Muslim Spain and the Maghrib: the artistic relationship in the Almoravid and Almohad periods

Abstract

The artistic history of Muslim Iberia, spanning nearly 800 years (711-1492), is divisible into five consecutive phases, each one of them possessing sufficient individual socio-political and stylistic characteristics to allow scholarship to segregate them into distinct periods. By the closing years of the eighth century, the Muslim artists and architects of the Iberian Peninsula had already created, albeit in a formative stage, and both in theory and practice, definite artistic rules and norms which were constantly followed until the end of the fifteenth century. These regulations and habits originated in large part from the legacy of Near Eastern, ancient Mediterranean, and early medieval European cultures, which the Muslims inherited and then brought from the Middle East and which, in addition, were reinforced by the cultural background which they found in Hispania. The Andalusian artists, whether conscious of it or not, understood and applied in a totally unprecedented way the aesthetic concepts of classicism and anti-classicism that had been the fundamental standards in the Graeco-Roman world. To these opposite artistic trends they added a strong measure of a sense of elegance and refinement, and a taste for luxury and surface embellishment, which were direct inspirations from their PersoMesopotamian inheritance.The result was a new and highly graceful, delicate, sumptuous, and ornamental style that was expressed in a manner which was consonant with either the classical or anti-classical principles of antiquity. Although these two divergent artistic currents are present in all phases of Hispano-Islamic art, the degree in which they occur, except for the first period of the Umayyads, is never in balance. One of the trends was always dominant over the other, reflecting the social taste of the time. Nevertheless, if one of the two tendencies is to be categorized as characteristic of Andalusian culture as a whole, because of its pervasive quality and high level of development, it has to be the anti-classical tendency. The overall, paramount artistic current of Muslim Iberia is similar, in concept, to the baroque, anti-classical styles of the Hellenistic, late Roman, Sasanian and Byzantine periods. In architectural embellishment, this Andalusian sense of aesthetics always produced very rich compositions. The ornamentation is characterized by the use of polychromatic motifs organized in complex arrangements, giving the illusion of depth or actually possessing varying subtle distances between foreground and background, and consequently, implying a certain degree of visual motion. In order to achieve its typifying optical effect, this trend relies on such elements as coloration, density, spatial manipulation, as well as movement and counter-movement. The end-product is a work of art which appears overwhelming, for it aims more for the senses than for the intellect. Moreover, because of its tremendous complexity and atectonic manner, it is incapable of being absorbed all at once