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Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain
296 pages | 12 color/119 b&w illustrations | 8 1/2 x 11 | 1999
Cloth edition is not available
ISBN 978-0-271-02247-5 | paper: $37.95 sh
Winner of the 2002 Eleanor Tufts Award for Outstanding English-language publication, sponsored by the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies
“Like a Muslim woman slowly revealing herself as she unveils, the text gradually enchants the reader. Indeed, the book is a fine and clear-sighted essay that in a most original fashion strives to understand the complex relationships that have led to the creation of the Muslim gardens seen in Spain today.” —Ana Luengo, Garden History
“Her book, Gardens Landscape & Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain, is a meticulous examination of the symbolic significance that gardens played as part of the visual whole of the architecture of the age.” —Elizabeth Iracki, Bloomsbury Review
“Ruggles has made a significant contribution to our understanding of an important aspect of Islamic art and culture. Her analysis of the political and economic basis of Islamic garden design in Spain . . . and her new interpretation of the Alhambra and Generalife gardens and palaces constitute a significant contribution to the history of landscape architecture.” —Marilyn Stokstad, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies
“Ruggles's always clear narrative interweaves all the fundamental threads of the historical and political events necessary to fully appreciate the cultural bases of everything that had to do with that dramatic transformation of the Iberian landscape. She seems as at home talking about the changing yields of crop harvests as about the variations in the concepts of paradise as a garden across different cultures.” —Maria Rosa Menocal, The Medieval Review (TMR)
“Though Ruggles's book usefully brings together much new and little-known information about the palace gardens of al-Andalus, it is by no means a straightforward account of the evolution of these gardens but is intended rather as a grand interpretative work written from a multidisciplinary perspective.… The overall result is clear-headed, highly readable, stimulating, and largely persuasive.” —Michael Jacobs, Times Literary Supplement
“Ruggles’s splendidly full and broad-ranging new book is a fundamental resource on the complex of images evoked in Faisal’s wonderful line, treating the gardens of al-Andalus in their historical and ideological contexts as well as in the more familiar architectural and botanical ones.… Ruggles’s always clear narrative interweaves all the fundamental threads of the historical and political events necessary to fully appreciate the cultural bases of everything that had to do with that dramatic transformation of the Iberian landscape. She seems as at home talking about the changing yields of crop harvests as about the variations in the concepts of paradise as a garden across different cultures” —Maria Rosa Menocal, The Medieval Review (TMR)
“Though Ruggles’s book usefully brings together much new and little-known information about the palace gardens of al-Andalus, it is by no means a straightforward account of the evolution of these gardens but it is intended rather as a grand interpretative work written from a multidisciplinary perspective.… the overall result is clear-headed, highly readable, stimulating and largely persuasive.” —Michael Jacobs, Times Literary Supplement
Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain offers a new interpretation of the history of gardens in Spain during the period of Islamic rule from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries. Islamic gardens, with their cultivated garden beds and water channels, are traditionally regarded as an early reflection of paradise, which the Koran describes as a "garden watered by four streams." However, D. Fairchild Ruggles argues that the early palace garden was primarily an environmental, economic, and political construct, and that paradisiac symbolism did not develop until gardens acquired tombs.
D. Fairchild Ruggles discusses three aspects of medieval Islamic Spain: the landscape and agricultural transformation as documented in the Arabic scientific literature and geographies, the typological formation of the garden and its symbolic meaning in the eighth through the tenth centuries, and the role of vision and the frame in the spatial apparatus of sovereignty through the fifteenth century.
Ruggles explains that, while the repertoire of architectural and garden forms was largely unchanged from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries, their meaning changed dramatically. The royal palace gardens of Cordoba expressed a political ideology that placed the king above and at the center of the garden and, metaphorically, his kingdom. While this conception of the world began to falter in later centuries, the patrons of architecture still clung to the forms and motifs of the earlier golden age. In Granada, instead of creating new forms, artists at the Alhambra reworked and refined familiar vocabulary and materials; the vistas fixed by windows and pavilions referred not to the actual relationship of the king to his domain but rather to the memory of an expanding territory.
D. Fairchild Ruggles is Associate Professor in Landscape History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the editor of Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (SUNY, forthcoming).