English engravings and the numerous drawings which have been published of the Court of Lions convey but a very incomplete and false idea of it: nearly all of them fail to give the proper proportions, and, in consequence of the over-loading necessitated by the fact of representing the infinite details of Arabian architecture, suggest the idea of a monument of much greater importance.
The Court of Lions is a hundred and twenty feet long, seventy-three broad, while the galleries which surround it are not more than twenty-two feet high. They are formed by a hundred and twenty-eight columns of white marble placed in a symmetrical disorder of four and four, and of three and three, together: these columns, the capitals of which are full of work and still preserve traces of gold and colour, support arches of extreme elegance and of quite a unique shape.
On entering, the Hall of Justice, the roof of which is a monument of art of the most inestimable rarity and worth, immediately attracts your attention, as it forms the back of the parallelogram. There you see the only Arabian pictures, perhaps, which have come down to us. One of them represents the Court of Lions itself, with the fountain, which is very apparent, but gilt: some personages, whom the oldness of the painting does not allow you to distinguish clearly, seem to be engaged in a joust or passage of arms.
The subject of the other appears to be a sort of divan where the Moorish kings of Granada are assembled, and whose white burnous, olive-coloured faces, red mouths, and mysteriously dark eyes, are still easily discernible. These paintings, as is asserted, are executed on prepared leather, pasted on cedar panels, and serve to prove that the precept of the Koran which forbids the likenesses of animated beings being taken was not always scrupulously observed by the Moors, even if the twelve lions of the fountain were not there to confirm this assertion.
To the left, halfway up the gallery, is the Hall of the Two Sisters, which is the fellow to the Hall of the Abencerrages. This name of las Dos Hermanas is given it from two immense flagstones of white Macael marble, equal in size and perfectly alike, which form part of the pavement. The vaulted roof, or cupola, which the Spaniards expressively call media naranja (half an orange), is a miracle of work and patience. It is like a honeycomb, or the stalactites of a grotto, or the bunches of soap-bubbles which children blow out through a straw. The myriads of little vaults, of domes three or four feet high which grow out of one another, crossing and intersecting each other's edges, seem rather the effect of fortuitous crystallization than the work of a human hand; the blue, red, and green in the hollows of the mouldings are still nearly as bright as if they had only just been put on. The walls, like those of the Hall of Ambassadors, are covered, from the frieze to the height of a man, with stucco-work of the most complicated and delicate description. The bottom of the walls is coated with those square pieces of glazed clay of which the black, yellow, and green angles, combined with the white ground, form a mosaic-work. The middle of the apartment, according to the invariable custom of the Arabs, whose habitations seem to be nothing but large ornamented fountains, is occupied by a basin and a jet of water. There are four fountains under the Gate of Justice, a like number under the entrance-gate, and another in the Hall of the Abencerrages, without counting the Taza de los Leones, which, not satisfied with vomiting water through the mouths of its twelve monsters, throws up another torrent towards the sky out of the cap which surmounts it. All this water flows through small trenches made in the flooring of the halls and the pavement of the courts, to the foot of the Fountain of Lions, where it disappears in a subterraneous conduit. This is certainly a kind of dwelling in which you would never be annoyed by the dust, and it is a matter of conjecture how these halls could be inhabited in the winter. The large cedar doors were no doubt then shut, the marble floor was perhaps covered with a thick carpet, and fires of fruit-stones and odoriferous wood lighted in the braseros, and it was thus that the return of the fine season was waited for, which is never long in coming at Granada.
We will not describe the Hall of the Abencerrages, which is almost similar to that of the Two Sisters, and contains nothing particular, with the exception of its ancient door of wood arranged in lozenges, which dates from the time of the Moors. At the Alcazar of Seville there is another one made exactly in the same style.
The Taza de los Leones enjoys, in Arabian poetry, a wonderful reputation, and no terms of praise are thought too high for these superb animals: I must own, however, that it would be difficult to find anything less resembling lions than these productions of African fancy; the paws are mere wedges, similar to those bits of wood, of hardly any shape, which are used to thrust into the bellies of paste-board dogs to make them keep their equilibrium; the muzzles, streaked with transversal lines, doubtless to represent the whiskers, are exactly like the snout of a hippopotamus; and the eyes are designed in so primitive a manner, that they remind you of the shapeless attempts of children. Nevertheless, these twelve lions, if we look upon them not as lions, but as chimeras, as a caprice in ornamenting, produce, with the basins they support, a picturesque effect full of elegance, which aids you to comprehend their reputation, and the praises contained in the following Arabian inscription, of twenty-four verses of twenty-two syllables each, engraved on the sides of the basin into which the waters of the upper basin fall. We ask our readers' pardon for the somewhat barbarous fidelity of the translation:—
FOUNTAIN, COURT OF LIONS, ALHAMBRA.