Part 14

As with the palaces of Toledo, so it is with its temples--the traces of Moorish art are nearly all defaced or obliterated. The mosque, which was replaced by the church of San Roman, possesses the purest mudejar steeple of Toledo, erected by Esteban de Illan, and another, if smaller, Moorish steeple, adorns the Santa Magdalena. A monument, which ranks among the most interesting in Spain, is the Cristo de la Luz, located between the Puerta del Sol and the Puerta Bisagra--a little gem of Moorish-Byzantine architecture, which is regarded as the oldest and most perfect specimen of its kind in the Peninsula. On the walls of this church, which remains to this day a perfect mosque, the conquering Alfonso VI. hung up his shield in 1035 to commemorate the first mass that was celebrated in Toledo after the defeat of the Moors. Until Tarik came to Toledo the mosque had been a Gothic temple, before which hung a cross, bearing an effigy of the crucified Christ. Legend declares that two impious Jews pricked the greatly-venerated body with a dagger, and that from the wound blood instantly gushed forth. The Jews, who attempted to evade the penalty of their folly by hiding the crucifix, were traced by the stains of blood to their house, and torn to pieces by the infuriated Christians. Tradition further asserts that the Jews planned a revenge by poisoning the feet of the restored statue, but that when a woman knelt before it the figure withdrew its foot from her kiss. Many other legends attach to the sacred relic, which was removed from before the church when the city was captured by the Moors, and secreted in a cavity in the wall, with a burning lamp placed before it. When the Moorish dominion came to an end, 370 years later, and the cavity was revealed, the unreplenished lamp was found to be still alight before the crucifix in the wall of the Moorish mosque. From this legend the church takes its name of the Christ of the Light.

This wonderful little monument, which is only twenty-two feet by twenty-five feet, possesses six short naves, which cross each other under nine vaults, and in the centre are four short, stout columns, surmounted by sculptured capitals, from which spring sixteen heavy horseshoe arches. This forest of naves and arches comprises a miniature reproduction of the mosque of Cordova. Arcades, cusped in Moorish fashion, and supported on shafts, pierce the walls; the inevitable “half orange” ceiling domes the centre, and above the principal arch is the shield of Alfonso VI., embellished with a white cross on a crimson ground, which the victorious king handed to Archbishop Bernardo to supply the place of a cross above the dismantled altar. This gem of Moorish-Byzantine architecture, so small yet so perfect,

so simple yet so fantastic, conveys an impression of amazing strength, and presents an admirable example of early Arabian work.

The nunnery of Santa Fe, which was originally a regal Moorish palace, has been shorn of nearly all its ancient beauty, which is now only traceable in the arcaded brickwork of the wall, almost obliterated by exuberant foliage. There are still the remnants of Moorish ornamentation in the convent halls and corridors of San Juan de la Penitencia, and the influence of Moorish art is also seen in some good azulejo and the artesonade ceiling of Santa Isabel.

The Alcantara bridge, which was originally a Roman structure, was repaired by the Goths in 687, and rebuilt by the Moors of 866. It was of this Moorish bridge that Rasis el Moro wrote: “It was such a rich and marvellous work, and so subtly wrought, that never man with truth could believe there was any other such fine work in Spain.” Since then it has been repaired and restored wholly, or in part, no fewer than eight times; and while these alterations have changed its style and appearance, it still remains one of the finest and most picturesque monuments of Toledo. The bridge of San Martin, which compares with it in interest and beauty, was built in 1203, and is guarded at either end with a tower and gateway adorned with Moorish arches and battlements. The bridge of San Martin gives entrance to the city through the gate of the Cambron. It is no longer Moorish, as it was in the time of Alfonso VI.; but on its half-renaissance, half-classical architecture, one may still read the remains of some of those grandiloquent utterances of the Moorish spirit which prompted Ponz to style Toledo the city of magnificent inscriptions. It was a devout, if somewhat credulous, spirit which inspired the transcription of the following article of faith: “There is but one God on earth, and Mohammed is His messenger. All the faithful who believe in our prophet Mohammed, and continue to kiss the hands and feet of Murabite Muley Abda Alcadar every day, will be without sin, will not be blind, nor deaf, nor lame, nor wounded; and receiving his benediction, when the time of his death comes, will only be three days ill and dying, will go with open eyes to Paradise forgiven of all sins.” Another inscription bore the following exhortation and compensatory promise: “Prayer and peace over our lord and prophet Mohammed. All the faithful, when they went to lie down in their beds, mentioning the Alfagiu Murabito Abdala, and recommending themselves to him, will enter no battle out of which they will not come victorious; and in whatever battle against Christians they may stain their lances with Christian blood, dying that same day, will go alive and whole with eyes open to Paradise, and his descendants will remain till the fourth generation forgiven.”

