The Eye of Sovereignty: Poetry and Vision in the Alhambra's Lindaraja Mirador

Abstract

The Alhambra Palace in fourteenth-century Granada had an extraordinary number of windows, towers, and balconies that allowed the palace inhabitant to gaze to the city and landscape beyond the palace walls. In the Alhambra's Lindaraja Mirador, the poetry inscribed on the walls collaborated with architecture to place the sultan on a visual continuum that began with him and ended symbolically at the horizons of his kingdom. The device of a window framing a carefully constructed view of landscape served to naturalize the implied association between vision and possession, and between territory and authority. The framed view and the idea of inscribing poetry murally had prior histories in al-Andalus and the Islamic architecture of the east. But the Alhambra is exceptional in that the poetry speaks in the first person, endowing architecture for the first time with its own voice.