Courting the Alhambra: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to the Hall of Justice Ceilings

296 Pages·2008·14.34 MB·English

by  Cynthia Robinson

Courting Th e Alhambra

Courting Th e Alhambra
Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to the
Hall of Justice Ceilings
Cynthia Robinson
Department of Art History and Visual Culture,
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Simone Pinet
Department of Romance Studies,
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Leiden • Boston
2008
Th is book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Courting the Alhambra: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to the Hall of Justice Ceilings /
edited by Cynthia Robinson, Simone Pinet.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-90-04-17342-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Mural painting and decoration, Islamic—Spain—Granada. 2. Hall of Justice (Alham-
bra, Granada, Spain) 3. Decoration and ornament, Islamic—Spain—Granada. 4. Deco-
ration and ornament, Architectural—Spain—Granada. 5. Ceilings—Spain—Granada.
I. Robinson, Cynthia, 1962- II. Pinet, Simone. III. Title.
ND2787.G7C68 2008
759.6’82—dc22
2008041965
ISBN-13 978 90 04 17342 2
Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Th e Netherlands
All rights reserved. No part of this publicaton may be reproduced, translated, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, pho-
tocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization of photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to Th e Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rose-
wood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
Printed in the Netherlands
CONTENTS
Articles
S imone Pinet and C ynthia R obinson , Introduction ................ 1
C ynthia R obinson , Arthur in the Alhambra? Narrative and
Nasrid Courtly Self-Fashioning in the Hall of Justice Ceiling
Paintings ........................................................................................ 12
A na E chevarria , Painting Politics in the Alhambra ..................... 47
R osa M aría R odríguez P orto , Courtliness and its Trujumanes:
Manufacturing Chivalric Imagery across the Castilian–
Grenadine Frontier ................................................................... 67
J errilynn D. D odds , Hunting in the Borderlands ...................... 115
J ennifer B orland , Th e Forested Frontier: Commentary in the
Margins of the Alhambra Ceiling Paintings .............................. 151
A manda L uyster , Cross-Cultural Style in the Alhambra: Textiles,
Identity and Origins ................................................................. 189
S imone P inet , Walk on the Wild Side ......................................... 216
O scar M artín , Allegories of Love: Th e Alhambra Ceilings and
Th e Evolution of Sentimental Fiction ....................................... 238
B ook R eviews
D aniel L asker , Review of Daniel Frank, Search Scripture Well.
Karaite Exegetes and the Origins of the Jewish Bible Commentary
in the Islamic East ..................................................................... 255
A ndrew B erns , Review of Elliott Horowitz: Reckless Rites: Purim
and the Legacy of Jewish Violence ................................................ 258
B rian C atlos , Review of Klein, Elka. Jews, Christian Society, and
Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona ............................................ 261
Th e page numbers in the above Table of contents and in the Index refer
to the bracketed page numbers in this volume.