The present Visagra Gate, rebuilt under Charles V., dates back to the Moors. It is entirely Moorish in character, with the heavy simple features, the triple horseshoe arches and upper crenellated apertures which we associate with the first period of Morisco architecture. Through this gate, which is now blocked up, Alfonso VI. entered Toledo. The two graceful square towers, roofed with green and white tiles, which compose the edifice, are joined by the high turreted walls of a square courtyard, and the decorations include the Senate’s dedication of the gate to Charles Quint, the sculptured arms of the emperor, a statue of St. Eugenie, two others of Gothic kings, and a life-sized angel holding an unsheathed sword. This cold, bare inventory of the ornaments of the gate convey no idea of the splendid impressiveness of the structure, the splendour and charm of

which sink into comparative insignificance beside its glorious neighbour, the Gate of the Sun.

This magnificent gate of rough stone, with its towers of brown granite, has been rightly described as one of the world’s masterpieces. Yet here again the pen is powerless to do justice to its beauty; and to describe its proportions and decoration is to complicate, rather than explain, the impression that is conveyed by the camera. The square towers, with their semi-circular fronts, and the great central arch resting on two Moorish columns, and the zones of ornamental arches above the horse-shaped openings, comprise a Moorish gem against a Spanish sky, a miracle of loveliness upon a rough and naked rampart. But how, cries Hannah Lynch, to write of this Puerta del Sol, that “thing of beauty even among crowded enchantments! It is to pick one’s way through superlatives and points of exclamation and call in vain on the goddess of sobriety to subdue our tendency to excess and incoherence. Put this matchless gate in the middle of the desert of Sahara; it would then be worth while making the frightful journey alone to look at it. However far you may have journeyed, you would still be for ever thankful to have seen such a masterpiece--incontestably a work of supreme art, perhaps the rarest thing of the world.” Whether the writer intends her high eulogy to be applied generally to any “work of supreme art,” or to the Puerta del Sol in particular, most people who have come under the witching influence of the art of the Moors, will not deny that it is well deserved.

MOORISH ORNAMENT

A NOTE ON THE ELEMENTS OF ARAB ART

In art, precept is subservient; practice is supreme. The idea which may be hidden in a picture is of little moment; it is the design, fully accomplished, which is prized. Its inspiration may become a “light to shine before men,” but it attains its paramount value only when realised.

Refinement of manners and acuteness of intellect have, in the East, nothing in common with what we call education. In this social state, ignorance, which, among us, condemns a man, may be the condition of great originality. The Arab tent-dweller was, and is, often, a very superior man; for the tent is a kind of school, always open, where, from contact with educated guests who have seen men and cities, was produced an intellectual movement which led the Arab, in exchanging his nomadic life for a settled habitation, to translate the tent to a more solid form; to commute the tent-pole for a slender marble column; and to transform luxurious products of the loom, which had adorned his former dwelling, to a semblance of their golden tissues on fairy-decorated diapery.

If the poetry and refinement of the South of Europe in modern times cannot be traced, as many authors would have us believe--notably Father Andres, a learned Spaniard, anxious to give to his own country the honour of imparting to the rest of Europe the first impulse of refinement after the fall of the Roman Empire--to the Arabs of Spain, much must still be allowed to their influence; for their progress in refinement was hardly less brilliant and rapid than their progress in Empire. At the period of the glory of Cordova, which began about A.D. 750, and continued to the time of its conquest by the Christians in 1236, the scholars of Spain were in a higher state of cultivation than could be found elsewhere; and if the Kingdom of Granada--the last stronghold of the Moslem--which ended in 1492, was less refined, it was perhaps more splendid and luxurious. The public schools and libraries of the Spanish Arabs were resorted to, not only by those of their own faith at home and in the East, but by Christians from different parts of Europe; and Pope Sylvester the Second (Gerbet, a Frenchman, Pope 999-1003), one of the most remarkable men of his age, is believed to have owed his elevation to the culture he absorbed in Seville and Cordova.

