When Spain Was Islamic

By ROBERT HUGHES

Auden had it right about Spain: "That arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot/ Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe." One thinks of this while visiting "Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain," the new | contribution to the 500th anniversary of Columbus by New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a long time, Spain and North Africa were one.

Power abhors a vacuum. At the close of the 7th century A.D., Iberia had almost become one. Its central administrative order, that of the Roman Empire, had long since dissolved. Over it, Visigothic laws and Christian rites had been superimposed. But as a political entity, Iberia was on the verge of collapse. Thus when the Arabs looked across the Mediterranean, they saw a vast territory spotted with squabbling factions -- Christians, Jews, Visigoths -- separated from Africa by a small strait and ripe for conquest. In 711 a mixed force of Arabs and Berbers under the command of Musa ibn Nusayr crossed the sea and smashed through the patchy Visigothic resistance; within 50 years most of Spain, except for the pockets of Castile and Catalonia in the north, had become al-Andalus, the farthest western expansion of a vast Muslim empire run by the Abbasid dynasty from Baghdad.

The sons of the Prophet brought no Arab women with them; they intermarried with Iberian ones. The conquering power became an indigenous one in short order, although the successive caliphs tended to retain a nostalgia for Baghdad. Out of the Moorish conquest grew the first unified culture Spain had seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire. It lasted until 1492, when Catholic armies, under Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, drove the last vestiges of Arab power back to North Africa. If you want to grasp why Spain, traditionally, is unique in Europe, you must begin with the fact that no other European country was so permeated -- in language, customs and cultural forms -- by Islam.

"Al-Andalus," which runs through Sept. 27, is the first large-scale attempt to supply American art lovers with a sense of this vanished and brilliant culture. Given the ignorant animus against the Arab world in America, it is a valuable show, and its massive catalog is the best introduction to Spanish Islamic civilization ever set before a general audience by a museum. If the show itself, with its 120-some items, seems a little thin to the casual eye, this is due to the extreme paucity of works of art that have come down to us from the Hispano-Islamic period. After the reconquest, bronze and gold were melted down, jewels prized from their settings, manuscripts burned, textiles left to rot, pottery smashed. Not much survived the iconoclastic vengeance of Christians after the 16th century.

The durable art of al-Andalus -- the Arabs' word for Spain between their initial conquest and their final expulsion -- was, of course, architecture. Of the 4,000 or so "castles in Spain" that still stand (military buildings of all kinds, from fortified palaces to watchtowers), fully a quarter were built by the Arabs. Several of their buildings, from the Alhambra, or "red castle," in Granada to the Great Mosque of Cordoba to the towering Giralda in Seville, are among the key works of world architecture.

The cool water gardens, the arcaded patios, the fractal-like proliferation of detail in the stucco domes, the mind-defeating intricacy of the mosaics with their cordons de la eternidad (literally, "ribbons of eternity") interlacing in continuous patterns: such things cannot be crated, shipped across the Atlantic and put in a museum. One fragment of a 14th century mosaic dado from the Alhambra, however beautiful, is only a detail and cannot convey the overwhelming effect of the patterning on the palace's actual walls. Thus, although this exhibition looks fine inside the pyramid of the Met's Lehman Pavilion, its sum effect does not begin to equal the setting in which the Spanish public saw it earlier this year -- the Alhambra itself.

Some important items from the original show, such as the 12th century ivory- inlaid minbar, or high preacher's throne, from the Kutubiyya mosque in Marrakesh, were also deemed too fragile to travel. When the Spanish authorities refused to lend one of the spectacular amphora-type "Alhambra vases," with its luster glazes and formalized handles like angels' wings, another was lent by the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. But even in its truncated form, "Al-Andalus" is not an exhibition to miss.

Partly, at least, this is because it gives such sharp vignettes of cultural crossing. Islam the Destroyer is a myth; in fact, much of what we know of classical Greek thought was preserved by Arab scholars, without whose efforts we would know little or nothing of Aristotle. In science, Europe until the 14th century was illiterate compared with the Arab world, and a group of exquisitely made brass instruments in this show reminds one that the universal astrolabe was invented in al-Andalus around 1300.

Hispano-Islamic culture was an extraordinary hybrid, built over the vestiges of Rome, mingling Western with Middle Eastern forms. This tension and merging shows itself everywhere in the remnants of Islamic Spain. The architects of ^ the prayer hall of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, for instance, designed its sublime forest of columns and horseshoe arches as a communal space without the hierarchical orientation of a Christian basilica, as befitted Islamic ritual -- but they also based its double-arch system on the design of Roman aqueducts. "You have taken something unique and turned it into something mundane," the Emperor Charles V is said to have remarked, on seeing the mosque converted into a Catholic church after the reconquista.

In the architectural fragments included in this show -- capitals and bases from the 10th century caliphal period, for instance -- one sees the forms of Roman antiquity dissolving into the Islamic taste for allover pattern; eaten away by deep carving, a recognizably Ionic capital turns into a web of exquisite stone lace, a sort of architectural counterpart to the deeply incised ivory caskets and pyxes favored by the courts of al-Andalus. One of the most impressive bowls in this show, a deep conical form bearing on its inside surface a design of a Portuguese nao, or trading ship, so powerful in its rhythms of hull and sail that the concavity of the dish seems almost to reverse itself under the visual pressure of the form, displays a Christian cross on the boat's mainsail.

Adaptation lay at the cultural heart of Islamic Spain. It was not always benign; like the Venetians bringing back war plunder to St. Mark's, the Arab rulers symbolized their victory over the Christian infidel by taking bells from church spires and converting them into mosque lamps. The most impressive single work of sculpture in the show, the 11th century Pisa griffin, is so hybrid that without a context, scholars seem unable to decide where it comes from -- or even whether it is from al-Andalus at all. It may equally well be Egyptian, North African or Iranian, though the Pisans themselves (who installed it on the facade of their cathedral) believed it was war booty from their conquest of Majorca, once an Arab fiefdom. Severely holed by bullets in the 19th century, it remains an overwhelmingly authoritative image -- rigid, swollen, and yet almost liquid in its linear rhythms, as in the rhyme between the profile curve of its breast and the serpentine edges of its wings: a guardian figure left stranded when the culture around it drained away and was lost.