Medieval
Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture
Encounters
in Confluence and Dialogue
Medieval Encounters 14 (2008) 153-163 www.brill.nl/me
Introduction
Cynthia Robinson, Simone Pinet
Editors
Th e Alhambra, a complex formed by largely fourteenth-century Nasrid
palaces, initially presents all who approach it with an imposing, impene-
trable and tower-studded façade. Th ose who enter, however, are rewarded
with a seemingly endless series of cool, fragrant gardens with pools and
fountains. Th is lush landscape is both punctuated and framed by buildings
composed of domes that appear to rival the celestial bodies themselves,
held up by slender, delicate columns reminiscent of alabaster or ivory, and
diaphanous walls woven of stucco marvels that defy even the most gifted
poets—though more than one attempted to rise to the challenge. A visitor
first encounters the stasis of the Hall of Comares—jewel of the so-called
“Palace of the Myrtles”1 and principal throne room for both the initial
patron of the palace, Yusuf I (r. 1333-1354), and his successor, Muham-
mad V (r. 1354-1391), whose proud tower appears to contemplate its own
reflection in the crystalline surface of the pool before it.
Th e adjacent Palace of the Lions presents an entirely different world. Its
central patio, surrounded by a forest of columns, would originally have been
paved in white marble;2 on its long sides, one glimpses the shaded interiors
of two large, square, heavily ornamented rooms of uncertain purpose,
1 Th e Palace of the Myrtles was built during the first decades of the fourteenth century,
while the Palace of the Lions was constructed between 1365 and 1390. Th e basic history of
the Alhambra has been succinctly summarized, in English, in Oleg Grabar, Th e Alhambra
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978; rev. ed. Sebastopol, CA: Solipsist Press,
1992), and, in Spanish, in José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, Los códigos de utopía de la Alhambra
de Granada (Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1990). As numerous scholars
have observed, the names currently used to refer to the various spaces that make up the
Alhambra complex originated in the nineteenth century, rather than in the thirteenth or
fourteenth; we make use of some of them in this collection for purposes of convenience.
2 Enrique Nuere Matauco, “Sobre el pavimento del Patio de los Leones,” Cuadernos de
la Alhambra 22 (1986), 87-93.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008
[2] 154 C. Robinson, S. Pinet / Medieval Encounters 14 (2008) 153-163
known to modern scholarship as the “Hall of the Two Sisters” and the
“Hall of the Abencerrajes.”3 On the short sides, two pavilions jut toward a
central fountain surrounded by a ring of crouching lions, from which the
palace takes its modern name. Th e ornamental stucco screens that com-
pose the pavilions, consisting primarily of architectural and vegetal motifs,
are delicate in appearance, perforated to allow the spaces they both delimit
and link to those around them to be dappled by the light of sun or moon.
Located behind the easternmost pavilion is a space known to modern
scholarship alternately as the “Hall of Kings” or the “Hall of Justice” (the
latter designation will be employed in this collection), composed of a long,
narrow hall open onto the patio but also screened from it by columns and
pavilion. Punctuated by six screen-like stucco arches adorned with muqar-
nas and draped with dense, naturalistic vegetation, this hall, in turn, opens
onto six shallow rooms, or alcobas, three of which are rectangular in shape
and three of which are square. Th e smaller square spaces are crowned by
muqarnas domes, miniature echoes of the stunning tours de force in celes-
tial illusionism that appear to hover above the nearby halls of the Two
Sisters and the Abencerrajes. Th e three larger, rectangular spaces, on the
other hand, rest beneath painted renditions of brilliantly colored gardens,
castles inhabited by courtly Christian lords and ladies, burbling fountains
and brooks, elegantly dressed Muslim knights deeply seated in a circle and
engaged in conversation, trysts and games of chess, coats of arms, hunts
and the rendering of tribute, a Wild Man, a lady with a lion, and scenes of
deadly combat.
Th e Alhambra complex itself has generated (and continues to generate)
a prolific body of scholarship; it has been the object of a myriad of inter-
pretive strategies and structures that range from the most blatant Oriental-
ism to the “impartially” archaeological, from careful reconstructions of its
poetics through the content and style of the verses inscribed onto its walls
3 Th ese rooms have received a dizzying variety of interpretations of their intended func-
tion; see James Dickie, “Th e Alhambra,” in Jerrilynn D. Dodds, ed., Al Andalus: the art of
Islamic Spain (New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art: Distributed by H.N. Abrams,
1992); Antonio Fernández-Puertas, Th e Alhambra (London: Saqi, 1997); Grabar, Th e
Alhambra; D. Fairchild Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic
Spain (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); D. Fairchild Rug-
gles, “Th e Eye of Sovereignty: Poetry and Vision in the Alhambra’s Lindaraja Mirador,”
Gesta 36, 2 (1997): 180-189; Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza, “El Palacio de los Leones de la
Alhambra: ¿Madrasa, zawiya y tumba de Muhammad V? Estudio para un debate,” Al-
Qantara 22, 1 (2001): 77-120; Robert Irwin, Th e Alhambra (London: Profile, 2004).
C. Robinson, S. Pinet / Medieval Encounters 14 (2008) 153-163 155 [3]
to daring (and not always entirely successful) applications of twentieth-
century critical theory.4 Th e paintings on leather that adorn the three vaults
above the rectangular alcobas of the “Hall of Justice,” however, have received
far less critical attention. Beginning in the eighteenth century, travelers
and visitors to the Alhambra expressed surprise and wonder at the presence
of these images, so clearly linked in stylistic terms to the visual heritage of
medieval Europe, rather than to the Islamic world to which the techniques
necessary for painting on leather are owed.5 During the latter decades of
the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, scholars largely
concurred in attributing the execution of the paintings to either Italian
or French artists. In 1973, however, Spanish art historian Basilio Pavón
Maldonado put forth the theory of possible Mudéjar authorship, positing
that the paintings could have been carried out by Muslim artisans living
in Castile and employed by or belonging to Pedro I, and suggesting that
these artisans had perhaps been “loaned” by the Castilian king to his friend
and ally Muhammad V of Granada.6 Jerrilynn D. Dodds, in an article pub-
lished in Art Bulletin in 1979, was the first American scholar to devote
serious attention to the topic, accepting Pavón’s “Mudéjar” theory and pro-
posing, on the basis of it, the specific identification of a number of the courtly
scenes in “Gothic” or “Northern” style present on the northern- and
4 F or a concise historiography of readings of the Alhambra from the Orientalist to the
archaeological, see the introduction to Puerta, Los códigos de utopía. For the Alhambra’s
visual and verbal poetics, see Puerta, Los códigos de utopía; ibidem, Historia del pensamiento
estético árabe: Al-Andalus y la estética árabe clásica (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1997); ibidem,
“La cultura y la creación artística,” in Historia del Reino de Granada, 3 v. (Granada: Univer-
sidad de Granada, 2002), I, 349-413; ibidem, “El vocabulario estético de los poemas de la
Alhambra,” in Pensar la Alhambra, ed. J. A. González Alcantud and A. Malpica Cuello
(Granada, 2001), 69-87; Ruggles, “Eye of Sovreignty;” Cynthia Robinson, “Marginal
Ornament: Poetics, Mimesis, and Devotion in the Palace of the Lions,” Muqarnas 25
(2008) (forthcoming). For an approach centered in the critical theory of the twentieth
century, see Valérie Gonzales, Beauty and Islam, esp. 45-50.
5 F or early interpretations of the paintings, as well as a discussion of the techniques used
to produce them, see Jesús Bermúdez Pareja, Pinturas sobre piel en la Alhambra de Granada,
Publicaciones del Patronato de la Alhambra; 1 (Granada: Patronato de la Alhambra y Gen-
eralife, 1987); ibidem and Manuel Maldonado Rodríguez, “Informe sobre técnicas, restau-
raciones y daños sufridos por los techos pintados de la Sala de los Reyes en el Palacio de los
Leones de la Alhambra,” Cuadernos de la Alhambra 6 (1970), 5-20. Ana Echevarría, in her
essay in this collection, also discusses the impression these ceilings made on at least one
sixteenth-century viewer.
6 Basilio Pavón Maldonado, Arte toledano: islámico y mudéjar (Madrid: Instituto His-
pano-Árabe de Cultura, 1973), 141-275.