauty. The great marble shell, fifteen feet in diameter and carved from a single block, which covers the sanctuary of the Mosque of Cordova, is one of the most curious and highly finished works that ever proceeded from the chisel of the Moslem sculptor. Its fidelity to nature, its perfect proportions, the striking position it occupies, render it one of the most interesting objects in the ancient temple whose holy of holies it embellishes. Stars are scattered in endless profusion throughout the Alhambra; in the centre of mosaic designs; through the belts of floral patterns which encompass the halls; in the lofty ceilings, where in the uncertain light their golden lustre recalls the sparkle of their originals on the spotless ground of the Southern heavens.
The painted windows, sparingly distributed in buildings erected by the jealous Moslem, were yet one of their most enchanting and characteristic features. No trace of them appears in the constructions of the khalifate; their existence during the age of transition is a matter of conjecture; and it is only in the last half of the final period of Hispano-Arab architecture that this art attained its highest development. The labors of the Gothic artist have from time immemorial been celebrated as the most perfect of their kind; and the jewelled designs whose tints illumine the aisles of mediæval cathedrals would seem to be of incomparable brilliancy of color and harmony of effect. And yet competent judges have pronounced that these superb works were rivalled, if not surpassed, by the rich and elegant combinations of Arabian genius. There is no reason to believe that the execution of the windows was inferior in beauty to the decoration of the walls; the same dexterity of hand, accuracy of eye, and correctness of taste must have presided over both; and a glaring deficiency in any prominent part must have been prejudicial to all. The patience which was not exhausted by years of toil upon an object intended for the uses of the harem, and to be seen by comparatively few, would not be likely to neglect the designs whose gorgeous hues were a principal attraction of the palace, the ornament and the glory of the capital. The stained glass employed was of every color, and corresponded in pattern with the arabesques of the interiors; and the blazons and devices of royalty disposed at intervals through the mass of ornament reminded the observer of the greatness of the monarch under whose auspices the work was completed. The exquisite charm of these effects when combined with those of the walls and cupolas must be imagined, for no description can convey an adequate idea of their surpassing excellence.