Arab art takes its place with the arts of Greece and Japan as one of the three great schools into which all styles of ornament naturally fall. Beauty and simplicity--the restrained rhythm and order which form the essential foundation of Greek art--is as distinct from the vivacious realism and unsymmetrical, haphazard decoration of the Japanese, as from that elegance and complexity produced by geometrical involutions symmetrically constructed, which constitute the basis of Moorish art. These three styles have been compared by Monsieur J. Bourgoin, in his _Elements of Arab Art_, to the three kingdoms of Nature. Greek art he likens to the animal kingdom, the Japanese art to the vegetable kingdom, and Arabian art, from the symmetry which recalls the crystallisation of minerals in its uniformity of configuration, and its elementary structure, he compares with the mineral kingdom.

In the art of the Arabs the inspiration is completely independent of living nature. The Arab artist proceeds from within to the exterior; he sets himself problems, and transfers them by means of the compass and rule. The decorative impulse of Arab art consists of geometrical diagrams either carved into relief, or inlaid, or simply laid flat. Since the inspiration is dry, and purely abstract, the artistic development is slight and unimportant; and, since the motive is restricted, Arab decorative art has remained simple, but still of an incomparable elegance, because the harmony between inspiration and execution is perfect. By their creed Mohammedan artists were forbidden to represent living forms, yet they adopted the principles they found in Nature, and developed them with absolute fidelity. Thus, as I showed in dealing with the architecture of the Alhambra, in surface decoration by the Moors the lines flow from a parent stem; every ornament, however distant, can be traced to its branch and root. In all cases we find the lines radiating from a parent stem, as we may see exemplified in Nature by the human hand, or in a leaf. We are never offended, as in modern practice, by the random introduction of an ornament set down without a reason for its existence. However irregular the expanse they have to decorate, they always commence by dividing the field into equal areas, and round these main lines they fill in their details, which invariably return to their parent stem, a system which proves them to have been absolute masters of space.

In the introduction to my volume on the Alhambra, I emphasised this fact, that the Moors ever had regard to the first principle of architecture--to decorate construction, never to construct decoration. In Arabian architecture, not only does the decoration arise naturally out of the construction, but the constructive idea is carried out in every detail of the ornamentation of the surfaces. A superfluous or useless ornament is never found in Moorish decoration; every ornament arises naturally and inevitably from the parent design. The general forms were first laid down; they were subdivided by general lines; the interstices were then filled in with ornament, to be again subdivided and enriched for closer inspection. The principle was carried out with the greatest refinement, and the harmony and beauty of all Moorish ornamentation is derived from its observance. The highest distinction was thereby obtained; the detail never interfering with the general form. Seen at a distance, the main lines strike the eye; on nearer approach, the ornamentation comes into the composition; and a minute inspection reveals the detail on the surface of the ornaments themselves.

Monsieur A. Rhone, in his _L’Egypte à Petites Journées_, holds that, “seeing the marvellous resources which the Arabs have found in geometry for decorating surfaces, one regrets less for art that the laws of Islamism have forbidden them, as an idolatrous act, to introduce representations of animated forms. Although these laws were not so strictly observed as is generally believed, who knows, if in turning the Arabian artists away from sculpture and statuary, they have not been the means of preserving this special and almost transcendant aptitude that the Semites have for all subtle combinations, and especially for those of geometrical numbers, lines, and figures?”

