Winner of the 2002 Eleanor Tufts Award for Outstanding English-language
publication, sponsored by the American Society for Hispanic Art
Historical Studies
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. |
|
|