Although the principles of Moorish art are so rigid and severe, the Arabs have not remained exempt from exterior influence, but have adapted and incorporated foreign feeling into their art, and modified it to their purpose. A note by the late Owen Jones greatly emphasises this fact. He says:--“When the Mohammedan religion and civilisation

rose with such astonishing rapidity in the East, the Arabs, in their mosques, made use of the materials which they found ready to their hands in the ruins of old Roman buildings which they purposely destroyed; they took columns with their Corinthian capitals, etc., and adapted them to the arrangement required for their own temples. In their subsequent works they did not, as we should have done, continue to copy and reproduce the models which were at first so convenient to them; but, applying to them their own peculiar feelings, they gradually departed from the original model, to such an extent at last, that but for the intermediate steps we should be unable to discover the least analogy between them. Yet by this process the capitals of their columns can be traced back to the Corinthian order which they, in the first instance, found so abundantly for their use.”

Arab art must ever remain distinct from every other school and style, because the essential foundation of it is fixed and limited. Now, those who resign themselves to a style of art reduce themselves to formulas, to copies, or to diagrams. Greco-Roman art has its formulas of ordinance and propositions; Chino-Japanese art has its characteristic copies; and Syro-Arabian art its abstract and geometrical diagrams. The general elements of Arabian art, as applied to architecture and decoration, consist of stalactites, intertwinings, and ornaments. Stalactites, which are at the same time ornaments and members of architecture, are employed in corbelling, in coving, and in pendentives, and are modelled and superposed by tapia, or cut in wood and placed side by side, or opened into hollows by superficial casings in wire and tressing. The intertwinings which embellish the surfaces are carved and trimmed in splitboards of carpentry, or laid in compartments, or carved in open work, or engraved in stone, wood, and metal; or set in filigree, vignettes, or mosaics. The ornaments, which divide themselves into decoration by embroidery or embellishment in sections, reduce themselves to a small number of elements, or flower-work cut flat in outline. The outlines, complete in the boundary which limits them, are quite characteristic. They do not resemble in any way, except in so far as the unalterable laws of geometry decree, the outline drawn by Europeans, nor the cursive traits used by the Chinese and Japanese. All Arab ornament is by involution of lines; in short, it may be said to be _entirely_ geometric.

The art of the Mohammedan, so powerful in appeal to the imagination, not only by beauty and grace, but by the doctrine of the Koran inscribed in their temples on every side in ornamented characters,--so admirably traced that they appear to form part of a perfected design proclaiming the power of Allah, and impressing upon the believer respect for the laws and the love of virtue;--produces an effect little short of magical. Still does that art accompany its religion in a lingering death. Crushed by the rapid strides which surrounding nations have made in the progress of civilization, and which have outrun and ruined it, yet do a few bright emanations appear, to show that as in religion they are faithful to their creed, so in art do their crumbling monuments preserve their shattered remains on which the observer still may see, in deep characters, the chronicles of the times.

In the illustrations which accompany these brief notes, the Arab’s mastery of line in the composition of design may be studied, and its mystery revealed; but to reduce these geometrical intertwinings to their original elements demands patience, application, and very much time. At first sight these diagrams may appear monotonous, but each is constructed on a particular theme. Most of them spread

throughout the Orient, and may be more particularly studied in the Moorish monuments in Spain, where they are employed indifferently in carvings, in mosaic and inlaid work, in application to chased bronze, and in compartments of decoration and embroidery. The infinite variety the artists are able to introduce while working on strict rules, which admit of no exception, is the result of instinct perfected by centuries of practice. That in their work was something to be learned, as well as to be felt, is evident from the Moorish poet’s exhortation to us to attentively contemplate the adornments of their palaces, and thereby reap the benefit of a commentary on decoration. It is, then, for the benefit of students who would know something more of Arabian ornamentation than can be derived from the sensation produced by broad effects, and for lovers of the fine arts who would understand the inwardness of Moorish refinement and reduce its mysteries to their primary bases, that the accompanying diagrams have been reproduced.

At foot of each diagram is added a short explanatory note; but it is expedient for the student to give consideration to the _plan_ which is, in every case, set out in dotted lines. By this means, he will discover, if he approaches his subject with a free mind, that his task will offer less difficulty than would appear at the outset. To minutely describe the construction of each diagram, and, at the same time comply with the stringent rules of geometry, would occupy much too great a space; nor would the result, perhaps, be proportioned to the labour.